From AllThingsD
Twitter Takes Big Data to School
By Mike Isaac
It’s that time of year again. The tinsel is hung, annoying music is playing nonstop, and university classes are winding down while students prep for exams before the holidays.
That includes the students from Professor Marti Hearst’s class at the University of California at Berkeley, all of whom just finished off a semester entrenched in data sets sliced straight from the Twitter firehose, after taking a course called I290: “Analyzing Big Data with Twitter.”
It was essentially a crash course in Twitter’s big-data practices. The engineering and math students enrolled spent half the semester in lecture hall listening to a host of guest product managers and engineers from Twitter, who explained the company’s approaches to analyzing and dealing with the massive amount of data that flows through Twitter’s pipes every single moment....