Sergei Vassilvitskii (of Yahoo! Research) went over this first class of "COMS 6998-12: Dealing with Massive Data", http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~coms699812/ http:

Sergei Vassilvitskii (of Yahoo! Research) went over this first class of "COMS 6998-12: Dealing with Massive Data", http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~coms699812/ http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~coms699812/ just a few weeks ago. Very interesting stuff. The class is dealing specifically with large data handling in both parallel processing and streaming techniques. It looks as if a major component of the class is mathematical distillation of complex problems trading exact matching for acceptable probabilistic bounds. When you are able to do these math tricks you can cut an O(n^2) or worse problem down to O(n log n) or better problem which is the real win.