Introduction

Data Science is an emerging interdisciplinary field of Statistics and Computer Science for which the foundational topics are Data Manipulation, Data Analysis with Statistics, Machine Learning, High Performance Computing, Data Communication with Information Visualization, and Data at Scale (Working with Big Data). Moreover, Data Science is an integral part of research in many fields, such as machine translation, speech recognition, robotics, search engines, digital economy in addition to business intelligence, operational intelligence, biological sciences, medical informatics, health care, social sciences and the humanities.

There is an explosive growth of data due to the rapid development of the Internet and digital technology. Further, data storage capacity and processing speed have increased dramatically and cost effectively. Thus, many industries deal with large volumes of data and this has resulted in a great demand and a good opportunity for graduates with statistical skills and competence in data base and in computer programming. Although it is of utmost importance to train personnel to undertake responsibilities related to the real world applications, the Sri Lankan education institutions have not paid due attention in the recent past in this rapidly growing area of science. There is also a global shortage of qualified graduates whose skills span these areas. Therefore, the M.Sc. Programme in Data Science has been designed to cater for the current demands for postgraduate training and research in the fields of big data, data mining and Computational Statistics.