I’ve begun my final stretch for the Master of Science program in Advanced Data Analytics! The ADTA 5940 Analytics Capstone Experience is my first full semester (16 weeks) course since I was in the information science program back in 2020. I’ve also started the semester taking a separate 8 week course at the start of the semester–ADTA 5550 Deep Learning with Big Data.

The capstone experience “requires a significant project about which students periodically report, highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of their findings and its relevance to their interests and/or career goals.” We are required to identify/choose a data set, then developing a problem statement/hypothesis statement, creating a concept paper (1st deliverable), writing a scholarly industry review on the subject of the data set, writing a first draft, revising it and then finalizing the research paper including all of the analysis concluding with a final presentation.

According to the syllabus, the deep learning course “…introduces the fundamentals of artificial neural networks (ANN), the bedrock foundation of the current trend in AI deep learning. The course provides the student with a guide through how to use TensorFlow, the most popular AI framework at present, to build artificial neural networks for deep learning. Besides TensorFlow, Keras, another widely used AI framework that is often used along with TensorFlow in deep-learning projects, will be discussed. The course focuses on the convolutional neural network that has driven the latest breakthroughs in the AI field especially image recognition. This course covers both the theory and the practical implementation of the AI network. As the fundamentals are discussed exemplary AI techniques will be employed to illustrate how AI deep learning theories can be applied to real-world solutions using various programming and system tools.”

There is some pressure since not only am I taking two advanced courses, I am also on my 5th year in the program and I do not think I can extend this any longer after this semester. Yep, just a tad bit nervous, but, here we go!