Basics of probability and statistics. Students will review basic probability concepts and probability distributions, the Central Limit Theorem and hypothesis testing, and linear and logistic regression. Throughout this course, students should develop and reinforce proper statistical intuition. This includes knowing how to identify a sample and a population and applying appropriate statistical methods such as hypothesis testing, as well being able to identify different types of data and using the proper methods for each type of data. By the end of the course, students should have a strong foundation in statistics with which they can start their graduate coursework.

The goal of research ethics is to protect human subjects from harm when they participate in a study. In the digital age, however, what constitutes "participation" has become blurry, especially with the rise of social media platforms and other online apps and services. Furthermore, new applications of big data raise important questions about how to protect consumers from harms, and what kinds of notice and consent should be obtained. This course provides an introduction and overview of research ethics in the 21st century and evaluates the many challenges to conducting ethical research.

To acquaint the students with the origins and basic principles of privacy law mainly in Europe. Furthermore, it will contrast the European privacy foundations with the U.S. approach. At the core of this course stands the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its applicability to specific cases and basic principles. Moreover, the course will cover current challenges to the existing privacy paradigms by big data and big data analytics.

Fundamental concepts of web surveys and web survey design. The course is organized in 3 main sections which follow the way a proper web survey is organized: prefielding, fielding and post fielding.

Basics of Python and SQL for data analysis.Students will explore real publicly-available datasets, using the data analysis toolsin Python to create summaries and generate visualizations. Students will learn thebasics of database management and organization, as well as learn how to code inSQL and work with PostgreSQL databases. By the end of the class, students shouldunderstand how to read in data from CSV files or from the internet and becomfortable using either SQL or Python to aggregate, summarize, describe, andvisualize these datasets.

Provides a condensed overview of web technologies and techniques to collect data from the web in an automated way. To this end, students will use the statistical software R. The course introduces fundamental parts of web architecture and data transmission on the web. Furthermore, students will learn how to scrape content from static and dynamic web pages and connect to APIs from popular web services. Finally, practical and ethical issues of web data collection are discussed.