Overview

This master’s course aims to respond to the demand for data scientists with the skills to develop innovative computational intelligence applications, capable of analysing large amounts of complex data to inform businesses decisions and market strategies.

Multidisciplinary content covers machine learning, neural networks, big data analysis, information retrieval, fuzzy systems and evolutionary computation. You will have opportunities to undertake practical projects, applying your learning to real-life problems in business, finance, security, industry control, engineering, natural language processing, information retrieval and bioinformatics.

Coventry University offers chances to learn alongside active researchers in areas such as pervasive computing, distributed computing and application, as well as innovative applications for interactive virtual worlds.

Course information

Big data processing and information retrieval drives some of the world most successful and high-tech businesses; from well-known companies like Google and Twitter, to specialist medical informatics providers and even space exploration.

The main theme throughout this course is automatic big data processing and information retrieval through machine learning, neural network and evolutionary computing. We aim to cover how to apply cutting-edge machine learning techniques to analyse big datasets, assess the statistical significance of data mining results and perform advanced data mining tasks.

We will introduce you to important frameworks which may include Hadoop Map Reduce, Spark, applications of relational databases and NoSQL databases in combination with easy to use and powerful development tools such as Scala, Python, Matlab and R. We will look at emerging theories, practices, approaches and management of distributed and intelligent computing systems, examining a wide range of case studies to see how applications have been developed and for what purposes, such as steganography detection system for colour stego images.

The focus of the MSc Data Science and Computational Intelligence course is on applications of data science methods and tools, combined with computational intelligence techniques for data-driven problem solving including the analysis, interpretation and visualisation of complex data, which is in increasing demand in fields such as marketing, pharmaceutics, finance, transportation, medicine, and management.

Career prospects

The highly-regarded Harvard Business Review has previously declared the role of ‘data scientist’ to be the sexiest career of the 21st century.

The explosion in the amount of available data now available to businesses, coupled with its potential value to improve competitive advantage, is driving the continued strong demand for data scientists throughout the world. In the UK alone, a 2019 Royal Society report found that demand for workers with specialist data skills like data scientists and data engineers had more than tripled over five years.

Opportunities following successful completion of this course could include careers as data scientists, data professionals and data analysts in variety of sectors including financial services, retail, marketing, customer and business intelligence.

The practical nature of our course places an emphasis on your future employability, developing a wide range of technical, analytical, design and professional skills.