EMC has successfully hosted the first ‘workshop in Data Science and Big Data Analytics in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The course is part of the world renowned EMC Academic Alliance (EAA) program that provides universities worldwide with technology curricula to educate the next generation of IT and data analytics professionals, and help meet the industry's growing demand for advanced technology skills to fulfill the gap in the Saudi Market. Through the course, the professors leveraged open curriculum built by industry subject matter experts covering a wealth of topics including the role of the data scientist, the data analytics life cycle, initial and advanced analysis topics on theory, methods, technology and tools, along with operational-izing an analytics project and data visualization techniques. This program is an open curriculum focused on technology concepts and principals applicable to any vendor environment enabling students to develop highly marketable knowledge and skills required in today's evolving IT industry. This exclusive program lies in alignment with the objectives of the Saudi Ministry of Higher Education to bridge the gap between the student outcomes in Saudi universities and the requirements of the Saudi IT job market as both public and private sector enterprises across Saudi Arabia continue to invest in technologies such as big data to drive competitive differentiation, enhance business efficiency and aid strategic insight. As the adoption of these technologies continues to grow across the largest IT market in the Middle East, the need to create the skills required to manage and operate complex infrastructure grows tenfold fuelling further the need for industry-academia alliances to address the skills gap that currently exists The Big Data Workshop was offered to nominated professors from a host of prominent universities across the Kingdom who had preregistered for the EMC Data Science and Big Data Analytics Course 2014 including King Saud University, Prince Sultan University, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Qassim University, Taibah University, Umm Al-Qura University and King Abdulaziz University aimed at helping faculty and staff gain the in-depth knowledge and necessary tools to educate the upcoming batch of Saudi undergraduate or postgraduate students during the 2014-2015 academic year. Upon completing the courses, students are ready to take and pass both EMC proven professional and EMC Academic Associate Exam. The EMC Academic Associate exam is a professional certification that is specially created for students of universities/members of the Academic Alliance program that will allow them to receive a certificate from EMC accredited from “CERT” Tracker System. Joseph Kambourakis, Lead Data Science Instructor at EMC, took the audience through grounding in basic and advanced analytic methods and an introduction to big data analytics technology and tools, including MapReduce and Hadoop. As part of the course, Labs offer opportunities to understand how these methods and tools may be applied to real world business challenges by a practicing data scientist. — SG
