Course Foundations of data-driven health science

The course, C268/04 Foundations of data-driven health science, is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, autumn 2021.

Criteria for participation: University degree in medicine, dentistry, nursing, or Master’s degree in other fields and/or postgraduate research fellows (PhD students and research-year medical students).

Aim: The aim of the course is to lay the conceptual foundation with which the student may begin to apply data-driven research practices, and to support her advancement to more specialised topics such as C119: "Stata and Datadocumentation" and C171: "Introduction to MATLAB in Neuroimaging".

Learning outcomes: Successful completion of the course will enable the PhD student to:

• Summarize how the main components of a computer relate to, and constrain, the act of "computing".
• Describe the basic organisation of a file system, and navigate it using commands in a "terminal".
• Contrast textual and binary files in terms of their contents and find information in both using tools that can be automated.
• Contrast local and non-local computing resources and file systems, and formulate use cases for both.
• Use variables in a programming language (python) and perform simple operations (manipulations) on the information (data) they contain.
• Write a program to extract, collate and preprocess "raw" data for further processing (statistics, visualisation, etc.).

Content: Teaching is in the form of "interactive lectures", where students follow instructions to complete specific learning tasks (hands-on), after introduction by the lecturers.

• Day 1: The anatomy of a computer and data
• Day 2: The anatomy and building blocks of a program
• Day 3: Programming as a means to gain insight into data

In the end of the course there will be a mandatory assignment

Recommended knowledge for participation: No prior knowledge on the topics covered is required. Participants must bring their own laptop with a hard drive (no Chromebooks or tablet-/surface-type devices are supported). Any reasonably modern (< 5-year-old) Windows, OS X or Linux operating system will do.

Instructor: Mads Jensen

Venue: Kollokvierum Øst (1268-218), The Victor Albeck Building, Vennelyst Blvd. 4, 8000 Aarhus C

Participation in the course is without cost for:

• PhD students, Research Year students and Research Honours Programme students from Aarhus University
• PhD students enrolled at partner universities of the Nordoc collaboration
• PhD students from other institutions in the open market agreement for PhD courses

Course dates:

• 20 September 2021 09:00 - 16:00
• 21 September 2021 09:00 - 16:00
• 22 September 2021 09:00 - 16:00