AI, the backbone of many new master's degrees in our country
Universities such as the UVic-UCC, the UOC or the UIC Barcelona incorporate new master's degrees that revolve around the advantages and the challenges that artificial intelligence entails
If there is one technology that has managed to revolutionize each and every industrial, business, and economic sector on a global scale, it is artificial intelligence (AI). It is a tool that, among other things, allows for the automation of a large number of processes, the analysis of a vast amount of data in parallel, and the improvement of decision-making in an increasing number of sectors of society, which explains why it is a discipline, however, with which both current and future professionals must familiarize themselves as soon as possible. Thus, it is not surprising that an increasing number of universities in our country have incorporated AI as a common thread in some of their new degrees.
AI and audiovisual language
This is the case, for example, of the new master's degree that the UVic-UCC will offer starting this 2026-2027 academic year through Elisava. It is the master's degree in Advanced Audiovisual Creation, AI and Virtual Production from Elisava in Audiovisual Creation with AI. In the words of Ivan Garriga and César Pesquera, directors of the degree, the acquisition of skills in AI provides “a significant advantage” in the current audiovisual production market due to strong business and economic demand for professionals in this field. “Within this context –they underline–, it is expected that the size of the market for generative artificial intelligence applied to audiovisual production will multiply by ten over the next ten years.” In this context, the training “enables creatives to practice new emerging professions that combine AI and audiovisual language,” they add. Furthermore, Garriga and Pesquera emphasize, as technology continues to evolve, professionals trained in this field “will enjoy the competitive advantage of knowing how to guide, refine and interpret AI to fully integrate its capabilities into various sectors and audiovisual workflows.”
The fact is that, aside from the “great potential to deeply transform both creative processes and business models in the audiovisual industry,” as the directors of the master's degree maintain, it must be taken into account that, for the professional to coexist in an enriching way with AI, understanding it as a tool at their disposal and not as a substitute, “creativity and reflection must be placed as the indisputable project and methodological core.” This approach, affirm Garriga and Pesquera, “is the key to facing the ethical, creative, economic and pedagogical challenges that the technological horizon presents.” A horizon which, for the technology-creative tandem to work, “requires critical spirit on the part of the professional in the face of the appearance of this tool, always ensuring ethical and transparent use in society.”
Creation of new knowledge
For this academic year, the UOC is renewing and expanding its online offerings with proposals aimed at professional profiles in transformation, an offer that emphasizes one of the disciplines that has emerged everywhere to stay, which is applied data analysis and visualization, and which will feature a degree of the same name, with itineraries in business intelligence, data policy, and data science applied to the social sciences. As Josep Cobarsí, director of the new master's degree, points out in relation to the business sphere, the master's provides “training in business intelligence, in order to be able to use techniques such as optimization or prediction for optimal decision-making in organizations, decisions based on the analysis of data from various sources.” And, he highlights, there are “many and very diverse data today”; what is intended here “is to know how to interrogate them properly at the service of the organizations' results.” In relation to social science studies, Cobarsí mentions the current existence of high-potential techniques, such as quantitative network analysis, automated text analysis, or machine learning applied to the detection of patterns and trends. These techniques, he points out, “we offer thinking of social science graduates who can significantly enhance their profile with this, and contribute to creating new scientific knowledge in their fields of sociology, politics, humanities, communication, etc.”
Cobarsí insists that the new master's degree aims to provide specific competencies in quantitative data analysis, through statistical techniques, machine learning, automated text analysis, among others, techniques that are combined with qualitative analysis, oriented above all to the creation of future scenarios. “Students will also learn to develop high-value visualizations, such as dashboards, data stories, maps, etc., aimed at summarizing large amounts of data to facilitate decision-making in organizations or the communication of scientific results,” emphasizes the director, who states that “above all, they will learn to ask themselves questions and answer them by interpreting very diverse data, which are massively available today and are underutilized.”
Analysis of complex biological data
Among the novelties that UIC Barcelona is incorporating this academic year into its master's degree catalog, there are a couple where AI has a notable weight. These are the Bioinformatics & AI for Healthcare (Bioengineering for Human Health) master's and the AI for Business, Big Data and Analytics master's. The former, points out Uciel Chorostecki, director of the master's and researcher at the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at UIC Barcelona, is specifically aimed at graduates and professionals in the life and health sciences (biology, biomedicine, pharmacy, medicine or nursing) “who need to complement their medical or biological base with new skills in programming, data science and AI applied to the biomedical sector from scratch”.
However, Chorostecki emphasizes that the program places emphasis on personalized medicine and the analysis of complex biological data, while delving into the use of Machine Learning and Deep Learning for computational genomics and the analysis of omics data, as well as in the design of new AI-assisted drugs, among others. And the fact is that, as the director of the new master's highlights, in human health, the greatest potential of AI “lies in translational precision medicine, such as anticipating diseases through biomarkers, optimizing clinical trials and designing oncological or pharmacological therapies adapted to each patient's genetics”. In order to lead this change, however, “it is necessary for health professionals and biologists to lose their fear of code and train in the analysis of large volumes of biomedical data”, concludes Chorostecki.
Intersection between AI and data engineering
In turn, in a context where, according to the latest Tech Sector Barometer in Catalonia, 1,700 vacancies for AI specialists went unfilled in our country last year, a sector that today employs 166,000 professionals –double that of a decade ago–, the UPC presents the Erasmus Mundus in Data Engineering and Artificial Intelligence (DEAI), which is taught jointly with universities in France, Belgium, Austria, and Italy and entirely in English.
Beyond its international character and focus on the intersection between AI and data engineering, research, and innovation, the master's degree offers interdisciplinary training that combines solid foundations in mathematics, statistics, machine learning, and data management with advanced content in computer vision, natural language processing, distributed systems, cloud computing, and AI ethics. “The goal is to train professionals capable of developing and managing AI projects based on large volumes of data in international and highly complex environments,” explains Professor Òscar Romero, Vice Dean of Postgraduate Studies at the Barcelona School of Informatics (FIB) of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia - BarcelonaTech (UPC).
The second master's degree that UIC Barcelona is launching this year in the field of AI is the Continuing Education Master's in AI for Business, Big Data and Analytics, directed by Carlos Cosials. It is a proprietary degree that allows and promotes access to profiles of different types, without prior knowledge of programming and with basic knowledge of statistics. “Students from Business Administration, marketing and non-computer and/or telecommunications engineering usually enroll, looking to deepen their analytical skills through a complete academic path that allows them to delve into the world of data and its application through AI, Machine Learning and Big Data,” explains Cosials, who also highlights that, in building models, both inference (with Machine Learning) and generative (with LLM), students end up learning “to build/program their own artificial intelligence models, from training to system validation.” This year the program will place special emphasis on regulatory and governance aspects, which companies are increasingly demanding.
