Machine learning, artificial INtelligence and Data (MIND)

The pedagogical objective of the MIND course is to provide fundamental knowledge in all areas of artificial intelligence focused on the use of data, the production of knowledge and the implementation of intelligence services:

• databases for collecting, storing, managing and querying large amounts of complex data,
• Information search and data mining for filtering, analysis and extraction of information,
• Machine learning to extract statistical and symbolic models from imperfect data,
• Computational intelligence to reason and utilize knowledge extracted from data.



The professions targeted by the MIND course are designers, developers and users of intelligent tools in all major fields requiring strong skills in data processing, analysis and enrichment. The expertise required for these jobs evolves rapidly, and requires continuous monitoring of the scientific activities and results concerned. The MIND course is also aimed at jobs in scientific research and R&D.

The following are just a few examples:

•     Web management, Web advertising, Design of social platforms
•     Business Intelligence, Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
•     Information retrieval and search engines on the web and in social platforms
•     Database tuning, Data analyst, Data architect, Data engineer, Data manager on distributed architectures (cloud, data grid, data center), Scientific data manager, technology watch, Web architect

Companies typically interested in the profile of students on this course are players in information processing, whether industrial (OpenData, Etalab, Internet memory, Google, Yahoo!) or academic (BNF, INA), large companies using complex solutions (SAP, Accenture, Total), information retrieval and data mining (Exalead, BlogSpirit, KXEN), as well as major groups in various fields such as finance...

From an academic point of view, the course naturally leads to positions as teacher-researcher and researcher. The aim is to maintain a thesis continuation rate of around 50%.

Organization of the training

The first semester of the M1 has a common core offering an important mutualization of courses with other programs of the computer science field. Two compulsory courses introduce the main models and languages for storing and accessing structured and semantic data, and for knowledge representation. These two courses are complemented by courses from other tracks that aim to provide a set of mathematical and computational tools necessary for the training as well as some other opportunities. Subject to schedule compatibility, we will also allow students, if they wish, to take a so-called "free" UE (belonging to another course of the Computer Science Master, or even another Master), which does not appear in the following table, and which would correspond to a coherent professional project.

From the second semester of the M1program, we propose three different competencies, each one offering a set of specific skills to the students, via a personalized arrangement of UE. These three competencies are :

• The "Learning" competency (APP) offers UEs in the areas of information retrieval and data mining applied to complex data analysis, scientific and industrial intelligence and social media.
• The "Databases" (DB) competency offers UEs in the field of databases applied to the management of complex and distributed large-scale data.
• The "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) competency offers courses in knowledge modeling and symbolic learning applied to complex and uncertain information (documents, semantic web).

The courses in each profile are complementary to the courses in the other two profiles and enable students to personalize their training.

The first semester of the M2 program offers specialized courses, each of which provides a set of specific skills for the different competencies. The students’ orientation towards a profession will be established through their internship in the second semester of M2, which takes place during the entire second semester and can be carried out in a research laboratory or company, with the emphasis on either research or development.

The students registered in Master M2 MIND with the sufficient prerequisites can follow UE related to advanced mathematical aspects (convex optimization, non-convex, statistical and automatic learning). Please see the detailed content on m2a.lip6.fr  

Upon graduation, the graduate will have mastered:

• the issues, problems and context of large-scale information processing
• the basic tools of artificial intelligence
• symbolic and numerical technologies for data-driven machine learning
• basic tools for information retrieval
• the different components of an operational data mining tool
• the functioning of search engines, text, image, speech and video.

They will also be able to implement and innovate the design of :

• large-scale data management, collection and analysis systems,
• data mining, information retrieval and technology watch tools,
• machine learning and pattern recognition algorithms.

The recruitment in M1 is mainly done at the L3 level (or equivalent) in Computer Science or Computer Science/Mathematics. Well-motivated candidates from other scientific fields may also be considered.

At the M2 level, the program can accommodate a few external candidates with compatible prerequisites, and in particular students in their final year of engineering schools (Centrale, CNAM, ENSIIE, EPITA, ParisTech, etc.) who want to complete a double degree.

Candidates must have solid knowledge of computer science (algorithms and programming, databases, logic...). Fundamental notions in mathematics (probability, statistics) are strongly advised.