Data Science oriented dataset/research question for Statistics MSc thesis I'd like to explore 'data science'. The term seems a little vague to me, but I expect it to require:


machine learning (rather than traditional statistics);
a large enough dataset that you have to run analyses on clusters.


What are some good datasets and problems, accessible to a statistician with some programming background, that I can use to explore the field of data science?

To keep this as narrow as possible, I'd ideally like links to open, well used datasets and example problems.
Just head to kaggle.com; it'll keep you busy for a long time. For open data there's the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository. In fact, there's a whole Stackexchange site devoted to this; look there.