“The future belongs to the companies and people that turn data into products”. Data are related to every aspect of our life and we use data products every day. Some well-known examples include Google, Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, forums, GPS, etc. This course is to introduce interesting cases, findings, and techniques on the analysis of popular data. The course will mainly study data from geography, politics, ecommerce, finance, medicine, as well as from social networks. Students will have a chance to manipulate these data, and perform simple yet interesting discoveries. Students will be familiarized with a number of computational tools developed to manipulate, visualize and understand data.