Data Science and Knowledge Engineering bachelor's programme changes name
As of 1 September 2020, the bachelor's programme in Data Science and Knowledge Engineering is named Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. The curriculum remains unchanged.
The new name, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, is a better fit for the bachelor’s programme, which teaches students how to extract useful knowledge from large amounts of data. It’s the second name change in the history of this programme. Over the course of nearly 30 years, a lot has changed in this dynamic field of study.
Evolution since 1992: Knowledge Engineering
While term 'data science' only really became popular around 10 years ago, the type of work existed long before that. In 1992, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence started out as the bachelor’s programme in Knowledge Engineering: a term that has been in use for much longer.
Knowledge engineering deals with the integration of knowledge into computer systems, so they can solve complex problems which normally require human expertise. An early example is a 1970s software which posed a series of yes/no questions to doctors, to help identify what sort of antibiotics they had to give to their patients. Exactly: it's a form of data science!
The Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering, which teaches the programme, will retain its name.
2016-2020: Data Science and Knowledge Engineering
As the field and its naming conventions changed, so did the name of the programme. In 2016, the bachelor’s programme was re-named Data Science and Knowledge Engineering. By then, Artificial Intelligence had long been one of the core topics of the curriculum. With the amount of data growing ever larger, data science increasingly relies on Artificial Intelligence to comb through the data for us.
2020: Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
The new name better reflects the programme’s curriculum. This was reinforced during the programme’s re-accreditation: in addition to a very positive programme re-evaluation by the NVAO (the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders), the accreditation committee voiced its support for the new name.
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The Data Science and Artificial Intelligence programme has three core topics: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science and Applied Mathematics.
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