Big Data Systems

Big data is everywhere.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming the new way of making progress in both industry and science.

A fundamental goal across modern business and science is to use as many machines as possible, consume as much information as possible, and do so as quickly as possible.

The big challenge is turning data into useful knowledge and actionable decisions.

This is a moving target as both the underlying hardware and our ability to collect data evolve.

In this course, we discuss how to design data and AI systems (data structures and algorithms for key data-driven areas, including large language models [LLMs], relational systems, distributed systems, graph systems, NoSQL, newSQL, machine learning, and neural networks).

We see that they all rely on the same set of very basic concepts, and we learn to synthesize efficient solutions to any problem across these areas using those concepts.