Data science is an interdisciplinary field of scientific methods, processes and systems for understanding the modern-age data sources, modeling the data behavior, extracting the business insight from that data, predicting future behavior and delivering useful data-driven business applications. In 2013, IBM estimated that two and a half million terabytes of data are created every day. Some of the sources, generating the data are:

• Individuals (through social networks and smartphones for the reflection of society)
• Machines (through real-time, network-connected sensors – Internet of things)
• Business and commerce (e.g. transaction records and financial data)
• Education (e.g. academics, literature, research)
• Medical / Healthcare (personal health records, health insurance)
• Justice (crime statistics for a city for the sake of efficient resource deployment)
• Transportation (Vehicle, pedestrians, trains, airlines, movement data)

The challenge is to make sense of this ever-increasing source of data for the use and benefit of society. A lot many companies and higher education institutions are already planning and implementing the programs to cater to this data tsunami. Data science has emerged as an interdisciplinary paradigm that draws upon the traditionally distinct areas of computer science, applied mathematics and statistics, applications from natural and social science, engineering, and business for developing solutions for gathering, cleaning, archiving, analyzing and visualizing data for the purposes of making informed decisions.

The Bachelors of Science in Data Science (BS-DS) program aims to develop core competencies in various areas of data science like understanding data products, data extraction, data cleaning, data modeling, classification, clustering, predictions, etc. Students will have the opportunity of learning the technical aspects of data science by understanding the trends in the current data products and preparing for the required data analysis skillset for the upcoming information processing systems. To cater to a wide range of professional and academic interests, students have the option of selecting their course work according to their specific needs. Riphah Institute of Systems Engineering (RISE) is currently offering MS (Information Security) and MS (Data Science) programs that are expected to not only complement each other but also will open new opportunities for coping with the challenges of the near future.