Master of Science - Crime Intelligence and Data Analytics

The work boundaries of the traditional police intelligence analyst and digital forensic investigator are becoming blurred – today’s analysts need to be cyber aware, understanding how communication records and web search histories can be extracted and analyzed.

This course covers these areas as well as theories that provide a better sense of the causes of crime and the prevention measures that can be put in place to stabilize and reverse these trends. Analysts shouldn’t be phased by data simply because of its size, complexity or format. This course provides students with the skills to work effectively with large datasets, allowing students to make more informed decisions in relation to criminal investigations. Key features include writing code to quickly clean up data and packaging it so it’s suitable for analysis and visualization.

Students will discover that the world constantly presents data in data frames or spreadsheets – daily activities are invariably logged by a time, date, geolocation. Students develop these skills along with their confidence in applying them to make more sense of the data – analyzing Twitter downloads, searched words and images, geolocation points or big data. This course also explores strategies employed in forensic investigation.