Prof. Richard Sinnott1
1University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, rsinnott@unimelb.edu.au
Almost 1000 Masters-level students at the University of Melbourne have been taught big data analytics on the NeCTAR Research Cloud since 2013 as part of the Cluster and Cloud Computing course. This course covers HPC programming including MPI as well as the hands- on experiences in dynamic deployment and scaling of applications on the Cloud typically to support big data analytics. Students are exposed to technologies such as noSQL systems such as CouchDB, CouchBase, Hadoop/HDFS and Spark, how to write scalable Cloud solutions using scripting approaches such as Boto and Ansible and use of container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
Social media data analytics forms a core part of the course as a freely available example of big data. This includes Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and Flickr. With the recent focus on privacy highlighted through Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, it is clear that such data can be used for many purposes – both good and bad. This talk will cover some of the key scenarios that push the boundaries of what can be done with such data and specifically those where data privacy issues arise. The talk also identifies approaches to protect users (from themselves!)
Biography:
Professor Richard O. Sinnott is the Director of eResearch at the University of Melbourne and Chair of Applied Computing Systems. In these roles he is responsible for all aspects of eResearch (research-oriented IT development) at the University. He has been lead software engineer/architect on an extensive portfolio of national and international projects, with specific focus on those research domains requiring finer-grained access control (security). He has over 300 peer reviewed publications across a range of applied computing research areas. He teaches a Masters-level course at the University: Cluster and Cloud Computing.