The Dean

Decree Index no. 6373 Prot. no. 97423

Date 20.10.2017
Title III Class V
UOR SOFPL

HAVING REGARD TO the Statute of the Politecnico di Milano;

HAVING REGARD TO M.D. no.509 of 3.11.1999;
HAVING REGARD TO M.D. no. 270 of 22.10.2004;
HAVING REGARD TO the University’s General Regulations;
HAVING REGARD TO the Politecnico di Milano Master regulations, issued with R.D. no. 2235 of
05.08.2013;
HAVING OBTAINED the favorable opinion of the Academic Senate at its meeting of 19.06.2017, regarding
the establishment and activation of Master proposals, including the 1st level "INTERNATIONAL MASTER
IN BUSINESS ANALYTICS AND BIG DATA";

HEREBY DECREES

The 1st level "INTERNATIONAL MASTER IN BUSINESS ANALYTICS AND BIG DATA" has been
established and activated for the years 2018/2019.

ART. 1
Features of the Master course

The 1st level "INTERNATIONAL MASTER IN BUSINESS ANALYTICS AND BIG DATA" has been
established and activated at the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering.
The School of reference is the School of Industrial and Information Engineering, and the contact person is
Prof. Angelo Carlo Morzenti. The course is delivered by the MIP Politecnico di Milano - Graduate School of
Business Società Consortile per Azioni.
The Master Director is Professor Carlo Vercellis.
The Master Commission is made up of professors of the Politecnico di Milano: Carlo Vercellis, Raffaella
Cagliano, Davide Chiaroni, Paolo Ciuccarelli, Marco Giorgino, Lucio Lamberti, Giuliano Noci, Stefano
Ronchi, Andrea Sianesi, Letizia Tanca, Carlotta Orsenigo, Piercesare Secchi, Angelo Carlo Morzenti, and by
Filippo Passerini, engineer.

ART. 2
Training objective and employment opportunities

The International Master in Business Analytics and Big Data is aimed at training data- savvy professionals
able to manage complex business analytics problems across a variety of different industries and environments,
using appropriate techniques and tools. This master provides the students with the ability to combine
sophisticated analytical tools with business processes to improve decision making and exploit new
opportunities, with the methodological and technical background required to select, apply or even design
effective predictive methods for the business domain, with the ability to gain valuable insights from big data
extraction, processing and interpretation, and with Interdisciplinary skills that enhance the communication and
integration with different stakeholders within the organization.
The master is aimed at preparing professionals who will able to work as Data Users (managers in the end user
corporate community able to exploit insights from data to make better decisions), Data Producers (data
analysts able to use the appropriate tools to convert analytical problems into analytical solutions) or Data
Interpreters (professionals and business consultants able to understand both users and producers establishing a
successful communication among them).

The Master will be delivered in English.

ART. 3
Teaching content and organization

The Master's Degree course will begin in September 2018 and will end in September 2019.

The analysis of data, their modelling, organisation and efficient search are key challenges. Data analysis is a
clear bottleneck in many applications, both due to the lack of scalability of existing algorithms as well as the
complexity of the data that must be analysed. Lastly, the presentation of results and their interpretation by non-
experts is crucial in order to extract useful knowledge.

The teaching activities are split as follows:

Hours of classroom training: 530

The classroom training consists of a mixture of educational sessions: lectures, case study discussions,
exercises, laboratories, simulations and corporate testimonials.

Hours of individual study: 769

The hours of individual study, essential for learning the course contents, will be used both for preparing for the
assessment tests and for individual and group work and exercises, to be carried out during the course and to be
submitted in class, as an integral part of the classroom training.

Hours of project work: 200

The hours of work project will be dedicated to an in-company project or to an independent research study, in
both cases under the guidance of a professor/tutor, and will form an integral part of the training. At the end of
the work project, a report will be submitted for evaluation.

Total hours: at least 1,500

ECTS for classroom training: 54 ECTS

Internship/ project work ECTS: 6 ECTS

Tot. ECTS: 60 ECTS

The teaching units (classroom activities corresponding to 54 ECTS) are structured as follows.

