USC Course Analyzes 60,000 UFO Sightings to Teach Ethically Informed Big-Data Science

To the point

At USC, Adjunct Professor Chris Mattmann taught a master’s course called Content Detection and Analysis for Big Data in which about 60 students analyzed a public database of more than 60,000 UFO sightings enriched with other sources and presented as visualizations to spot patterns but with no conclusive evidence of alien life, Team 8—Matheos Asfaw, Eric Hachuel, Pablo Guidice, Bruno Mazetti, and Teague Ashcraft—contributed, including scraping ufostalker.com and converting PDFs into searchable data and emphasizing data cleaning to avoid misleading conclusions, and Mattmann, who helped co‑develop Apache Tika used in the Panama Papers, aims to teach end‑to‑end, ethically informed data science with real‑world relevance and weekly data‑ethics discussions to prepare students for handling large, messy datasets and deriving meaningful insights even in UFO research.