Profile and Career

IT and Cognition is an interdisciplinary Master's programme where students work with technologies that shape the future. Cutting-edge information and communication technologies not only require technical innovation, but also deep knowledge of language, vision and other aspects of human cognition. For a computer to play Jeopardy, drive a car, or summarize a newspaper article it must mimic human cognitive processes to some extent.

The MSc in IT and Cognition at the University of Copenhagen is a very exclusive programme for a small group of talented and focused students who wish to excel in developing advanced cognitive technologies. Students will learn to deal with the complexity of human language, vision and cognition, design innovative and intelligent information and communication technology (ICT) using knowledge of language and human cognition, and identify new interesting applications of cognitive models. In the MA programme students are presented with cutting-edge technologies such as natural language parsing, object recognition, virtual agents, machine translation, or visual scene analysis.

If you are interested in cognitive phenomena such as memory, attention, visual recognition or language, are keen on interdisciplinary study and want to improve your IT skills, this is the programme for you.

Computational modeling plays a central role in the programme, because computational modeling is important to cognitive research for evaluating theories, and because computational modeling of cognitive processes is important to push the frontiers of information and communication technology. Technologies such as Google Talk translation bots, brain-computer interaction or Google's Driverless Car are examples of computational modeling of cognitive processes that is likely to change the future.

Career portrait

Fiammetta worked as a data scientist and is now pursuing a PhD at DTU.

Teaching

The MSc in IT and Cognition emphasizes technical cutting-edge innovation grounded in deep knowledge of human cognition. The study programme combines cognitive and technical courses with a focus on statistical modeling and natural language processing and is designed to provide candidates with competencies that are useful in both research and business careers. The courses in the IT and Cognition programme use different teaching formats; they include class instruction, so-called "shared tasks", lectures, supervision, and project and group work.

Guest Lectures, Individual Interviews and Supervision

Since the programme is very exclusive, the staff offers considerable guidance and support, incl. individual interviews and supervision, guest lectures, supervision of voluntary research projects and the organization of student workshops. The individual interviews are used to continuously evaluate the study programme, to supervise the students and to be able to better recruit students for research projects and collaborations with industry.

Past guest lectures have, for example, been about language acquisition, authorship attribution, epistemic logic, learning mathematics, social media processing and visual attention. We invite both researchers and industry partners to give guest lectures.

Career Opportunities

Candidates will be interesting to industry as well as research, and are popular in both places. They typically work with cognitive technologies in the industry or do frontier research in image and language processing or related areas.

The reason is, of course, that computational modeling becomes more and more important in research, and that in order to create good IT products it is important to know what, cognitively speaking, is easy and difficult for people to understand. This knowledge can help create information and communication technology that can make users' daily lives and workflows easier and facilitate the implementation of new products to achieve greater efficiency and user satisfaction.

Our past students have jobs at places like SAS Institute, Gallup, Textkernel, or continue their studies in PhD programs at universities in Denmark or elsewhere.

The figure shows the distribution of professional fields that graduates have pursued in their careers.

Read about the programme structure.

Interview with a graduate

Meet Claire Joyce, a graduate of the MSc in IT and Cognition, and listen to her story about how to build a career in Denmark.