UNLV - Spring 2026
MIS 769
Big Data Analytics for Business
Richard Young, Ph.D. | Online Asynchronous
Course Textbook
The Neuroscience of Artificial Intelligence (NeuroAI Handbook) - Free supplementary textbook for this course.
Reading Schedule
NeuroAI Handbook chapters aligned with weekly topics. Referenced as "RY" in the syllabus.
| Week | Date | Topic | RY Chapters |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jan 19 | Intro to Big Data | Ch 8 (Data Science Pipeline) |
| 2 | Jan 26 | Big Data Technologies | Ch 8.1 (Distributed Paradigm) |
| 3 | Feb 2 | MapReduce in Python | Ch 8.1 (MapReduce) |
| 4 | Feb 9 | Text Basics - Tokens & Stems | Ch 14.0 (Text Processing) |
| 5 | Feb 16 | Text Vectorization | Ch 14.0.4 (Words to Vectors) |
| 6 | Feb 23 | Advanced NLP + BERTopic | Ch 14 (Sequence Models) |
| 7 | Mar 2 | Introduction to LLMs | Ch 15.1 (LLM Fundamentals) |
| 8 | Mar 9 | Embeddings & Attention | Ch 14.2, 14.3 (Attention, Transformers) |
| 9 | Mar 16 | SPRING BREAK | Ch 18 (Ethical AI) - Optional |
| 10 | Mar 23 | RAG Systems | Ch 15.5 (Vector Databases & RAG) |
| 11 | Mar 30 | Prompt Engineering & Fine-Tuning | Ch 15.2, 15.3 (Fine-tuning, Prompting) |
| 12 | Apr 6 | Transformers Deep Dive | Ch 14.3 (Transformer Architecture) |
| 13 | Apr 13 | AI Agents & Automation | Ch 5 (Executive Control Networks) |
| 14 | Apr 20 | ViT & Diffusion Models | Ch 16.1.1 (ViT), Ch 16.2 (Diffusion) |
| 15 | Apr 27 | CLIP & Multimodal | Ch 16.1.2 (CLIP), Ch 16.1.3 (Multimodal) |
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Contact
Email: [email protected]
Office Hours: By appointment