During your studies at Innovative Communication Technologies and Entrepreneurship (ICTE), you will study with both danish and international students. Some of the international students read one or two semesters as guest students, while others are reading the full masters programme.

All three courses on the first semester are mandatory.

Project

Services and platforms (15 ECTS)

The semester project in the first semester has the theme of “Services and platforms”, and it puts focus on the interplay between technologies and their applications. It explores how state-of-the-art Internet and communication technologies can contribute to value creation and new business opportunities by solving concrete user needs. You analyse the capabilities and potential of the new technologies along with concrete user and market needs, and you develop a requirements specification for a realistic service or service platform. You also analyse the specific data that are needed and how they can be collected. Finally, you select the most suitable technologies and conceptually develop a realistic service and the associated service architecture.

Courses

Security in IOT and Cloud Architectures (5 ECTS)
The course concerns Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, edge computing and cloud integration, with a focus on the security aspects.

Communication systems (5 ECTS)
The course concerns broadband infrastructures, including mobile and wireless networks such as 3G, 4G and 5G, as well as broadcast networks and platforms and their evolution - the #future Internet” and the “future of broadcast”.

You will learn about PHY layer technologies and principles such as spectrum usage and limitations, advanced modulation schemes and multiplexing techniques and channel coding in selected systems. In addition, you will work with mobile systems and technologies for 3G, 4G and 5G, mobile cellular access, Machine Type Communication and other 5G technologies. You will be taught about digital broadcast networks (radio and TV), such as cable, satellite and terrestrial networks, as well as different modern solutions of distributing audio-visual content such as streaming technologies,  HBB-TV (Hybrid Broadband Broadcast) and Over-the-Top TV (OTT-TV). The course also covers the evolution of wired broadband infrastructures such as DSL-, DOCSIS- and fiber-based infrastructures.

Internet technologies and service architectures (5 ECTS)
This course attends to the structure, protocols and design principles of the Internet and the World Wide Web, and focus is how the Internet can support the distribution of content and services. The Web is treated as a global network of distributed resources, which can be accessed and composed into services that address concrete user needs. It is not a programming course, but a course which gives you an understanding of  the latest technologies and their potential. You will learn about classic principles such as Web 2.0, Web 3.0, REST and Service Oriented Architectures as well as the latest opportunities of using browser functionality, Web APIs, OTT streaming, Internet of Things, cloud technologies and micro services. You will also gain knowledge about how web technologies and principles are increasingly being applied in future telecom and mobile networks, e.g., via hardware virtualisation and IP-based services.

The second semester consists of one 15 ECTS semester project, and three courses (5 ECTS).

Project

ICT Service Development: Design and Architectures (15 ECTS)

The second semester project builds on the knowledge you obtained during the first semester. 

Here, focus is on service development, emphasising the data, the data flow and the service architectures that are needed to realise a concrete service. Many kinds of data can be collected and processed, and it is essential to know how to manage them in a proper way when you develop services. Special attention must be paid to the handling of personal data from users of the service, i.e., privacy protection as well as governance and ethical issues. In 2. semester you will have three courses and your service must relate to one or more of the three courses, each of them adding different perspectives to the service.

Courses

Identity and Access Management (5 ECTS)

As a user, you are constantly acting via your online digital identity when you access resources, services and content on the Web. Providing various amounts of personal information enables you to get a better user experience with personalisation and also to get access to protected resources, if you register or authenticate. Often, however, you are paying with far too much personal information to receive content and services, and there is a constant loss of privacy and risk of your data being misused. This course deals with management of digital identities and, more generally, with fine-grained exposure and access control of protected resources (including personal data). You will learn to develop services with better privacy protection and access control, state-of-the-art technologies for authentication and authorisation, assurance levels, policies and policy architectures. You will also gain knowledge about identity and access management systems in enterprises and on a national or cross-border level.

Machine learning (5 ECTS)

This course gives you a broad introduction to the basic concepts of machine learning. Prerequisites include the general knowledge of linear algebra, probability and applied statistics.
The objective is for you to learn about data modelling, key machine learning concepts such as feature extraction, cross-validation, generalisation and over-fitting and course of dimensionality among others. You will become able to select and apply a range of different machine learning algorithms and techniques (such as deep neural network, support vector machine, linear regression, logistic regression) on specific problems including regression, classification, anomaly detection, clustering and recommender systems..