Didactic Unit SSD CFU/ECTS

Management basics 4,0
Strategy & Marketing ING-IND/35 2,0
Accounting & Finance ING-IND/35 2,0
IT basics 4,0
SW Engineering ING-INF/05 2,0
IS Architecture ING-INF/05 2,0
Business Information Systems ING-INF/05 2
Data Management & Warehousing 7
Database Design and Technology ING-INF/05 3,0
Advances in Data Integration, warehousing and ING-INF/05 4,0
sensemaking
Big Data Cloud Technologies 7,5

Cloud Technologies and Big Data Frameworks ING-INF/05 2,0

Enabling Infrastructure (HW and architecture) ING-INF/05 4,0
Security ING-INF/05, INF/01 1,5
 Other advanced technologies 3,0
The Web as a ubiquitous platform for documents ING-INF/05 2,0
services, data and semantics
Mobile Technologies ING-INF/05, ING- 1,0
INF/01
Fundamentals of Statistics and Data Visualization 5,0
Fundamentals of Statistics SECS-S/01 3,0
Data visualization ICAR/13 2,0
Predictive Analytics and Business Applications 8,0
Big Data opportunities and applications INF/01 2,0
Data Mining and Machine learning INF/01 3,5
Business applications of advanced analytics INF/01 2,5
Project and People Management 3,0
Project Management and People Management ING-IND/35-17 2,0
Change Management ING-IND/35 1,0
Analytics for Management 6,5
More than technology: personal skills ING-IND/35 1,5
Web and Social Media Analytics ING-IND/35 1,0
Marketing Analytics ING-IND/35 2,0
IoT & Big Data ING-IND/35 -17 2,0
Electives ING-IND/35 -17 4,0
Project Work 6,0
Total 60

Management basics

Strategy & Marketing

The economic value as a determinant of strategic actions. The business model and positioning decisions within
economic sectors. The analysis of the competition and the dynamics of the supply chain's interaction. The
analysis of competitive differentials (choices of business portfolio, degree of vertical integration, cost
advantages and attractiveness). The business and industrial plan as a summarised tool of the company's
strategic choices. The decision-making process in marketing. The analysis of the demand, segmentation, value
proposition and marketing mix (the four Ps: Product, Price, Promotion and Place).

Accounting & Finance

The financial statements and the difference between economic and financial variables; accounting principles;
cost accounting and management control; investment valuation principles.

IT basics

Software Engineering
The course aims to analyse the evolution of software development from both a technological and
methodological points of view. Software process. Software life cycle. Software development model. Software
quality. Metrics. Relational Development Systems. UNL/collection requirements. Lifecycle Management.

IS Architecture
Introduction to information systems; types of information systems; Anthony pyramid; OLTP and OLAP.
Integration architectures. ERP and CRM; main components; software selection criteria; modelling process;
BPMN; analysis of the quality of processes; adaptive processes.

Business Information Systems

The course provides a business-oriented definition of “big data” and “data science” and confronts the subject
of how technological innovation has supported this wave of change in the business. The enabling technologies
are positioned within the Information Systems of a company, through the analysis of the most recent
tendencies in Information Systems management.

Data Management and Warehousing

Database Design and Technology

Database Management System; Transaction Management.

Advances in Data Integration, Warehousing Sensemaking

Data Integration; Data Warehouses; Data personalization and exploration.

Big Data Cloud Technologies

Cloud Technologies and Big Data Frameworks

Critical factors and opportunities of Big Data applications, which will be described through the use of case
studies. Modern storage and platform constraints and scalability. Big Data opportunities for clear objectives
and business problems. Big Data eco-system and relationships with Business Intelligence Tools.

Enabling Infrastructure (HW and architecture)

Understanding the fundamental themes of Cloud and Big Data technologies, the pros and cons of different
solutions and methodologies in evaluating their performance.

Security
Basic security engineering concepts. Basic cryptography concepts. Wed applications for the security and
protection of databases.

Other advanced technologies

The web as a widespread platform for documents, services, data and semantics. Semantics technologies and
their role in controlling the dimension of the “variety” of Big Data (RDF, OWL, SPARQL, R2RML).
The concepts of retrieval measures, crawling and indexing, link analysis, semantic search, open linked data,
crowdsearching.

Mobile technologies
Mobile apps, mobile design principles. Trends and future directions.

Fundamentals of Statistics and Data Visualization

Fundamentals of Statistics
Exploration of multivariate data: Descriptive statistics and graphical explorations. Average vector and
dispersion vectors. The size of a sample of multivariate data. The generalized variance. The distance induced
by the covariance matrix.
Analysis of covariance structure and size reduction: The main components (PCA): an orthogonal basis
generated by data. The independent components (ICA), a non-orthogonal base generated from data.
Discrimination, classification, grouping: General criteria for classification: statistical model, misclassification
and prior costs. Evaluation of a classification criterion: the matrix of confusion, error classification and cross-
validation methods. Alternative methods to the problem of classification: logistic regression and CARTs.
Similarity measures. Unsupervised Classification: hierarchical and non-hierarchical methods. The k-means
method. Multidimensional scaling. A look beyond: Object Oriented Data Analysis. A few case studies.

Data visualization
Data Visualization: the essentials (different forms of Data Visualization "by Example". The process of data
visualisation and roles involved. Potential impacts of data visualization at an IT level and possibly for the
entire company). Data Visualization: Principles (Basic elements of visual communication and graphic
summary. Delivering Data. Good & Bad practices: a critical analysis of concrete examples).
Data Visualization: tools (overview of the main of Data Discovery and Exploration tools).

