BDS Projects

Behavioural Data Science program at UvA consists of many real-world data challenges. Some of these are:

 Big Data Analytics : This course dives deeper into big data challenges, from image classifications to natural language processing, it takes data from different online sources such as Amazon review to understand how big data is analysed and interpreted through machine learning algorithms. Students also learns to compare and contrast different techniques based on various performance metrics to identify the best performing model.

– Pressure Cooker: As the name suggests the Pressure cooker not only teaches students to deal with real client’s data science problem but also gives a first hand experience with working in a stressful conditions. During this project students are divided into several teams wherein there are required to solve a client’s data science question. All the teams have the same problem and in the end different teams have to present their finding to the client. The stressful aspect is the time-line, the teams have only one week to understand the business problem, explore and model the data and finally provide a deliverable to the client. Students have to demonstrate not only the above mentioned hard skills but soft skills such as communication, time management and scheduling in order to successfully finish this project.

– Internship Data Driven Consultancy: One of the unique aspects of the BDS program allows students to do a small internship through a university chosen organization for a month. Univeristy assigns students to a specific company which has a data science challenge. The students in teams of 3-4 individuals get a month long time to analyse and evaluate the data in order to draw insightful conclusions. While data analytical skills are essential, consultation and communication skills play a big role in understand the problem and collaborating with other students to find a optimum solution.

– Internship / Master Thesis: Finally, at the end of the year, students individually have to find their own internship organizations wherein they act as a data science consultant to solve real world problems. Students can also choose to do their master thesis with an external organization.