User experience and computer ethics (5 ECTS)

It is easy to agree that web pages, IT-systems and devices should be easy to use. It is more difficult to achieve this usability in the real world. Why it is difficult - is the topic of this course. We look at this both in theory and in practice.

We analyse interaction design solutions to try to understand - through theory - why ideals for usability and user experience sometimes are difficult to reach. We discuss why "a user" is not a user, and how different use contexts and use situations dramatically change the usefulness of the interaction design. We also discuss how the apparently simple or harmless goal of good usability and interaction design is strongly woven together with much more 'hot' discussions about business models, policy enforcement, user sovereignty and stakeholder interests.

Interaction design is also about methods to understand how people other than engineers perceive the world and how they want their digital tools to function, even if they cannot express it in the kind of technical terms that can be included in a requirement specification. Interaction design is also about understanding the professional activity of designing: understanding the dilemmas in which designers are situated.

We assume that you know basic user interface design and have some experiences with usability. If not, we will catch up on this. The course has its focus on theory and analyses, but also contains practical exercises and assignments to examine the problems we analyse. We work with interaction design not only for the PC-screen or tablet, but also for TV, cars, industrial plants and smart homes - embodied interaction.

On the third semester, you have four different options to combine for your semester. There is however an mandatory course in all the options:

• Data Mining and Analysis (5 ECTS)

There are also the following elective courses:

Algorithmic content exposure (5 ECTS)
This course is about the 'why' and 'how' of algorithmic recommendation of media content such as films, music and books, and of media content management in general. Imagine you are developing a personalised service that can recommend film, music, books, articles, etc. to users. This course provides you with the tools to design a simple, yet powerful recommender systems. To do so, we need to look at principles and systems for describing media content such as books, films, audio and web content. We also need to look at ways to organise the media content and keep track of copyrights. And we need a method to analyse content that is not yet described - unstructured data. For this purpose, we use Latent Semantic Analysis/Latent Semantic Indexing. This course is a hands-on course where we also critically discuss the value for users and other stakeholders of the services we design.
This course builds on knowledge obtained in the modules “Internet technologies and service architectures” and “Machine Learning”. The objective is for you to learn about among others the principles for algorithmic selection of content, e.g. as used in recommender systems, the key standards of media formats and representation of digital content, methods for attending to Digital Rights Management (DRM), etc. In addition, you are going to work with preparation and integration of multimedia content in a service, including associated metadata, etc.

Green ICT - Sustainable Business Development (5 ECTS)
Today, we are becoming ever more conscious of the impact of our activities on the environment. We wonder how we can perform our daily tasks without harming our environment. Initially, there was a push towards using Information and Communication Technologies to moderate how we perform our daily activities in an environmentally sustainable way. The challenge, however, was that these environmentally conscious initiatives were neither sustainable economically nor did they promote social equity. As a result, those initiatives failed. In this course, you will be learning, analysing and possibly developing different solutions and approaches towards how you can use Information and Communication Technologies to facilitate environmental sustainability in a manner that is economically and socially sustainable. You will also be armed with analytical tools that will enable you to implement sustainability measures that will result in the digital transformation of industries, organisations and in society. You will also gain knowledge on how to approach the development of sustainable (“green”) IT solutions in order to make them environmentally, economic and socially sustainable.

Enterprise Security and Compliance (5 ECTS)
The aim of this course is to give you the knowledge and skills to work with IT security and compliance in enterprises. You will gain knowledge of important standards for compliance such as the ISO 27xxx family, GDPR and others, including cloud security, and you will learn how to perform a risk assessment and carry out an information security review and an IT audit. You will be able to design requirements and controls for an enterprise security solution based on a risk assessment and to implement and verify enterprise security solutions.

Privacy Engineering (5 ECTS)
Informational privacy is today an integrated element of digital services. Businesses and organisations that store or process personal information must protect users’ privacy. The privacy engineering course examines privacy as a concept and its practical implications. Furthermore, the relation to cyber security and trust is discussed. Specifically, the course addresses GDPR and its implications for software developers and organizations. The course discusses technical solutions to provide privacy, the integration of privacy into the design process and privacy as expressed in interface design.

