The digital space is advancing at a dizzying pace, affecting every aspect of our lives. Technological advancements and industrial innovations create many opportunities for digital transformation, including social and inter-personal communication, welfare and health, education, economics, business, industry, commerce, and more. The continuous technological changes affect us and the world around us, including the development of our society and its values, the manner in which ecological factors affect social and cultural systems, work processes, creation of online education and healthcare services, and many more. At the same time, we – individuals, businesses, and government – accumulate more information than ever, which enables unprecedent creation of knowledge on the one hand, but on the other hand creates many challenges related to the storage, protection, retrieval, processing, and presentation of data, in a way that is accessible to both the human user and autonomous AI-based systems. Big data, data mining, cloud services, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence are all facilitators of innovative and novel information technologies. The combination of the technological and social facets enables to address the complex challenges we now face and creates the opportunity for technological innovation that may improve our lives and our environment.
Israel – the start-up nation – is a greenhouse for this type of innovation: We have a strong and diverse high-tech industry, inventing, creating, and exporting innovative technology to the entire world. The Israeli startups and high-tech companies create a vast supply of fascinating and challenging jobs for young graduates of information technology degrees.
The Information Systems Department at the University of Haifa, established in 2002, has been taking an active part in qualifying practitioners and researchers in the domain of information systems. The department offers a variety of three-year programs for Bachelor (B.Sc.) degree, emphasizing technological aspects of information processing and analysis as well as information systems development, and allows combining this domain with others, such as economics, computer science, cognitive sciences, humanities, and more. Our graduates work in industry in a wide variety of roles: requirements engineers, data analysts, business intelligence systems developers, enterprise resources planning (ERP) implementers, project managers, pre-sale and marketing of information systems, and software quality assurance, to name a few.
The graduate programs (for M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees) emphasize high-quality research in a variety of topics, including business processes, decision support systems, software engineering, human aspects of software/information systems engineering, business intelligence, natural language processing, computer vision, human-computer interaction, visualization, big data, medical and biological information systems, productive communities, and more. Graduate students perform research with the supervision of senior faculty members, and the research results are published in leading international scientific conferences and journals.
Yours,
Irit