Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate in Information Technologies for Business Intelligence – Doctoral College

Since its inception 20 years ago, Business Intelligence (BI) has become a huge industrial domain and a major economic driver, however overlooked by academics. It encompasses many scientific and technological fields including data warehouses, data mining, content analytics, business process management, visual analytics, and requires competences in information systems, web science, decision science, and software engineering. The Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate in Information Technologies for Business Intelligence – Doctoral College (IT4BI-DC) is designed to develop research excellence in this broad scope of fields. Its main objective is to train computer scientists who understand and help develop the strategies of modern enterprise decision makers.

The programme favours the integration of students into a network of world-renowned researchers and specialists in BI. The curriculum is jointly delivered by Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), Aalborg Universitet (Denmark), Technische Universität Dresden (Germany), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), and Poznan University of Technology (Poland). Associated partners from around the world include top-ranked universities, leading industries in BI, public and private research organizations, R&D companies, consulting companies, and public authorities. This consortium will prepare graduates to address major governance challenges in today’s knowledge-based society by developing the three interdependent components of the “knowledge triangle”, i.e., education, research, and innovation.

IT4BI-DC is a 3-year (180 ECTS) doctoral programme implemented as a co-tutelle model. The consortium jointly designs a set of Doctoral Topics addressing six fundamental BI challenges: Modeling and Semantics, Information Discovery, Information Integration, Business Analytics, Large-Scale Processing, and Collaboration and Privacy. Each of the Doctoral Topics is jointly co-supervised by at least two partners of the consortium. The doctoral candidate will spend between 33% and 50% in the host university of the co-tutelle. Upon completion of the program, graduates will be awarded with a joint degree from the universities of the co-tutelle.

IT4BI-DC provides to doctoral candidates a high-level education and training programme comprising Research-specific courses, Innovation and Entrepreneurship courses, Methodological and Communication courses, Language courses, Organization of and participation in scientific events, and Internships.