Predictive Analytics and Business Applications

Big Data opportunities and applications
Opportunity to use Big Data and major issues related to their use through the illustration of use cases: the
challenges of scalability and constraints of current storage platforms and computing; opportunities of Big Data
in relation to the different business objectives and problems; the ecosystem of Big Data and its relationship
with Business Intelligence systems.

Data mining and machine learning

Predictive and machine learning methods: linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction, regression,
classification, classification trees, Bayesian methods, logistic regression, neural networks, support vector
machines, clustering, association rules. Evaluation and benchmark of the accuracy of predictive methods.

Business applications of advanced analytics

Examples of use of predictive methods through the use of cases in different contexts and industries. Laboratory
activities and use of software tools.

Project & People Management

Project Management
Project management: principles and methods of project management.

Change Management
Approaches to managing change, critical issues, management tools, communication. Radical and incremental
innovation.

Analytics for Management

More than technology: personal skills
The course is aimed at deepening the personal skills of management, leadership and communication, to
maximise the Business Intelligence & Analytics impact on the business and the organization.

Web and Social Media Analytics

The course aims at introducing to the use of data analysis and the big data solutions to the problem of large-
scale web content analytics.
In particular, the course focuses on how to apply the concepts of entity extraction, text and multimedia
analysis, network analysis, statistics, and machine learning to the problem of characterization of the user
behavior on social network and on the web. The course will show how these techniques can enable space-and
time-analysis of social media, recommendation and personalization of content for users, sentiment and
popularity analysis, and comparison between different actors and entities in the analyzed context. Finally, the
course will address the main challenges that can hinder the success of a social media analysis project.

Marketing Analytics
Advanced analytics for Marketing applications: targeting customer retention and cross-selling campaigns,
social media analytics, pricing optimisation, market basket analysis.

IoT & Big Data

The course aims to look in depth at the fusion occurring between Operational Technology and Information
Technology, and how the Internet of Things (IoT) is working in this direction in the industrial sector, in order
to close the gap between the physical world and the digital one.

Electives
Students may attend elective courses specifically designed for the International Master in Business Analytics
and Big Data or elective courses of other connected Masters.
The choice of courses by students is subject to approval by the Commission Master. With reference to the
electives, below are some examples of potential electives, each of which is 4 ECTS:

 Analytics for Finance

 Analytics on customer experience
 Social Media Marketing
 Analytics for Supply Chain Management
 ART. 4
Admission requirements

The Master is open to candidates who have a Bachelor or a Master of Science, and work experience less than 3
years.
For the candidates who have graduated abroad, equivalent study titles in the respective educational institutions
will be considered.
The number of students admitted is 40.
The selection will be made by the Commission.

ART. 5
Prerequisites

The application may be submitted from the day following the date of this Decree and within May 30th, 2018.

* Italian/foreign citizens with Degree obtained in Italy

 Self-certifications relating to Personal identity (name and surname, date and place of birth, nationality and
residence).
 A copy of the student's identity document
 Copy of the Diploma Supplement or copy of the Diploma and Academic qualifications, indicating the
marks obtained in each examination, for the students with a University Degree obtained under the old
educational system.
 Curriculum Vitae
 TOEFL, TOEIC, IELTS or equivalent certification.

* Italian/EU citizens with foreign Degree

 Self-certification relating to personal identity (name and surname, date and place of birth, nationality and
residence)
 Photocopy of the academic certificate plus to certificate detailing the marks obtained for each examination,
or the Diploma Supplement (upon enrolment, the Declaration of Value from the local Italian
Diplomatic authorities must be submitted, or an Official document issued by ENIC/NARIC centers).
 A copy of the student's identity document.
 Curriculum Vitae
 TOEFL, TOEIC, IELTS or equivalent certification.

The application form must contain the following statement: "I authorize the processing of my personal data by
the Politecnico di Milano, pursuant to Legislative Decree. N. 196 of 30.6.2003".

The documentation must be sent to:

MIP Politecnico di Milano - Graduate School of Business

Società Consortile per Azioni.
Via Lambruschini 4c – building 26/A - 20156 Milano
Tel.: +39- 022399.2820
Fax + 39-02-2399.2844
e-mail: infomasters@mip.polimi.it

Under Article 75 of Presidential Decree 445/2000, if the Administration finds, on the basis of appropriate
checks, that non-truthful statements have been made by the candidate, the declarant shall forfeit any benefits
obtained on the basis of the false declarations made.

