Data Science & Artificial Intelligence @UM

BSc & MSc

Student research

Did you know that around 10% of our bachelor's students and 30% of our master's students publishes their work in academic journals and at top-tier research conferences? Project work, theses, internships and honours projects often find their way into scientific literature, and our students frequently travel to present their work.

Here's a few recent examples:

• Philippe published his bachelor's thesis for the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence programme with the IEEE Web Intelligence Conference in Santiago, Chile, where he also presented his work. Read more about Philippe's trip and his bachelor's thesis. 
• As a master's student Artificial Intelligence, Lianne published her internship work with the IEEE Conference on Games. She travelled to London to give a presentation. Read more about Lianne's work and her research internship.
• Five master's students Data Science for Decision Making bagged a Best Paper Award, international media coverage and attention from the Dutch government with the chatbot they built for their project work. Read more about the #MeTooMaastricht chatbot in the MSc project highlights. 

BSc projects

Simulating space missions & more

Remember how in July 2019, NASA announced its Dragonfly mission to Titan? The space agency revealed it would be sending a rover to Saturn's moon, that will hopefully reach it by 2034.

While the world gasped in surprise, we have to admit that we're pretty used to thinking about this sort of space mission. In fact, one of the first year Data Science and Artificial Intelligence bachelor's projects is to simulate space missions to... You guessed it, Titan!

The ultimate goal: a manned return mission
During the project, you work on simulating increasingly difficult space missions. One of the first things to do is to simulate the movement of celestial bodies. From there, you try simulating your first mission: simply shooting an object in the direction of Titan. The final mission? Simulating a manned return mission - ideally without casualties, this is not Kerbal Space Program.

So how do you go about doing that? All projects run for five months each, and take place alongside your courses where you pick up the skills and knowledge you will need to complete the project. You work in project groups of 5-7 students, and you meet with your tutor once a week to discuss your progress.

Other projects
Other projects you may encounter during the bachelor's include creating an intelligent agent capable of playing a game (year 2), designing and implementing a traffic simulator (year 2) or enabling a robot arm to autonomously play tic-tac-toe with human players (year 3). There are many other projects and they rotate, so which one you'll get remains a surprise.

BSc honours tracks

Excel during your bachelor's studies

Did you absolutely nail your first year as a bachelor's student? Are you looking for an extra challenge? Lucky you: we offer honours tracks to top-performing students of the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence programme. As an honours student, you explore research or professional life during year 2 and year 3 of the programme.

Practical track: KE@Work
KE@Work gives you the opportunity to take what you learn during your studies and apply it directly in a real-world setting at a company or organization. Instead of the regular group projects in year 2 and 3 of the bachelor's, you work at a KE@Work partner organization for two days a week, where you tackle challenges in the field of Data Science and/or Artificial Intelligence. In return, you receive a monthly stipend and a CV full of relevant working experience - before you even graduate!

Read more about being a KE@Work student

Research track: MaRBLe 2.0
MaRBLe 2.0 - 'Maastricht Research-Based Learning 2.0' - lets you get up close and personal with ongoing research in our department. During this two-year programme, your work is organised in a similar way as in professional research institutes: you work together with other students as individual experts on a team project, while being embedded in one of our research groups. You work towards a journal publication as a team.

MSc projects

#MeTooMaastricht chatbot

Last September, five students of the Data Science for Decision Making master's programme built a chatbot to assist survivors of sexual harassment. 

After sci & tech blog The Register wrote about the chatbot, newspapers in Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands followed suit. The student project went all the way to the Dutch government, where the chatbot became the subject of questions to the parliament. 

Academically, the chatbot was a hit too: the publication received the Best Paper Award at the 4th Workshop on Data Science for Social Good (SoGood 2019) in Würzburg, Germany. Have a look at an early version of the paper!

More projects
Want to know more about project-centred learning? The student projects blog collects a selection of layman's write-ups, which is one of the tasks you're asked to complete for the projects. It features bachelors theses and master's projects.

MSc projects

Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence will change the world... Well, provided that we overcome a few hurdles. Explainability is one of those things. It's a hot topic at the moment: how can we find out why black box AIs make the decisions they do? When it comes to life-changing decisions that impact people's lives, for example in the legal domain, "because the neural network said so" won't get you far. 

