IIT, IIM, ISI to offer a joint course

Kolkata: Three premier institutions of IIT Kharagpur, IIM Kolkata and Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) Kolkata, have come together for the first time to offer a joint course in business analytics.

Starting from this session, the Post Graduate Diploma in Business Analytics (PGDBA) will allow students the rare opportunity to become students of all the three institutions at the same time and study one semester at each of them.

Professor Sudeshna Sarkar of Computer Science and Engineering department at IIT-KGP said the two-year full-time residential diploma programme is aimed at creating business analytics professionals by giving students cutting-edge inter-disciplinary educational experience.

The first semester at ISI will focus on mathematical foundation, statistical and machine learning theories for analytics. The second semester at IIT Kharagpur will focus on the engineering aspects of analysing huge volume of data.

The third semester at IIM Kolkata will concentrate on application of analytics in functional areas while in the fourth semester the students will be required to do an internship of six months duration on an analytics project in a business organisation.

The field of business analytics aims to analyse understand and interpret large data sets from a business point of view.

Technology and practices in this area are evolving rapidly and this course is expected to groom professionals with a strong foundation in statistics and machine learning, technology and business processes and applications, who will be ready for a career in the fast growing analytics industry, Sarkar said.

In India, the analytics market is expected to double between 2011 and 2018 reaching a figure of 2.3 billion USD by 2018, according to a report published by Nasscom and Blueocean Market Intelligence.