The programme favours the integration of students into a network of specialists and researchers in BI and BD. The curriculum is jointly delivered by Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Belgium, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Spain, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e) in the Netherlands, CentraleSupélec (CS) in France and Università degli Studi di Padova (UniPD) in Italy. Scholars from academic partners around the world and partners from leading industries in BI, private R&D companies, service companies, public research institutes, and public authorities will contribute to the programme by training students, providing computers, software, course material, job placement or internship perspectives, as well as financial support.
This consortium will prepare the graduates not only to answer today s professional challenges by a strong connection with the needs coming from the industry, but also to pursue their studies into doctorate programs, through strong connections with the researchers and innovators views.
The master is divided in four semesters of 30 ECTS each. In the first year, students acquire fundamental knowledge in BI and BD. The first semester at ULB homogenises the students’ background by introducing them to core BI competences: traditional data management, business process management, and data analytics. The second semester at UPC covers BD fundamentals: distributed management to deal with Volume, semantic management to deal with Variety, and distributed stream-based management to deal with Velocity. In this first year, students also acquire ethics awareness and business and entrepreneurship skills to deal with Value, as well as horizontal skills such as critical thinking, language, writing, and presentation skills. In the second year, students specialise in how to couple such techniques with a business goal. The specialisation in “Business Process Analytics” at TU/e offers the bridge between data mining and business processes modelling and analysis, i.e., dealing mainly with Variability and Value. The specialisation in “Decision Support and Analytics” at CS concentrates on models, algorithms, and technologies related to decision-support systems and massive data analytics, dealing mainly with Value and Veracity. Ethics and innovation courses are incorporated in the three specialisation programmes.The specialization on “Statistics & Deep Learning for Data Analytics” at UniPD aims to provide students with advanced Data-Science methods and strengthen their background in Statistics and Deep Learning. In this respect, UniPd will provide a first mandatory course on Statistical Inference, and a second mandatory course on Deep Learning, the latter with an emphasis on the analysis of human data (see the course description below). Furthermore, students with a strong interest in statistical methods can opt to further enlarge their background of Data-Science methods by also taking a course on Stochastic Model. In the last semester, devoted to the master’s thesis, students put into practice the obtained technical skills, aligned with a business and entrepreneurship vision, and with a strong background in ethics. Finally, during the whole programme, students are introduced to local culture aspects.
The tuition language is English. The programme targets students with a Bachelor of Science (or a level equivalent to 180 ETCS) with major in Computer Science, as well as an English proficiency corresponding to level B2 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.