Starting this school year, Penn State Great Valley is offering an on-campus data analytics master’s program to its students.

The program will make full use of Penn State Great Valley’s big data lab, created by engineering professors Adrian Barb and Robin Qiu. The newly created resource, on the ground floor of the main building, will provide students and local industries access to a variety of tools and systems.

In a recent test of the lab’s capabilities, Barb and Qiu used a tool called Visualizing Public Opinions to score tweets posted about this year’s presidential candidates. Visualizing Public Opinions makes it possible to track tweets worldwide and promptly provides a sentiment analysis of international dialogue.

The tweets are scored from positive one to negative one based on their positive or negative content. With the data, the system then charts the percentage of each by time and candidate, giving analysts a real time view of how attitudes change based on a candidate’s behavior or actions.

Penn State Great Valley’s big data lab is an enormous asset to the campus, and will be an invaluable tool for students taking the new data analytics master’s degree program.

What is unique about Penn State Great Valley’s program is the two-fold student experience. This gives graduate students a better insight into the lifecycle of big data systems and on how to use the equipment and also provides them with hands-on time with the systems to conduct their own research.

Check out previous VISTA Today coverage of Penn State University here.