Engineering & Technology Courses

This course will provide fundamental knowledge about Decision Management and Business Rules Management. Organisations execute numerous decisions each day, based on an increasing amount of data. Technology offers increasing possibilities for automating or supporting such decision-making. Decision Management and Business Rules Management enables organisations to progress from relatively simple task automation beyond workflow and process automation, into decision-centric automation. This course provides students with the theoretical background and hands-on experience regarding the capabilities required to innovate using Decision Management and Business Rules Management.

Technology is not neutral. In this course we discuss and practice how to recognise and address moral questions in digital innovation. How do you respect personal and public values such as security, autonomy, well-being or distributive justice in technological designs? And how do your own values and norms influence the choices you make or would like to make? We introduce various ethical tools and techniques and show how their application leads to more value-sensitive choices. This will be very much a hands-on course.

Process mining is a data analytics technique to discover, evaluate or enhance business processes by analysing the data traces left behind during the execution of these processes. It provides insights based on the data captured in the process-supporting IT systems. In contrast to other data analytic mechanisms, process mining analyses process flow, i.e. the sequence of steps taken by various actors to execute a particular task. The insights gained by process mining can be used for conformance checking or process improvement.

This course will provide both theoretical background and hands-on experience with business process management (BPM), improvement and innovation. On the one hand it is important for organisations to have grip on their processes, and to continually evaluate and improve their processes in an evolutionary way; Information Technology (IT) can play a supporting role in this. On the other hand, innovative IT can play a disruptive role for businesses. In this course both aspects will be illustrated and discussed.

Process mining is a rapidly growing field of research. This is testified by an established research community, numerous publications and thousands of organisations applying process mining. Because of this interest, we now face a vast body of knowledge that spans multiple disciplines and covers a range of methods, tools, and techniques. A single individual may find it daunting to set up a new research line in this field. After all, it is difficult to oversee all relevant developments and to understand the different approaches available. To help and guide aspiring process mining researchers, this course aims at bringing them together.

What does the city of the future look like? Since the beginning of the 21st Century the majority of the world population lives in an urban area. The Summer School Smart Sustainable Cities discusses how to boost the sustainable development of cities. In one week, we will dive into several highly relevant themes such as clean air, mobility, waste, energy, and also innovation, inclusiveness, participation and smart solutions to these issues.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has grown in the last few years from a promising research field into a widely applied technology. Many processes and decisions in our lives are governed by algorithms: from autonomous driving, e-commerce recommendations, traffic predictions to fraud detection. It is important that AI is used correctly, to prevent privacy issues, discriminations and other harm. In this course we explain what AI is, how algorithms work, and how you select, train and implement algorithms.