Preamble to the program:
Data science has become important due to recent technology disruptions. Most fundamental is Moore's Law which has driven an exponential growth in computing, storage, and communications per rupee over the past 50 years. This rate of growth shows no signs of abating. Consequently, today we have the Internet of Things: a plethora of sensors costing 10s of rupees or less, a global Internet with almost limitless bandwidth, and enormous storage in global clouds. The present era is full of technological advances in almost all spectrum of life and we are flooded with enormous amount of data. There is an increasing demand of capturing, analyzing, and synthesizing this large amount of data sets in a number of application domains to better understand various phenomena and to convert the information available in the data into actionable strategies such as new scientific discoveries, business applications, policy making, and healthcare etc.
Data science is the area where applications of various tools and techniques from the disciplines of applied statistics,mathematics and computer science are used to get greater insight and to make better and informed decisions forvarious purposes by analysing a large amount of data. Jim Gray, database pioneer, has called Data Science the 4th paradigm of science. The first 3 are the empirical, the theoretical and the computational paradigms.
In industry there is an escalating demand for trained professionals who can collect, process, and study the large data sets and reveal underlying trend and other insights. Consequently, the study of data science as a discipline has become essential to cater the growing need for professionals and researchers to deal with the future challenges.
Given the mounting importance of the data science paradigm, IIT Mandi has decided to start a new 4 years bachelor program on Data Science and Engineering (DSE).
The curriculum of the DSE program focuses on exposing to the students with the essentials of applied statistics,applied mathematics, and computer science required in the context of data science and its applications with strong emphasis on having hands-on experience with the help of practicum, labs and experience of dealing with real-world problems.
Objectives of the program:After the completion of the degree, students would
- Be prepared with a varied range of expertise in different aspects of data science such as data collection, visualization, processing and modeling of large data sets.
- Acquire good understanding of both the theory and application of applied statistics mathematics and computer science based existing data science models to analyse huge data sets originating from diversified application areas.
- Be able to create models using the knowledge acquired from the program to solve future challenges and real-world problems requiring large scale data analysis.
- Be better trained professionals to cater the growing demand for data scientists and engineers in industry.