Five master's students of the Artificial Intelligence and Data Science for Decision Making programmes tackled black box models and looked into ways of making them interpretable. You can read the write-up of their problem statement and results in this blog.

More projects
Want to know more about project-centred learning? The student projects blog collects a selection of layman's write-ups, which is one of the tasks you're asked to complete for the projects. It features bachelors theses and master's projects.

BSc & MSc

Course highlights

If you study with us, you'll engage with project-centred learning: you work on two big projects per year alongside your classes.

So, classes are just about sitting and listening to lectures right? Well, not all of them. Here are some of the things that happened in class:

• The master's course Intelligent Search & Games held a voluntary ending tournament where you could earn bonus points on your exam. Students built game AIs that competed against each other in the board game Andantino. The student who created the winning algorithm received a full extra point on the exam!
• The bachelor's course Robotics and Embedded Systems is part course, part race, part beauty contest. At the end of the course, there's prizes to be earned for the fastest and the fanciest robot built and programmed during the course. The 2019 fanciest robot prize went to CatDog, pictured in the middle. Watch a movie of the last day of the course.
• The bachelor's course Data Analysis tackles everything from inspecting, cleaning, transforming, restoring and preparing data for modelling all the way up to data visualization and storytelling. For the course finale, you get to answer whatever questions you want, by analyzing whatever dataset you like... In a two-minute, self-made Data Madness video. Here's some Data Madness: Which programming language should you learn? And who is better at soccer, Brazil or the Netherlands? Or can you predict whether a superhero is good or bad based on their superpowers? Perhaps you've wondered what happens when you train a chatbot based on Team Fortress 2 chatlogs...

If you would like to check out the course catalogue of our individual programmes, follow the links below:
Course catalogue BSc Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
Course catalogue MSc Artificial Intelligence
Course catalogue MSc Data Science for Decision Making

Meet our alumni

After your diploma

Since we've started teaching in 1992, the demand for experts in data science and artificial intelligence has shot through the roof. Our diplomas offer excellent job prospects both within and outside of the Netherlands.

Will you work for a start-up company, a large multinational, as a researcher, in Silicon Valley or will you be your own boss? Will you apply your skills in the domain of healthcare, robotics, logistics, ICT, gaming, finance or elsewhere? Here's a selection of positions that our alumni hold:

• Research scientist at Facebook AI Research
• Software Development Engineer at Amazon
• Senior Program Manager Business Operations at Tesla
• Software Engineer at Google
• Chief Technology Officer at myTomorrows
• PhD student at University College London
• Data and Software Engineer at the European Space Agency
• Team Lead Data Science at Bol.com
• Consultant Financial Advisory & Analytics at Deloitte
• Methodologist at CBS (Statistics Netherlands)
• Senior Algorithm Software Engineer at Pie Medical Imaging

If you're curious what some of our bachelor's and master's alumni from the class of 2019 are up to, have a look at this article.

Get to know us

The small-scale nature of our education shows outside of the classroom as well. Professors, students and support staff all address each other on a first-name basis. We like to involve our students however we can: for example, all staff and students were invited to celebrate a professor's inauguration. Students provided the suggestions to name our new lecture halls, and when all three of our programmes were ranked #1 in the Dutch Keuzegids, there was free pie for everyone. On Pi Day, of course. 

To give you a sense of what goes on in our department, we've collected some of our favourite memories of last year in this overview. To see more, you can also have a look at our social media.

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Research
In addition to teaching, we engage in research. These are not separated activities: as a student, you get up close and personal with ongoing research in the department.

Our research spans the domains of Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics and Robotics. The department's contributions to areas such as multi-agent systems, (medical) signal and image processing, FAIR principles, game theory, intelligent search techniques and affective computing are internationally recognized.

Visit the Department of Advanced Computing Sciences' research pages

March 2020 - September 2021

During the pandemic

We're not going to lie, pandemics aren't fun. On the other hand... Moving things online does open up possibilities. We can do things that would never be possible in real life! Here's our favorite online moments during the pandemic:

Our first-ever online graduation ceremony ft. internet royalty
Around 40 bachelor's and master's students were the first to graduate online. The ceremonies - which were preceded by a graduation package, including a graduation cap and confetti - were livestreamed via Youtube. The graduation ceremonies featured a concert coming from our lab, including swaying robots, and the closing words were kindly delivered by András aka Hide the Pain Harold of meme fame (we're mostly impressed that we managed to keep that a secret leading up to the event itself).

