MED 299 (Section ID 81650): Cloud Computing

Instructor: Shamim Nemati, Ph.D.
Quarter: Spring
Units: 3

Overview:  Scalable computing on the Cloud is becoming increasingly ubiquitous across industry and academia. This course introduces the core concepts of secure and privacy-preserving computing on the Cloud with an emphasis on Behavioral, Social, and Health Data. Whether you are an informatics student, looking into scaling your applications in a HIPAA compliant cloud environment, or somebody who likes to learn more about informatics-related resources available on the Cloud, this course is for you. 

Objectives: Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Explain the advantages of cloud offerings compared to on-premise
• Explain the various Service models on Cloud as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
• Name and describe Storage, Infrastructure, Compute, and Data resources on popular Cloud service providers
• Explain legal and compliance requirements, including HIPAA security and privacy rules, HIPAA safe harbor, and GDPR, and implement necessary encryption and decryption tools, identity and access management, and key management
• Implement scalable computing solutions, including Containers and Serverless Computing
• Develop Python, R, and SQL applications with managed Jupyter notebooks on the Cloud
• Query and analyze publicly available big data including NIH sponsored All of US research data, Medicare utilization dataset, and MIMIC-III clinical data, among others

Class organization:  In class lecture, hands-on practice, discussion and student presentation (unless virtual learning is required)

• VMs, Networking, Storage
• HIPAA, Security and Privacy
• Managed Services on the Cloud
• Public Datasets
• Serverless Computing

Materials and Prerequisites:

• Class reading material will be distributed before each session as necessary
• A laptop computer will be required for the course
• Familiarity with Python or R, and SQL