IT4BI becomes BDMA!

The Master's Degree in Information Technologies for Business Intelligence (IT4BI) received its first generation of students in September 2012. One year later, the second generation of which I was part, would be welcomed to start studies in Brussels as well.

Since its beginning, IT4BI has been facilitating learning, research and international collaboration in a positive and friendly atmosphere, thus providing the means for personal and professional development of many people around the World.

By the end of September 2016, the fifth generation of IT4BI students will have started their studies in Brussels while the third generation completes their thesis defences and the fourth generation begins their specialisation semesters in Barcelona, Berlin and Paris.

In September 2017, IT4BI will become BDMA, which stands for "Big Data Management and Analytics". BDMA focuses on the new needs of research, education, and industry with respect to Big Data and will keep on receiving the support of the European Commission as part of the Erasmus+ Programme.

IT4BI has literally changed many lives and there are no doubts that BDMA will keep on doing so. You may learn more about BDMA programme on the official website.

Recognition Award for IT4BI

The French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) has awarded an ongoing IT4BI Master Thesis Project with the prize "Prix spécial du jury" in the context of the competition "Boost Your Code 2015".

The award was given for ElectioVis, an open source decision-aiding software tool that I started to develop as part of the IT4BI Decision Support and BI specialisation I am pursuing at École Centrale Paris. The project profits from the academic advisory of Prof. Valentina Ferretti, an expert in the decision-making field who lectures at École Centrale Paris and Polytechnic University of Turin.

ElectioVis is a website that aims to bring the power of decision-making closer to all citizens of the world, overcoming economic, social, cognitive and language barriers. It will be available online during June 2015 and everyone will be able to try it for free.

The Fundamental Theorem of Linear Algebra by G. Strang

The Fundamental Theorem of Linear Algebra

This is a series of articles devoted to Gilbert Strang’s Paper “The fundamental theorem of linear algebra” published by American Mathematical Monthly in 1993.

IT4BI FAQ

I quite often receive questions about the IT4BI program: my CV is on the program's website, and people see my email there and write me. Also, I get quite a lot of questions from social networks. I usually try my best to give answers to all of them, but many questions repeat again and again, so it's a good idea to create a FAQ and make the answers are available to everybody, so I don't have to repeat myself. A fairly large part of the questions are about the admission process, and I already addressed some of them in IT4BI: How To.

IT4BI: How To

In the post European Master Programs in Data Analysis I listed some Master programs that I myself applied to. There I also briefly outlined how to apply to them. In this post, I would like to give more details about the process of applying to the program of my choice: Erasmus Mundus IT4BI. This is mostly based on my experience and I would like to share this with you.

Additionally, I sometimes get questions by email about the program and quite a lot of them are about the process: documents, motivation letters, etc. In this post I will also address these questions, and spare myself the troubles of typing the same text over and over again :)

IT4BI: Distributed and Large-Scale Business Intelligence

The first semester of the second year is devoted to specialization, and there are 3 possible choices in the IT4BI program. One of them is "Distributed and Large-Scale Business Intelligence" and it is delivered by the DIMA group at the Technical University of Berlin. It is the specialization of my choice, so I'm happy to share my experience about it in this post.

A Round-Trip to RDF

This is my first post in the blog and I would like to start off by sharing an application I developed as part of my studies at École Centrale Paris. Its name is RDF Usine and it is meant to convert plain text files (e.g. CSV) into RDF format.

I have published not only the executable library but also the complete source code.

IT4BI First Year: Business Intelligence Fundamentals

The first year of the IT4BI program is devoted to Business Intelligence fundamentals. There is plenty of information on the website of the program, including the course content page and the course description document. Even though these resources are comprehensive enough, I would still like to add a few details about the curriculum, so you can compare what is written on the website with the things we studied.