Master BDMA
Big Data Management and Analytics
The 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. Sharing contents with an Erasmus Mundus Master Programme, BDMA adheres to international studies, being structured to cover all the skills BI and BD specialists require.
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 e 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.
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 Universität Berlin (TUB) in Germany, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e) in the Netherlands and Université François Rabelais Tours (UFRT) in France. 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 “Large- Scale Data Analytics” at TUB focus on data analytics on both large, heterogeneous data, but also on fast, high-throughput data, i.e., dealing mainly with Volume, Velocity, and Variety. 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 “Content and Usage Analytics” at UFRT concentrates on the accuracy of the analysis on heterogeneous data, dealing mainly with Value, Variability and Veracity. Ethics courses are incorporated in all three specialisation programmes. 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. The BDMA programme will deliver a joint degree to the graduates following the mobility ULB, UPC, and UFRT. The BDMA programme will deliver three degrees from ULB, UPC, and the university of specialisation (either TUB or TU/e) to the graduates following the other mobilities.