DAN619 Big Data Processing & Blockchain Technology

[3–0, 3 cr.]

This course has two pillars. The course first focuses on blockchain technology and its applications in business. It explores how blockchain brings profound changes to businesses and explains how it transforms businesses structures, functions and roles of the organization. The course then dives into the various methods of blockchain governance that exist in the market place and examines specific features of blockchain to overcome problems that have been difficult to solve in the past using the existing centralized architecture. Topics include: key concepts like hashing, public key cryptography, digital signing, mining, proof-of-work, proof of stake, public vs private vs permissioned blockchain, peer-to-peer transactions, blocks, consensus mechanisms, smart contracts, crypto-asset, distributed resources, decentralized protocol, and the double spending problem. These concepts will be illustrated using the Bitcoin application and implemented mainly using Ethereum. The course then tackles how to process large data volumes on large computational clusters by introducing advanced features for Spark 2.0. Students will learn how to set up clusters in both batch and real time modes, retrieve big volumes of textual data, analyze streaming data and use the ML API.