ICT & Artificial Intelligence

Chatbots that answer your questions on a website, self-driving cars, apps that give personal advice about your health, cameras with facial recognition, and online translation services. These all fall under “intelligent software”, which is increasingly becoming part of our daily lives.

For software engineers, this is a revolution. In the traditional way of making software, you divide a problem into parts and then solve those parts with a rules-based approach. Software with AI uses algorithms that you can train with data to learn the rules by itself. The resulting model can then be used to make smart decisions. Recently, there have been accessible open-source programming environments with a large number of standard algorithms in which you can do this. Super interesting and completely relevant for the world of today.

Within the ICT & Artificial Intelligence specialisation, you learn how to build professional software solutions with intelligent behaviour in a methodical and structured way. Techniques such as machine learning and deep learning – such as algorithms that can learn rules from data – are central. The specialisation is design oriented. In each semester, you go through the process of going from “business idea” to “AI product”. Data is essential here. In practice, this often involves large amounts of data, also in the form of images and texts. You learn to look critically at these kinds of data-driven solutions, and you will also learn about data ethics and legislation.

Once you have completed this specialisation, you can work for ICT companies as a machine learning engineer or AI engineer. You can also join a data-science team within companies or government organisations. In such a team, you will work on data-based innovations.