I am currently in the last year of my Master's degree in Computer Science and Engineering. As of now I developed a research article which was submited for publication and I am now working on my master thesis. My master thesis belongs to the area of data science. I am studying and performing transformations on financial and human resources data from the Portuguese Health Care System (SNS). This data seems to be very promising since the dataset is very and has been cross validated by me and another competent entity. The plan is to use data science techniques in order to find patterns, clusters and even forecasting the data.
For my master's degree I opted for two specializations in Computer Science and Engineering, these were Intelligent Systems and Information and Visualization. The first one, more loosely linked to artificial intelligence has been one that always fascinated me. I always found this area to be so curious and interesting. Being able to enroll in subjects certainly shed some light on the area. I had subjects that approached Natural Language, Machine Learning, Agents and Multi-Agent Systems and also Planning and Decision Making.
For the second specialization I did it on Information and Visualization for the simple reason that if none of us ever interacted with a machine (computer) we'd probably never follow a course on this area. I find it fascinating the organization and synthesis of data presentation. It is as relevant as the actual information being displayed. What's an unreadable graph full of relevant information worth?
For the choice of my bachelor's degree I think I've always known it'd have to be on something computer-related. I knew that Instituto Superior Técnico was a place of reference country and worldwide. So the choice was simple.