Data Science & Technology | Data Science - double degree

The University of Twente is a core partner of EIT Digital, part of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. The EIT Digital Master School offers an international Master’s programme focusing on ICT Innovation, combining and integrating technical majors with a fully standardised minor on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. As a student at the EIT Digital Master School, you will not only gain fundamental knowledge and skills on a technical topic, but also learn how to commercialise your innovative ideas.

Computer Science Double degree in Data Science

Data abounds. Social media, manufacturing systems, medical devices, logistic services and countless other sources generate petabytes of data on a daily basis. With the wealth of data available, we are at a point in history where we can conduct analyses to detect, discover and better understand the world around us.

Students who specialise in data science will acquire in-depth technical skills in scalable data collection techniques and data analysis methods. They will learn how to use and develop a suite of tools and technologies that address data capture, processing, storage, transfer, analysis, visualisation and related concepts (e.g. data access, data pricing and data privacy).

At the same time, they will acquire extensive business skills, learning how to bring an innovation to the market and how to develop a successful business model. These vital entrepreneurial skills will give students their ticket to a successful career.

Structure of the double degree Programme

The EIT Digital Master’s specialisation in Data Science is a double degree programme that enables you to study in two different countries. You can attend the University of Twente in either your entry year or your exit year, and spend the other year studying at one of the EIT Digital partner universities. In other words, you will study at two of Europe’s leading universities of technology and obtain a double degree on graduation.

You will start the Master’s programme at the entry university of your choice, although this will depend partly on your technical background. After completing your first year, you will transfer to your exit university in a different European country. All classes will be taught in English.

Besides the University of Twente, the programme is offered by KTH (Stockholm), Aalto (Helsinki), the Technical University of Madrid, the University of Paris-Sud, TU Berlin, the University of the Cote d’Azur, ELTE University Budapest and the University of Trento in Italy. The two-year programme (120 ECTS credits) includes a technical major (90 credits) and an Innovation and Entrepreneurship minor (30 credits).

First-Year programme at the University of Twente

The University of Twente offers the following mandatory courses for the first/entry year (5 EC each):

Core courses:

Managing Big Data
Data Science (could also be 10 EC, with additional topics and project)
Machine Learning 1
Information Theory and Statistics
Computer Ethics

Core I&E courses (shared with other EIT masters):

The Innovation & Entrepreneurship (I&E) courses form an important part of the programme. The I&E basics course (offered in the first half of the first semester) provides an introduction to business and management. The Business Development Lab (offered in the second half of the first semester) extends media systems engineering projects by a market survey, a business model generation process, and a venture development exercise. We emphasise user driven innovation and holistic analysis of service, technology, organisation and financial perspectives, as new technologies are disruptive for existing business models and almost always have a significant impact on the culture and social relations. Society-relevant themes also are at the core of the summer schools, which bring students from the different entry points together.

EIT OFF-SITE SUMMER SCHOOL

A key component in EIT Digital Master School students' innovation and entrepreneurship education is compulsory attendance at a two-week long summer school during the interval between the two academic years.

Second-year programme at the University of Twente

If you complete the exit year of your EIT Master’s programme at the University of Twente, you will specialise in Data Science for Personal Information. The courses you take, in addition to your final project, will cover areas such as health and sports, wellbeing, biometrics and privacy.

Core courses

Please note: you will also be allowed to propose similar courses at the entry university to cover mandatory courses.

Advanced & Elective Courses

Whether you follow the entry or exit year with the University of Twente, you have to follow mandatory core courses as well as 4 out of 6 advanced courses. You can comply with these requirements by choosing courses during the first/second year at the other university that are similar to the courses at the University of Twente to replace one or more core/advanced courses in Twente.

Advanced courses (requirement of at least 4):

Example of elective courses

Career opportunities

This Master’s programme will introduce students to the following topics and provide them with relevant work experience: big data, data analytics, information inference, machine learning, context-aware applications and smart services. By studying data science, you will discover how to mine value from data by analysing various data sources. In service engineering, you will learn how to design services that effectively use system capabilities to satisfy user needs and requirements. Information systems that use data science results to become context aware and extract greater value from data can turn traditional services into smart services.

Relevant applications can be found in a wide range of domains, from pervasive health and wellbeing to intelligent transportation, logistics, maintenance and business intelligence. This breadth of scope towards various areas offered by the programme – mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering and business information – gives students the freedom to select their own balance between them. Career prospects for data scientists are outstanding. Almost all our students find a job within three months.

The in-depth theoretical and technical skills provided by the programme will equip you to become:

a specialist in specific data types (e.g. natural language text, image data, geographic data, sensor data, networked data)
a designer of smart services
a designer of data science algorithms
an expert in multi-disciplinary projects related to data science

Data Science research group

Education and research in the world of data science calls for a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach that spans fields such as computational statistics, machine learning, image and signal processing, information retrieval, and data processing and management. A Data Science Research Group has been formed to focus on this approach. The group’s mission is to work towards explainable data science by developing methods for the autonomous, reliable and robust gathering, preparation and analysis of data to enable relevant, trustworthy and accessible results.

More information and application

For more information on EIT Digital, entry universities, the application procedure and tuition fees, visit the EIT Digital website.

Go to our double degree overview to find out more about other double degrees opportunities at the University of Twente.