Option A: Regular semester

Project

Advanced ICT solutions (15 ECTS)

The 3rd semester project on "Advanced ICT solutions" (Option A1) is about building services that are not 'just from the shelf', but are innovative. Your project should create value for users and the business, but based on processing of large amounts of data. That could be a fairness-oriented recommender system, a novel business analysis tool, an innovative way of describing media data - in short, any digital service that implies advanced processing of data. You have a great degree of freedom in developing your idea in dialogue with your supervisor.

You will follow the mandatory course and you will choose to of the elective courses described above.

Option B: Project-Oriented Study in an External Organisation

Project

Project-Oriented Study in an External Organisation (25 ECTS)

An academic internship is based on an agreement between a company, you and your AAU supervisor and the study board. The purpose of an academic internship is for you to learn and apply theories and methods to address engineering problems in an industrial context. In addition, you will be introduced to business procedures and politics. An academic internship can take place in Denmark or abroad.

Concurrently you will follow the mandatory course Data Mining and Analysis (as described in the text above).

Option C and D:

You can choose to extend your master thesis to two semesters and the long master thesis is either 45 or 50 ECTS.

Option C: 3th. and 4th. semester - long master thesis (1)

Project

Long master thesis (45 ECTS - lasting 3th. and 4th. semester).
At third semester you follow the mandatory course and you choose two of the elective courses (described earlier in this page).

Option D: 3th. and 4th. semester - long master thesis (2)

Project

Long master thesis (50 ECTS - lasting 3th. and 4th. semester)

At third semester you follow the mandatory course and you choose one of the elective courses (described earlier in this page).

There are no courses in the 4th semester, as this semester is entirely dedicated to your master’s thesis. The thesis project completes your studies and gives you the chance to dive into one or more topics from ICTE, that you found really exciting. The thesis project contributes to your personal profile and forms the basis for your professional career.

• Master's thesis (30 ECTS)

Read ICTE projects in "Projektbiblioteket"

See curriculum for master programme for Innovative Communication Technologies and Entrepreneurship. Here you cand find details about courses and projects etc.

All bachelors who don't have their bachelor degree from Aalborg University, must participate in a course about Problem based Learning (PBL) as part of their first semester project. Read more about PBL here.
Read about PBL here.

Aalborg University is famous for its problem based learning where you work in a group on a large written assignment often collaborating with an industrial partner. This study method is also called “The Aalborg Model for Problem Based Learning”. The method is highly recognised internationally, and the university is host to a successful UNESCO chair in Problem Based Learning in Engineering Education and a Centre for PBL and Sustainability approved by UNESCO.

The problem based project work at Aalborg University gives you a unique opportunity to acquire new knowledge and competences at a high academic level in an independent manner. You get to apply theory to practice when you work to solve real-life problems, and you will be well prepared for your future career.
Learn more about PBL.

When doing project work, you work closely in groups with other students. This gives you the opportunity to cooperate, share knowledge and to explore larger and more complex academic problems than what you would have been able to do on your own. Furthermore, the groups serve a social purpose and make it easier for you to get to know your fellow students and feel more at home at the university.
Learn more about teamwork at AAU.

Aalborg University works closely with the business community. This means that as a student you will work with real issues from companies and organisations. Thus, while you are studying, you already have the opportunity to enhance your academic competences with a business-oriented and practical angle.

At Aalborg University teaching is research based. This means that your lecturers are doing research within the same academic field as he or she is teaching. You thus have access to the latest knowledge and dedicated teachers who are passionate about what they teach. The teaching material not only includes books but may also consist of, for example, current academic articles from journals.

The laboratories at Aalborg University are of the highest standard, and they play an important role in teaching. You will work under the best laboratory conditions with access to the latest technology, which is vital for your benefiting from the teaching.

AAU Copenhagen is a part of Aalborg University and is located at Sydhavnen (South Harbour) near the city centre. Therefore, students at AAU CPH have access to the city’s wide range of cultural and leisure activities. AAU CPH is a relatively new campus with an international focus, an innovative learning environment and close collaborations with businesses, of which many are located on the campus area. Overall there are close to 3,700 students enrolled in AAU CPH’s exciting bachelor’s and master’s programmes. Learn more about student life in Copenhagen.