"It was a wonderful experience interacting with you and appreciate the way you have planned and executed the whole publication process within the agreed timelines.”
Subrat SaurabhAuthor of Kuch Woh Pal
Analysis of data is part of our daily lives, irrespective of profession. A school teacher may wish to organise students into study groups based on their marks across subjects. A shop keeper may want to identify which customers to focus on when offering a category of products. A tour operator may require the best train connections for a trip involving multiple destinations. An editor may want to determine if the sentences in a paragraph are well formed. All these questions and many more can be answered by applying concepts from computational thinking to appropriate datasets. This book is aimed at teaching the set of skills required for these kinds of analyses.
This book provides the reader a firm grounding in the concepts underlying computational thinking -- iteration, variables and filtering. It then explains how to express these concepts using flowcharts and pseudocode, and, finally, how to apply this learning to glean useful information from datasets. In the process, the reader will also learn how to maintain and process information using structures like lists and dictionaries, and how to use abstractions like graphs and recursion to navigate complex relationships and hierarchical structures. At the end of this journey, readers should be able to spot the key patterns that occur repeatedly during computation, and apply these patterns to data based problems that they may encounter in their daily lives.
G Venkatesh, Madhavan Mukund
G Venkatesh studied at IIT Madras and TIFR Bombay. He is presently a Professor of Practice at IIT Madras where he has been teaching since 2014. He has been a faculty member at the Computer Science Department of IIT Bombay for 8 years, a visiting faculty member at IIM Bangalore for 3 years, and the Chief Technology Officer of Sasken Technologies Bangalore for nearly 20 years. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and the IETE. His passion for pedagogy innovation led him to found Mylspot Education Services in 2014. He is a co-founder of the Comsnets association which runs two premier international conferences in India. He serves on many government, industry, investor and academic committees and company boards. He teaches two courses in the online BSc in Programmming and Data Science offered by IIT Madras.
Madhavan Mukund studied at IIT Bombay and Aarhus University. He is presently Director of the Chennai Mathematical Institute where he has been a faculty member since 1992. He has served as President of both the ACM India Council and the Indian Association for Research in Computing Science (IARCS). He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences. In addition to research, he is also passionate about CS education at all levels. He is part of ACM India's CSpathshala initiative to introduce computational thinking in schools. He has been the National Coordinator of the Indian Computing Olympiad since 2002. He teaches online courses on algorithms, programming and data structures for the NPTEL project of MHRD, Government of India, as well as the online BSc in Programmming and Data Science offered by IIT Madras.