* Non-EU citizens residing abroad

Non-EU citizens residing abroad must submit to the Managing office of the Specializing Master the following
documents:

 a Scan copy of the original University Degree achieved and related translation in Italian/English/French
or Spanish
 a scan copy of the official University transcripts and related translation in Italian/English/French or
Spanish or the Diploma Supplement
 Copy of the passport, demonstrating citizenship
 Curriculum Vitae
 TOEFL, TOEIC, IELTS or equivalent certification.

At least 30 days before the application deadline, as mentioned in the present article.

The Managing Office will send all the above documents to the Politecnico di Milano in order to be admitted to
the Specializing Master:

Servizio Offerta Formativa Post Laurea

Master e Corsi di perfezionamento
Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32 Padiglione Nord
20133 Milan

by the closing date of this selection call, as required by the MIUR/MAE notice “Norme per l'accesso degli
studenti stranieri ai corsi universitari anno accademico 2016-2017”.

Upon receiving applications for admission tests from the above-mentioned students, the “Servizio Offerta
Formativa Post Laurea” will verify their actual participation and, if the candidates pass the above mentioned
admission procedure, will communicate the outcome to the relevant Italian Diplomatic authorities in order to
prepare the documentation for enrolment in the Specializing Master and issue a national long-stay visa.

Once admitted, candidates must submit their study title to the Italian Diplomatic authorities to complete the
required procedure.

ENROLMENT:

DEGREE OBTAINED IN ITALY

Students admitted to the Master course must submit to the Managing office of the Specializing Master an
application for enrolment using the specific form provided, complete with revenue stamp. Students may certify
their own educational qualifications earned in Italy by filling in the space provided on the registration form.
The application form may be found on the following website
www.polimi.it/postlaurea > Documentazione

Non-EU citizens, in addition to the above documentation, must submit a copy of their residence permit.
DEGREE OBTAINED ABROAD

Students admitted to the Master course must submit to the Managing office of the Specializing Master an
application for enrolment using the specific form provided, complete with revenue stamp.
The application form may be found on the following website www.polimi.it/postlaurea > Documentazione

The academic degrees obtained must be documented by presenting:

- Declaration of Value issued by the local Italian diplomatic authorities (Italian Embassy or Italian
Consulate) on letterhead paper complete with original stamp; or an Official document issued by
ENIC/NARIC centers
- true copy of the original academic certificate

Non-EU citizens, in addition to the above documentation must submit a copy of the residence permit.

Students born in a non-EU nation who declare EU citizenship must attach to copy of an identity
document demonstrating EU citizenship. Students who fail to present to copy of an identity document
demonstrating EU citizenship will be required to present to copy of their residence permit.

In order to be admitted to the Master's final examination, students must submit - within 30 days of the exam
date - an appropriate application to the Politecnico di Milano. The application form may be found on the
following website www.polimi.it/postlaurea > Documentazione.

ART. 6
Certifications and awards

CERTIFICATION ISSUED
After completing the course and on passing the final exam, the 1st level "International Master in Business
Analytics and Big Data" certification will be issued in English.

STUDENT OBLIGATIONS
Attendance is compulsory for at least 90% of the course activities.
Withdrawal from the course must be submitted in writing. The training period cannot be suspended for any
reason. It is not possible to simultaneously enroll for another Master or study course offered by an Italian
university.

ASSESSMENT PROCEDURE
The assessment procedure involves course tests and a final exam. The final exam will consist in submitting and
defending a report prepared during the Master course.

ART. 7
Tuition fees and contributions

The total cost of the course is equal to € 14.000,00.

The cost is split into:

- Contribution for enrolment in the Politecnico di Milano - € 500.00 per student
- Master tuition fees - € 13.500,00 per student

The contribution for enrolment in the Politecnico di Milano will not be returned under any
circumstances.

Payments may be made by bank transfer to BANCA POPOLARE DI SONDRIO - AGENZIA N.21 - VIA E.
BONARDI N. 4 c/o POLITECNICO DI MILANO - CIN L - ABI 05696 - CAB 01620 - C/C 000010025X55 -
account (C/C) made out to MIP Politecnico di Milano - Graduate School of Business- International bank
codes: IBAN IT02 L056 9601 6200 0001 0025 X55 - BIC/SWIFT POSOIT22
specifying the Master in Business Analytics and Big Data as the reason for the bank transfer.
 ART. 8
Grants

Scholarships are available to cover part of the fee, as well as low-interest loans and loans on trust offered by
partner banks.

FOR CLARIFICATIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Dr Anna Zini,
MIP Politecnico di Milano Graduate School of Business
via Lambruschini 4C - Building 26/A - 20156 Milano
Tel 0223992856
Fax 0223992844
zini@mip.polimi.it
infomasters@mip.polimi.it

Milan, 20.10.2017
The Dean
(Prof. Ferruccio Resta)
Signed Ferruccio Resta

Digitally signed, according to the law