The new application session for 2022-2024 has started! You can apply since September 13th, 2021 and until December 12th, 2021.
As previously, there are two distinct application periods, one for those applying for a scholarship, and the other for those applying as fee paying (i.e.self sustained) students. More information on the admission page.
Background & Objectives
The First Report of the EU Data Market Study estimates that the number of data users will reach more than 1.3 million in 2020 while the overall data market will likely reach € 111 billion under high growth conditions. The last decade was marked by the digitalisation of virtually all aspects of our daily lives. Today, public and private organisations in all sectors face an avalanche of digital data on a daily basis. While at first glance this appears to be favourable for our knowledge-based society, in many ways it is a burden. Data is neither information nor knowledge. Instead, data is of great value once it has been refined and analysed, in order to address well-formulated questions, concerning problems of interest. It is only then through data-driven innovation that the economic and social benefit can be fully realised. The Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree Programme in Big Data Management and Analytics (BDMA) is a unique programme that fully covers all of the data management and analytics aspects of Big Data (BD), built on top of Business Intelligence (BI) foundations, and complemented with horizontal skills. It has been jointly designed and adheres to international studies, being structured to cover all the skills BI and BD specialists require.
Presentation & Structure
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.
