IRVINE, Calif., Dec. 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Due to the rapid progression of the technology industry, University of California, Irvine Extension announced today the availability of courses in the Predictive Analytics and Information Systems Security Certificate Programs. The courses will provide participants interested in predictive analytics and information systems security management with the tools and techniques that are vital to continued professional growth in these industries.

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"UC Irvine Extension anticipates that the importance of digitally driven data and the protection of information systems from security threats and hackers will impact businesses and corporations in 2013," said Dr. Dave Dimas, director of engineering, sciences and information technology at UC Irvine Extension. "Global industries are focusing increasing resources on IT security to ensure business continuity and leveraging big data to increase top line revenues. UC Irvine Extension continues to offer courses that allow professionals to build upon existing skill sets and advance in their careers."

Predictive Analytics Certificate Program:

This program is designed for professionals who are using or wish to use Predictive Analytics to optimize business performance at a variety of levels. UC Irvine Extension is offering the following webinar and two courses during winter quarter:

• Predictive Analytics Special Topic Webinar: Text Analytics & Text Mining (Jan. 15, 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., PST) - This free webinar will provide participants with the introductory concepts of text analytics and text mining that are used to  recognize how stored, unstructured data represents an extremely valuable source of business information.
• Course: Effective Data Preparation (Jan. 7 to Feb. 24) - This online course will address how to extract stored data elements, transform their formats, and derive new relationships among them, in order to produce a dataset suitable for analytical modeling. Course instructor Dr. Robert Nisbet, chief scientist at Smogfarm, which studies crowd psychology, will provide attendees with the skills to produce a fully processed data set compatible for building powerful predictive models.
• Course: Text Analytics & Text Mining (Jan. 28 to March 24) - This new online course  instructed by Dr. Gary Miner, author of Handbook of Statistical Analysis & Data Mining Applications and Practical Text Mining, will focus on basic concepts of textual information including tokenization and part-of-speech tagging. The course will expose participants to practical techniques for text extraction and text mining, document clustering and classification, information retrieval, and the enhancement of structured data.

Information Systems Security Certificate Programs:

This certificate program is designed for security professionals who would like to expand their knowledge on the underlying principles for designing, engineering, and managing secure information systems environments. The following course will be offered during the winter quarter:

• Course: Reverse Engineering (Jan. 14 to March 3) - This elective course, part of the  Cyber Security Track of the Information Systems Security Certificate Program, will provide attendees with the skills to stop malware attacks by analyzing malware through reverse - engineer malicious code using system and network monitoring utilities, debuggers, disassembles, and a handful of scripts. Course instructor Dr. Ian Harris, associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine, will cover native Windows executables and web based malware.  

For more information or to register for the online courses or webinars, please visit Predictive Analytics and Information Systems Security Certificate Programs' pages or or call (949) 824-5414.

About UC Irvine Extension: University of California, Irvine Extension is the continuing education arm of UC Irvine. Through thousands of courses and programs offered on campus, online and on site, UC Irvine Extension helps adult learners reach their career advancement and personal enrichment goals -- and is celebrating 50 years of providing universally accessible, university-level learning to local, regional and global communities. Learn more at www.extension.uci.edu, or join us on Facebook at facebook.com/uciextension.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UC Irvine is a top-ranked university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Led by Chancellor Michael Drake since 2005, UC Irvine is among the most dynamic campuses in the University of California system, with nearly 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 1,100 faculty and 9,000 staff. Orange County's largest employer, UC Irvine contributes an annual economic impact of $4.2 billion. For more UC Irvine news, visit www.today.uci.edu. 

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SOURCE UC Irvine Extension