Roorkee: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee has partnered with TSW, the Executive Education Division of Times Professional Learning (a part of The Times of India group) and launched a Post Graduate Certificate Program in Data Science & Machine Learning. The program has been designed especially for working professionals with insights from academics and industry experts and will strike the right balance between rigour and practice.

“Data Science and Machine Learning has become increasingly useful in newer areas. In the near future it is likely to become an essential skill for many different professions and industries. Academic institutions need to come forward for the huge capacity building exercise that is required to meet the needs of the industry.  The situation arising out of Covid-19 pandemic has given us the hope that many such programs can be effectively delivered online provided the program is for a longer duration.  Our partnership with TSW seeks to achieve this with the eleven months certificate program” said Prof. Ajit K Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee

The course offers 3 specializations to choose from:

I.          Computer vision and Image recognition

II.          Speech Recognition

III.          Data Engineering.

This intensive hands-on program will comprise more than 184 hours of live virtual sessions to be relayed by IIT Roorkee faculty as well as industry experts and has around 200 hours of self-learning content.  

This 11-month course with specialisations prepares the learner for a career in data science and artificial intelligence. No prior knowledge of coding is required to apply for the programme though an engineering degree is required. To enrol in the course, the applicant is required to have a Bachelor’s degree with minimum 50% aggregate along with minimum 2 years of experience preferably in the software domain. There is a provision of a special 15% discount on the course fee for alumni of IIT Roorkee.

Industry mentorship and career support would be also provided to learners upon the completion of the course. TSW has collaborated with over 250 leading organizations across sectors and more than 11,000 learners have been successfully placed in reputed organizations in the past few years.

With a total of 10 projects and real datasets, students would benefit from hands-on learning on diverse topics such as a recommendation system based on the dataset from Amazon, Auto-tagging photos uploaded by Yelp users on a review website, Classify the audio based on Google Audio set, Sentiment analysis on the live Twitter feed, Lung Cancer Detection, Satellite image classification, Covid-19 dataset analysis and Chatbot using Google Dialogflow.

Mr. Anish Srikrishna, CEO, Times Professional Learning (a part of The Times of India Group), added, “AI is predicted to increase national GDP growth by an average of 1.7 percent across 16 industries by 2035. A recent report goes on to say that, by 2035, AI technologies could increase labour productivity by 40% or more, thereby doubling economic growth in 12 developed nations that continue to draw talented and experienced professionals to work in this domain. We have partnered with IIT-Roorkee in bringing a program in Data Sciences and Machine Learning that has specific modules on Deep Learning and AI, backed with a specialization that is promising and rewarding.”

According to a Gartner study, 75% of enterprises are likely to shift from piloting AI to operationalizing it by the end of 2024, driving a 5X increase in streaming data and analytics infrastructure. As Big Data gears to play a significant role in the future, the vast amounts of information in sectors such as healthcare, government, finance, business management, among others, will require a skilled workforce to address the challenges of data analytics and improvise products, services and society.