Program’s structure & philosophy

Several factors have been taken into consideration to structure the content of the program:

• existing programs on business analytics and data science in business schools and engineering/CS departments at well known universities worldwide,
• proposals and suggestions of members of the advisory committee of the program, consisting of university professors and industry experts in the US and Asia,
• evaluations, comments and feedback of the participants in AUEB’s seminars and specialization programs on Big Data and Business Analytics during the last two years.

In brief, the program covers in detail theoretical concepts on business, statistics and data management, while it recognizes the importance of practical training on systems and tools. In addition, special care has been given to the “breadth requirement”: exposure on analytics applications in different fields and domains. The result is a well-balanced program between theory and practice. Theoretical concepts account for 50% of the program, systems and tools account for 25% of the program and the “breadth requirement” accounts for another 25% of the program. Theoretical concepts fall in four broad thematic areas:

• Business Environment and Processes (Information Systems & Business Process Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Business and Privacy Issues in Data Analysis)
• Statistics (Statistics for Business Analytics I, Statistics for Business Analytics II, Advanced Topics in Statistics)
• Data Management (Data Management & Business Intelligence, Big Data Systems, Advanced Topics in Data Engineering)
• Optimization and Knowledge Discovery (Large-scale Optimization, Mining Big Datasets, Social Network Analysis)

Practical training on system and tools involve the following platforms: SAS, R, Hadoop and related projects, Spark, MongoDB, Redis, Neo4j, Python (tentatively).

Finally, case studies will be presented in the context of finance, marketing, health, energy, human resources, transportation, supply chain analytics.

Full-time program

The full time program consists of one year of coursework, followed by a semester-long thesis or capstone project. 

Fall Quarter

• Information Systems and Business Process Management 5 ECTS
• Large Scale Optimization 5 ECTS
• Fundamentals in Data Management 5 ECTS
• Statistics for Business Analytics I 5 ECTS

Winter Quarter

• Business Intelligence & Data Engineering 5 ECTS
• Data Visualization 2.5 ECTS
• Statistics for Business Analytics II 5 ECTS
• Requirements Engineering for Analytics 2.5 ECTS
• Python for Analytics & Artificial Intelligence 5 ECTS

Spring Quarter

• AI for Business Analytics 5 ECTS
• Advanced Topics in Data Analysis 2,5 ECTS
• Data Governance and Privacy 2,5 ECTS
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship 2,5 ECTS
• Business Analytics Use Cases 5 ECTS
• Cloud Infrastructure for Analytics 2,5 ECTS

Fall Quarter (2nd year)

• Thesis or Field Study Project or Internship 30 ECTS