An expert on cyber security in the financial sector, John Yearwood is also the head of the School of Information Technology at the Deakin University in Australia. His work in data mining and computational intelligence has led to the development of new machine learning and hybrid learning algorithms for artificial neural networks, as well as new data and text mining and pattern recognition approaches. During his recent visit to India, he spoke about career opportunities in the field of Information Technology.
What are the areas that can be explored in the IT field?
There are many new areas that are developing rapidly and have a huge impact on the society. One of the most significant is Data Analytics or Data Science, which makes sense of the massive amount of data that is being collected and stored concerning all aspects of society. This data is now viewed as a resource that can inform decisions through analytics and machine learning from the data. There are also new areas in virtual reality and augmented reality, cyber security, cyber physical systems and the Internet of things.
What are the career opportunities that students can consider?
Students can consider careers that involve developing and maintaining technological infrastructure which includes gathering and storing data. They can also become a data analyst or data scientist and use machine learning to discover knowledge from the data. There are careers with a range of titles — data analytics, data scientists, business analyst, business intelligence, persistent sensing and cognitive computing.
There are many jobs now available in the cyber security field and the demand for highly trained security IT professionals are growing rapidly. Virtual Reality is an area that is now taking off because of the availability of affordable equipment and headsets.
How popular are IT courses among Indian students at Deakin University?
IT courses are the most popular courses alongside business courses. Indian students are well equipped for IT usually having a technical background from a B.Tech or an engineering degree.
Give us an insight into data analytics course and what career choices can be explored after taking the course.
Careers in almost any area are possible because all sectors now have data and want to exploit opportunities for their data. Key areas are health, finance, sports analytics, learning analytics, business analytics, consumer analytics and marketing.
What qualifications are required to study this course?
An undergraduate degree is required. The Master of Data Analytics programme has a foundation semester that provides the important preparation for analytics but students should also have an inclination towards patterns. So, mathematics or statistics helps.
How can advanced data analytics help Indian companies perform better?
Advanced data analytics can help companies know the important relationships in their business, what is working and why and what is not. It also finds anomalies in data and can be used to detect fraud. Mostly it can give competitive advantage by making sense of the very large data that companies now have.
How does India’s IT sector compare with the global standard?
India’s IT sector is of a very high standard with good global market penetration. It needs to have the strong backup provided by the latest research results in computer science. This is rapidly becoming the case.
