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new two-years Master of Science programmes in 

* Organisation Dynamics and Self Organisation
* Knowledge Technology and Management
* Intelligent Internet Applications

These programmes have all been developed with the idea in mind of
educating people to be knowledgeable in and sympathetic to a wide
variety of fields and techniques within the different programme
areas. The programmes emphasise the combination of developing
theoretical insight, the ability to form a practical perspective on
the learned theoretical techniques, and to consequently apply acquired
theoretical insight in practice. Our Master programmes are open to
people from a wide variety of disciplines, having minimally obtained
an HBO or University Bacholor degree, or 'Drs' diploma. The programmes
are full time studies, but it is possible for students to plan their
studies in part time.


== Overview ===========================================

Currently, organisations become increasingly more dynamic,
informational and knowledge intensive. The incorporation of the
internet as to extending and replacing conventional organisational
services with digital information services, is an important reason for
the increase in these factors. Within our Master programmes

* Organisation Dynamics and Self Organisation
* Knowledge Technology and Management
* Intelligent Internet Applications

we offer the possibility to learn about novel developments in the
multi-disciplinary information sciences that have recently had many
important practical implications. As to the dynamics of organisations,
we mention the management sciences that incorporate organisational
concepts from the study of organisms, the brain, chaos and
complexity. As to knowledge technology, this area has proven its
successfulness by the deliverance of knowledge-based systems and, more
recently, the "next-generation" semantic world wide web. For internet
applications, the concepts of intelligent agents and multi-agent
systems have contributed to the advancement of using artificial
intelligence techniques in upcoming generations of the internet.


== Programmes =========================================

Organisation Dynamics and Self Organisation
-------------------------------------------
This multi-displinary Master programme focuses on the study of
organisations, their dynamics, and the emergence of organisational
structures. The curriculum contains courses taught in the Faculty of
Social Sciences and the Department of Biology.

The focus in the multi-disciplinary studies as contained in this
programme, is on the analysis and modeling of, and simulating and
experimenting with organised dynamic processes. The research
disciplines as studied are from artificial intelligence, biology,
social sciences, economics, and computer science. The curriculum
includes lectures and practical work (some of which are subject to
choice) in topics as datamining, modeling and simulation of
organisations, organisation theory, economic models, evolution
biology, evolutionairy genetics, neurobiology of behaviour and
organisational behaviour.

This programme is under responsibility of prof.dr. Jan Treur and
prof.dr. Guszti Eiben.

Knowledge Technology and Management
-----------------------------------
This Master programme concentrates on knowledge, its structure and
applications. It focuses on both the organisational aspects of
knowledge management, as well as the technical aspects of designing
and building knowledge-based systems.

Companies that subscribe the significance of automating knowledge that
is available within the organisation, often incorporate knowledge
acquisition and modelling techniques from the research area of
artificial intelligence to perform this automation. The management of
knowledge in such an automated fashion is one of the key issues of
this Master programme. As such, elements from economics and psychology
(management and organisation, organisation psychology, knowledge
models) are studied. A second issue of interest is knowledge
technology, in which people are to be supported by automated
knowledge-based systems. Techniques from knowledge acquisition,
knowledge representation, software engineering and human computer
interaction are taking part in this process. Finally, the world wide
web is a development inherent related to the importance of knowledge
as a production factor in companies. Incorporating knowledge in the
world wide web requires the study of knowledge management and
technology with respect to the development of the next web
generations.

This programme is under responsibility of prof.dr. Frank van Harmelen.

Intelligent Internet Applications
---------------------------------
In this Master programme, the focus is on the way that Artificial
Intelligence techniques can play an important role in the context of
the current and upcoming generations of the Internet.

This programme contains elements so that the student has a good
overview of the contemporary literature regarding applications of
intelligent web-sites and intelligent agents on the Internet. The
student learns techniques and methods from Artificial Intelligence
that are used in Internet applications and is a capable designer of
intelligent web-sites applications based on intelligent agents.
Examples of such intelligent applications are knowledge-based advisory
systems that are integrated within intelligent websites, intelligent
agents that are active on the Internet (e.g., search-bots, personal
assistants of e-shops), and various advancements of the Semantic
Web. Subjects that characterise this Master programme are Intelligent
Internet Applications, E-commerce, User Interface Design and
Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems.

This Master programme is under responsibility of prof.dr. Frank van
Harmelen, prof.dr. Jan Treur, and dr. Catholijn Jonker.

Other programmes
----------------
Besides these Master programmes, the Department of Artificial
Intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit offers a Master programme in
cognitive science and interdisciplinary programmes with linguistics
and law. The Cognitive Science programme is built around the study of
behaviour and cognition and the curriculum is mainly provided by the
Department of Cognitive Psychology, in cooperation with the Department
of Artificial Intelligence. In the interdisciplinary programmes,
courses are followed at the Faculty of Linguistics and the Faculty of
Law, respectively.


== Admission ===========================================

For the Master programmes

  Organisation dynamics and self organisation
  Knowledge technology and management 
  Intelligent internet applications
  Cognitive Science
  Artificial Intelligence and Linguistics
  Artificial Intelligence and Law

students may enroll who have a Bachelor or Drs diploma in Artificial
Intelligence obtained at a dutch institute (Utrecht, Nijmegen,
Amsterdam (VU, UvA), Groningen, Maastricht).

The programmes are also open to people with other diplomas, University
or HBO, who are kindly invited to contact us if interested in
following a Master programme at our Department.


== Contact information ================================

For more information on the Master programmes, contact:
  dr. Martijn Schut
  Department of Artificial Intelligence
  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
  De Boelelaan 1081a
  1081 HV Amsterdam
  The Netherlands
  tel: +31 20 44 47668 / +31 20 44 47700
  fax: +31 20 44 47653
  email: schut at cs.vu.nl


== More information ===================================

More detailed information on the Master AI Programmes can be 
found at the following website:
   
http://www.cs.vu.nl/ai/masters/

More general information on our Department can be found at 
the departmental website:
   
http://www.cs.vu.nl/ai/index-en.html