In a piece of positive news, IIT Madras is planning to almost double the number of seats for its Inter-Disciplinary Dual Degree (IDDD) program on Data Science owing to the positive response from the industry as well as demand from the students.
With a massive curriculum overhaul in 2015, IIT Madras offers great flexibility to students, giving them the opportunity to take courses across disciplines, and build towards expertise in modern interdisciplinary areas that will define the future of engineering and technology. In particular, IIT Madras provides its undergraduate students an option to upgrade to IDDD programmes, where the students will study for five years and obtain B.Tech. in a parent discipline and M.Tech. in an interdisciplinary area.
Speaking about the importance of Data Science to the nation’s development, Prof B Ravindran, Head, Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC DSAI), IIT Madras, and the course coordinator said, “Data Science is greatly impacting every discipline and the graduates of this programme, by virtue of their interdisciplinary training, are well equipped to be leaders in a digital world. ”
The IDDD Data Science Students will have a bachelor’s degree in the major they opted for when they joined, as well as a Master’s degree in Data Science, enabling them to apply their Data Science skills to solve problems in their parent discipline. This is a one-of-its-kind interdisciplinary programme in the country, providing students with a strong foundation in both their parent discipline, as well as frontier areas of data science. The graduating students are uniquely trained to fulfil the rapidly increasing need for data science and artificial intelligence professionals in the Indian industry.
Students taking the course will also intern at companies and take up projects in data science. More than half of the students chose to take up projects that applied data science in their parent discipline. Students from eight of the 10 eligible departments in IIT Madras have already enrolled in this course.
