Study program “Data Science and Artificial Intelligence” will start again in winter semester

The Bachelor and Master program “Data Science and Artificial Intelligence” always begins in the winter semester at Saarland University.

“Artificial intelligence is now used everywhere, in online shopping, autonomous driving and medical data analysis,” explains Professor Jens Dittrich, who heads the Big Data Analytics research group at Saarland University. Data science has also profited from this. Because the focus of “Data Science” is not on the data itself, but on the way it is processed and evaluated.

“In the new course, students therefore learn how to analyse problems in such a way that they can be solved with artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data methods,” explains Dittrich and continues: “To ensure that they really use these methods as tools and not just as theoretical constructs, students work on practical problems at an early stage. This is done in close cooperation with about 10 application subjects such as psychology, linguistics, physics and materials science. Others are planned.

Dittrich conceived the course of studies together with scientists from the computer science department and the neighbouring computer science institutes. Six internationally renowned research institutions, including the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Helmholtz Center for Information Security (CISPA) and the two Max Planck Institutes for Computer Science and Software Systems, belong to the “Saarland Informatics Campus”. For Dittrich, it is precisely this environment and the breadth of the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence offering that makes the new course stand out from the other courses offered in Germany: “Data Science and AI are nowhere else in this breadth”. In addition, the discipline regularly receives awards in the nationwide CHE ranking: “The students regularly give us top marks,” says Dittrich.

Graduates do not have to worry about the time after graduation. The Donors’ Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanities in Germany calculated the need for data analysis professionals on the basis of job offers from a large online job exchange and came to the conclusion that around 10,000 specialists were being sought in Germany alone in 2018. For a further study, the association interviewed more than 600 large corporations, medium-sized and small companies as well as start-ups. The surveyed companies estimate that by 2023 around half a million experts will be needed in Germany to analyse complex data. /gb