Formal Education in Data Science - Recent Experiences from Faculty of Technical Sciences of University of Novi Sad

Abstract

In recent years, Data Science has become an emerging education and research discipline all over the world. Software industry shows an increasing and even quite intensive interest for academic education in this area. In this extended abstract, we announce main motivation factors for creating a new study program in Data Science at Faculty of Technical Sciences of University of Novi Sad, and why it is important to nurture the culture of interdisciplinary orientation of such program from early beginning of B.Sc. studies. Also, we announce how we structured the new study program and addressed the main issues that come from evident industry requirements. The program was initiated in 2017, both B.Sc. and M.Sc. studies, and we collect the new experiences.

Keywords

• Academic Education
• Data Science
• Information Engineering

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employers rather expect experts capable of recognizing and resolving their interdisciplinary oriented and complex requirements.

In our current academic education, we can identify study programs of the three categories, covering in some extent disciplines of CSI&SE, as a basis to provide Data Science education. Those are: ( 1 ) Specific study programs in CSI&SE; ( 2 ) Study programs in (Applied) Mathematics; and ( 3 ) Study programs in Economics, Business Administration and Management. Our experiences in teaching CSI&SE courses in study programs of all the three categories lead to the identification of typical students’ and even teachers’ behavioral patterns. In the paper we will discuss why such patterns lower the culture of interdisciplinarity, and how it can be raised by data science study programs. Also, we will transfer some our recent experiences from the execution of Information Engineering study programs, where we identify increasing awareness of students about the importance of Data Science in upcoming years, while still the polarization of students’ population to one, with clear ideas about their future, vs. students with not clear recognition of their future opportunities is present. Acknowledgements The research presented in the paper was supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia under Grant III44010, “Intelligent Systems for Software Product Development and Business Support based on Models”.

References

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