Cross-domain Curriculums
【Ministry of Education】ITSA Program
With the certificates, being the most in-demand talent!
Harvard Business Review once dubbed Data Scientist the sexiest job of the 21st Century. LinkedIn statistics also proved that the demand for talents in business analytics in the United States has grown six times in the past five years, and the market demand gap in major cities across the United States had exceeded 150,000 in 2018. In Taiwan, 104 Corporation reported that the job vacancy related to data analytics would exceed 17,000 in 2016 and multiply many times over in just a few years, reaching a scale of 100,000 by 2020. In a digital society, business analytics is the most important core capability of enterprises, and cross-disciplinary managers with expertise in programming, probability statistics, and business management will be a key role to lead enterprise transformation in the near future. To address the talent gap, the College of Science of Sun Yat-Sen University has launched three interdisciplinary curriculums in the spring of 2019: Business Analytics, Digital Marketing and E-Commerce, and Fintech and Innovation (as shown below). In the curriculums, we integrate the online courses from more than ten well-known business schools such as Harvard Business School, Wharton School of the University of Penn, and MIT Sloan School of Management. The primary goal for the three curriculums is designed to “let students from different departments learn big data and artificial intelligence, and build the ability to interpret data-driven findings and uncover valuable business insights.”
If you are passionate about data analytics, let’s join us!
Nowadays, most professional managers who have the ability to analyze business data in the industry do not have information-related backgrounds. Since innovative and creative talents may not all come from business schools, students above junior with any background studying at Sun Yat-Sen University are all eligible to apply for this curriculum. However, it is not easy for non-information backgrounds students to learn big data and artificial intelligence programming. After taking several online courses designed for non-information background students by many prestigious universities as references (Harvard University, MIT College, Penn Wharton School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, etc.), we believe that it is necessary for students to spend more time to lay a solid foundation. Therefore, we determined to first launch two common courses of the three curriculums, “R language“, “Probability & Business“ , and “Big Data, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence“ in the spring and fall of 2019, respectively.
After finishing the first two courses, students will learn to use programming and probability statistics, use big data and artificial intelligence technology to sort out, and analyze huge amounts of data, predict events, simulate situations, optimize options based on the analysis results, and make strategies through data visualization.
In the next advanced course (2020 spring), students can choose and focus on one of the curriculums to practice the mentioned skills through a series of cases.
Position and Learning Focuses of The Interdisciplinary Curriculums
From the perspective of the School of Management, we position the curriculums at the level of business management applications instead of information engineering. On the basis of the platform designed by the School of Management of Sun Yat-Sen University, we have installed considerably advanced packages and covered the complicated algorithm and arithmetic with pre-written programming templates and semi-automatic tools. With the bases, students can focus more on business logic and practical applications. For students without information and engineering background, you will have chances to practically use big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence through advanced interfaces. Besides, you will also further learn to apply them to the domain knowledge, through the technologies to do innovation and enterprise transformation. As for students with information background, you will learn how to apply your domain knowledge to corporate-level strategies, such as brand marketing, financial accounting, human resources, product planning, pricing, and competition, etc. You will have more opportunities to move from a data center to an office and to be promoted from a system administrator to an executive manager.
Regardless of the background and the experience in programming, we expect that you can become a cross-domain talent and develop programming skills, probability statistics knowledge, and business management capabilities through the three interdisciplinary curriculums.
The Common Features of The Three Curriculums
The common features of the three curriculums in this program included:
- Every student has chances to do business analytics by using big data and artificial intelligence.
- Regardless of the major, you can take this curriculum as long as you are interested in data analysis and can devote yourself to learning.
- It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to write code. Teaching assistants will assist you with the work twice a week.
- In the curriculum, we use advanced interfaces to cover complicated models and algorithms. The courses focus more on the business practical application instead of programming.
- We make good use of the latest online courses content from some prestigious schools such as Harvard and MIT, etc. Also, we provide Chinese guided videos and assist students to obtain the certificates.
- Integrate the essence of the courses from world-class business schools, and systematically introduce the innovative applications of big data-related technologies in the field of business management.
- Compile data cases based on business, practice business models through market simulations, and use analytical methods to solve practical problems.
- The Capstone projects will invite domestic companies to provide information for practical analysis.
- With the complete big data computing system and a huge amount of industrial-scale data, students can have practical experiences in using big data.
- Through making good use of cloud sources, every student will set up and own a personal cloud deep learning host.
- Students from different departments can exploit each other’s comparative advantages as well as complementarities to grow up through group projects and competitions.
- Outstanding group projects and individual assignments will be rewarded. The curriculums will also assist students to make webpages and some short videos related to the courses.
- Through publishing works through the website of the School of Management, and improving visibility through social media, students could increase employment opportunities.
Click the related pictures below to see the features, teaching goals, and course contents of each curriculum.