Data science & Technology

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Help design the world of tomorrow by making sense of vast volumes of data and by engineering systems that drive progress in any sector and business.

How can you extract value from the immense volumes of data generated at unprecedented rates nowadays? Data is everywhere and powers everything we do. Hospitals are increasingly using data to identify patients at risk of developing diseases and to provide personalised prescriptions based on medical history. Logistics and transport companies use data to track vehicles in real time, so they can optimise routes to reduce fuel consumption. Data science and technology plays a significant role in athletes’ performance analysis and sports injury prevention. If you want to work with complex forms and combinations of data from texts, images, sounds, and sensors to design, develop, and implement software systems and infrastructures for various applications and domains, the specialisation in Data Science & Technology is right for you!

"Researchers at UT together with students in Data Science & Technology are creating the world's largest benchmark for breast cancer diagnosis in collaboration with the ZGT hospital in Hengelo. It makes use of more than ten thousand patients’ records. As this is sensitive data that can’t be publicly accessed, the students designed a system with which researchers can submit their machine learning method to the hospital, where their predictive models for diagnosis are trained and evaluated how well their model will work on this large dataset… no data needs to leave the hospital while progress on breast cancer diagnosis can still be made.”

Dr.ir. Maurice van Keulen, Programme mentor Data Science & Technology

What is Data Science & Technology

This specialisation teaches you to design, develop, and implement models, software systems, and infrastructures to analyse large amounts of data. You will learn the fundamental data science principles of storing, processing, and transmitting data along with the theory and techniques of machine learning and statistics. Depending on your interests, you can customise your programme by choosing one of our four suggested profiles.

You can, for example, become a specialist in a specific type of data, such as text data, and go in the direction of natural language processing or specialise in image, sensor networks, or time-series data. What about designing a smart service such as a predictive maintenance solution for car parts that predicts when they are likely to break down? Or you can focus on designing new machine learning algorithms and investigate how predictive models can be made explainable such that we can detect and remove unwanted biases and shortcuts from them. Are you interested in multidisciplinary research? If you want to develop a machine learning model that helps a clinician diagnose breast cancer, you can take courses to learn more about healthcare or another domain of your interest.

Examples of courses you will follow during this specialisation:
  • How can you design large-scale storage for data-intensive applications such as Gmail or Facebook? And how can you process large Twitter data streams? You will learn this and more in the course Managing Big Data.
  • What are the theoretical and practical aspects of machine learning techniques: their workings, associated complexity, and applications in different domains? Learn more in the course Machine Learning.
  • Take on the challenge of working with real-world datasets from sectors such as healthcare or transport. In the course Data Science, you will dive into data mining, visualisation, natural language processing, and process mining.

Learn from real-life situations

Thanks to the state-of-the-art labs and research facilities at the EEMCS faculty and the local infrastructure with more than one petabyte of storage space for analysing large datasets, you will gain hands-on experience and work on real-life problems and solutions. For example, you can contribute to explainable AI research and learn to build machine learning algorithms that explain the predictions and the reasoning that brought to them. This way, you can build an AI system that assists a clinician in diagnosing breast cancer by showing on the mammograms why the AI thinks the diagnosis is malignant or benign. What about designing models that can predict traffic jams one hour in advance? Or are you interested in building 3D models of a building from 2D floorplans or sensor readings to assess its structural weaknesses, fire risks, and accessibility issues?

What will you learn?

As a graduate of the Master's in Computer Science with a specialisation in Data Science & Technology, you have acquired specific scientific knowledge, skills, and values that will help you in your future career.

  • Knowledge

    After completing this Master’s specialisation, you:

    • have in-depth knowledge of managing and processing large volumes of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data;
    • comprehend the theoretical foundations of learning algorithms including probability theory, statistics, and information theory;
    • have in-depth understanding of the methods and techniques for designing and analysing smart services.
  • Skills

    After successfully finishing this Master’s specialisation, you:

    • can design solutions for the management of large volumes of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, such as sensor data, multimedia data, textual data, and geographic data;
    • can analyse large volumes of generated data and derive well-founded scientific conclusions from it;
    • can analyse, design, and implement smart services, covering every stage of an information system's lifecycle: requirement analysis, architecture design, realisation, and maintenance.
  • Values

    After completing this Master’s specialisation, you:

    • understand the ethical implications as well as social, cultural, and public aspects in the field of data science;
    • are able to relate information from other disciplines to problems and solutions in data science;
    • demonstrate a critical attitude when dealing with data and results in real-world decision making.

Other specialisations

Is this specialisation not exactly what you are looking for? Maybe one of the other specialisations suits you better. You can also find out more about related Master’s at the University of Twente:

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