News in brief

IBM advances analytics skills programme to universities in India and globally

IBM has teamed up with 500 universities in India in a Faculty Development Program to Build Skills for a Smarter Planet. Students in China, Ireland and Scotland will also be a part of the programme.

In India, IBM is working with faculty members from 500 universities to help more than 30,000 students develop skills in predictive analytics. As part of the programme, IBM will conduct a series of training programmes with Business School faculty concentrating on predictive and business analytics, in 15 major cities throughout India. The faculty members will complete a certification process in analytics at the end of the programme.

The learning process will involve access to predictive analytics technology and focus on how to act on the results the analytics technology uncovers.

Every day people create the equivalent of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data from sensors, mobile devices, online transactions, and social networks; so much so that 90 per cent of the world’s data has been generated in the past two years. This amounts to more data than organisations can effectively use without applying analytics. The new programmes are providing students and faculty members with access to the latest software capabilities.

The University of West Scotland is introducing several new courses to its School of Computing curriculum including data mining, business intelligence and knowledge management. Plans to expand the analytics course offerings to non-IT and non-finance students are underway.

At the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland’s largest university, students are using analytics software in a variety of application areas allowing them to collect hidden data and applying knowledge that seemed impossible to find before that could now be uncovered.

These universities join schools around the world including Northwestern University, Yale School of Management, Fordham University, DePaul University, University of Southern California and University of Ottawa Telfer School of Management, that are working with IBM to develop and implement undergraduate and graduate curriculum and training on business analytics.

Through its academic initiative, IBM is making its software, courseware and curricula available to nearly 6,000 universities and more than 30,000 faculties to advance technology skills. More information about IBM’s University Programs and Academic Initiative is available at www.ibm.com/press/university.