The Higher Education Review

With campuses in Sydney, Mumbai, Singapore and Dubai, S P Jain School of Global Management offers globally renowned undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral and professional programs in management. The institute’s professional programs in Big Data and Visual Analytics along with other domains like Financial Technology, Machine Learning, Digital Marketing, Virtual Reality, and Cyber Security have most advanced content delivery across the world and has most of the cutting-edge subjects covered, such as perceptions, reinforcement learning, data mining, artificial intelligence and many more. The courses are available in both full time and part-time format. The course enables the student to look at career opportunities in advanced areas without being restricted in a niche. “Our Big Data and Visual Analytics program has been structured with a philosophy that a sound understanding of the technologies involved is needed to apply the most relevant one for the business,” says Dr. Suneel Sharma, Director of Big Data and Visual Analytics program and head of professional programs, S P Jain School of Global Management.

Since the large services companies in India have had been focussing on traditional technologies such as application development, maintenance and enterprise software like ERP and CRM, instead of giving the importance to areas such as machine learning, computer vision, artificial intelligence, mathematics, algorithms and coding, we have been overly dependent on skills available overseas.

“We are finding that professionals from many companies in India are coming to us to get trained on some of these skills where we have a professional program. This is a change in the right direction in our view. Our course is structured on quickly putting the professional back into a job and therefore it is a rigorous six months full time and nine months part-time blended program,” opines Prof. Sharma. S P Jain’s Big Data and Visual Analytics program is different from a normal business analytics course, where the intensity is not restricted in knowing how to handle desktop software like Excel, or in the best case a software like SAS, run a regression and make some charts out of the data.

“The focus is not on the black box software driven approach, but to understand the wiring behind the black box too,” claims Prof. Sharma. Being one of the top ranked global institutions, S P Jain has managed to bring highly qualified faculty members on the board - every faculty has qualifications attained in the US, the IISc or IIT.

At present, the institute has highly qualified faculty members with an average experience of 10 years, offering an intellectually stimulating classroom environment to the learners. “Although, Big Data and Visual Analytics is a new program, our students are employed with some of the top companies such as Citibank, Deloitte, Morgan Stanley, Fractal Analytics and so on. Some of them are pursuing international careers too,” states Prof. Sharma. While the future of data science looks promising, S P Jain is in constant process of reinventing and adapting the program content to include the cutting-edge work that is being done and published.“Data science education is fast evolving. Therefore, we want to perfect the model through learning ourselves before looking at an expanded program in the future,” concludes Prof. Sharma.