Class project: “Analyzing Big Data with Twitter”

Twitter partnered with UC Berkeley this past semester to teach Analyzing Big Data with Twitter, a class with Prof. Marti Hearst. In the first half of the semester, Twitter engineers went to UC Berkeley to talk about the technology behind Twitter: from the basics of scaling up a service to the algorithms behind user recommendations and search. These talks are available online, on the course website.

In the second half of the course, students applied their knowledge and creativity to build data-driven applications on top of Twitter. They came up with a range of products that included tracking bands or football teams, monitoring Tweets to find calls for help, and identifying communities on Twitter. Each project was mentored by one of our engineers.

Last week, 40 of the students came to Twitter HQ to demo their final projects in front of a group of our engineers, designers and engineering leadership team.

The students’ enthusiasm and creativity inspired and impressed all of us who were involved. The entire experience was really fun, and we hope to work with Berkeley more in the future.

Many thanks to the volunteer Twitter engineers, to Prof. Hearst, and of course to our fantastic students!

Posted by Gilad Mishne - @gilad
Engineering Manager, Search