DKE Bachelor's Introduction Day 2020: not what you were expecting
It's not easy to start studying during a pandemic. To make this a memorable and still fun occassion, we immersed our new bachelor's students in a custom-made, two-day and mostly online alternate reality game. We disguised it as a plain old introduction programme. Our new students exceeded all expectations when they uncovered the conspiracy, defused the bomb and freed our Director of Studies in no time. Curious? We have a small report up here.

February 2020

Inauguration pre-party

An inauguration is an academic ceremony, during which someone formally accepts their professorship. The new professor gives a public lecture (an 'inaugural address') about their work while other professors look on. Although the inauguration itself is a short and tightly regulated event, professors are free to extend the festivities.

When it was Professor Frank Thuijsman's turn on February 7, we celebrated the occassion with a pre-party for students, alumni and staff. The pre-party featured a pubquiz, two lightning talks by our researchers (about game theory and data challenges at the Large Hadron Collider) and a live concert by the interactive, smartphone-controlled jazz trio Tin Men and the Telephone.

October 2019 - January 2020

Naming the new lecture halls

Ahead of the move into our new building, we asked our students to come up with names for our six new lecture halls. Here's some honorary mentions that didn't make it:

• Skynet, GLaDOS, KITT, HAL 9000, JARVIS, Baymax
• House of Gauss, Haw-King's Palace, Euler's Empire, Turing Temple, Bayes' Basement, Dijkstra's District
• Master Soda, Stormbrewer, Puke Skywalker, Obi Wine Kenobi, Darth Jaeger, Qui Gon Gin (yes but no.)

After considering all 80 submissions, we fell for a space theme: Deep Space, Cyberspace, Search Space, Eigenspace, Vector Space and Memory Space. The common room will henceforth be known as The Space. 

The fun doesn't end there: we will transform the back walls of the spaces with graphic murals that match creative interpretations of their names. Please don’t be turned off by our MS Paint skills, but the above image shows what the walls could look like in the near future (except, you know, better and done by someone with actual graphics skills).

June 2019

Annual OMGWTFBBQ

In collaboration with study association MSV Incognito, we organize an annual barbecue - suitably named the OMGWTFBBQ - at the end of each academic year. The OMGWTFBBQ is free for all of the department's students and staff, and includes vegan and vegetarian menu options alongside the classic BBQ menu.

Last year's OMGWTFBBQ was preceded by an introductory (and voluntary) game of cricket, courtesy of one of our British lecturers.

March 2019

25th birthday of study association MSV Incognito

MSV Incognito is the study association for all students of the Department of Advanced Computing Sciences. Our department sponsors the membership fee, so as a student you automatically get to join for free!

We're quite fond of MSV Incognito. We collaborate on a lot of activities, like the career day and the annual barbecue. When the study association celebrated its 25th birthday in March 2019, we whipped out our phone cameras and assembled a small video to say congratulations on our behalf. The quality isn't great, but it's the thought that matters...

The video features some of the department's professors (including one that spontaneously dressed up as the MSV Incognito logo) and support staff. Watch the video on our Facebook page.

March 2019

Pi Day: pie (vlaai) for all and Math/Maastricht city guide launch

Pi Day 2019 had a lot of good things in store, including pie.

Pie for all
First off, all students ate as much vlaai as they could - a type of pie and the local delicacy in our area - to celebrate that all three of our programmes were ranked #1 in the 2019 Keuzegids rankings. The Keuzegids clusters study programmes in the Netherlands by subject, and then provides a ranking based on student satisfaction, expert judgement and job prospects. Worth a celebration!

Math/Maastricht, an alternative guide to the city
Secondly, we unveiled our special project: the mathematics-inspired city guide Math/Maastricht. In it, some of our math-oriented lecturers and researchers explain why they associate a certain spot in the city with their work. Within their stories, you'll encounter minotaurs, windmills, art installations and... train shunting yards. We even ran a month-long photo exhibition and made the news.

We strongly recommend you have a look: the project features many lecturers you'll meet, it gives a nice impression of the city and you get to learn about mathematics in the process. 

Visit the Math/Maastricht web portal