Asian Institute of Management: Passing the Baton of Data Science Knowledge & Skills to Future Generations

Data science, AI, and Business intelligence are some of the modern technologies that echo throughout the world. Thanks to digital transformation, the business world is embracing disruptive technologies and the rest of them gearing up to meet the demands of the tech industry. To keep the momentum going, the future of our society needs to be equipped with the right skills to become future leaders. Be it a future innovator or a future tech entrepreneur, the way our future generation grows up will affect their technical intellect.

To nurture their talents in the right way, The Asian Institute of Management offers courses that inspire and transform the lives of its students, preparing them to take charge of the world. Pioneering tech education in Asia, AIM is synonymous with a multicultural learning environment that strikes a balance between real-world exposure and necessary tech knowledge. To know more about its insightful set of courses in the field of artificial intelligence and big data, we interviewed two of the esteemed members of the institute, Dr. Jikyeong Kang and Dr. Erika Legara.

Marking its Name as a Synonym for Excellence

The Asian Institute of Management is an Asian pioneer in management education. The founding of the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) in 1968 was the result of an unprecedented cooperative effort between two leading educational institutions in the Philippines, namely the Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University. A group of Harvard Business School Advisory Board and Philippine business leaders, and initial funding from the Ford Foundation, USAID, and the Lopez and Ayala families also lent support to start the university. With combined efforts, they made possible the dream of establishing the best business management school outside of the USA, and certainly, with a standard of excellence unmatched in all of Asia. To date, more than 45,000 alumni from 79 countries have passed the Institute's hallowed halls and made their mark in businesses, governments, and societies.

The Asian Institute of Management has also contributed remarkably to sustain the growth of businesses and societies in the region by developing professional, entrepreneurial, and socially responsible managers and leaders. Throughout its history, the Institute has sought to empower students to thrive in challenging and rapidly shifting environments.

AIM's Master of Science in Data Science (MSDS) program, which is one of the four programs housed in the AIM's Aboitiz School of Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (ASITE), is the Institute's response to the demand for one of the fastest-growing and most sought-after specializations worldwide—Data Science, which is also considered by many enterprises as a strategic capability that allows them to compete on analytics globally.

Combining the Best of Data Science and Business Courses

The Asian Institute of Management's Master of Science in Data Science (MSDS) is a truly unique pioneering program designed primarily with two things in mind, the students, who will eventually become data science practitioners and leaders, and the institutions (i.e., enterprises, governments, and international organizations) that its graduates will work for. The program was conceived based on the fact that there is a big gap between business and technology when translating data science models and products into actionable insights that can help decision-makers and leaders reach their strategic imperatives.

With these two fundamental aspects in mind, the program exhibits a proper fusion of the technical aspects of data science and advanced analytics with general business and management courses. Thus, MSDS' curriculum addresses many critical pain points of enterprises.  Most critically, it attempts to address the lack of technically skilled individuals who possess the required level of communication, leadership, and management skills to help businesses and organizations make informed decisions.

The MSDS curriculum is rigorous and relevant. It concentrates on the latest techniques, models, and technologies used in the field of advanced analytics. In addition, students are trained to formulate the right analytics questions based on the situation/facts and identify the correct ensemble of data-driven approaches to address highly diverse business and societal problems. Equally important, they are taught how to properly communicate results and data-driven insights to maximize their impact on organizations.

Coaching the Best Minds with the Best Faculty

The idea of launching a data science master's program at the Asian Institute of Management was first conceived by the current President and Dean, Dr. Jikyeong Kang, about 5 years ago.  Despite some strong suggestions by various stakeholders to consider launching a Business Analytics program, rather than a more hardcore Data Science program, she decided to carry out a market research study to test its feasibility and acceptance level in the marketplace. Similar to the informal feedback they received, the results were not very encouraging and, at best, gave a mixed view.  However, she felt passionate about its potential contribution to AIM's reputation and the nation-building agenda for the Philippines, and convinced the faculty and the Board of Trustees to launch the program, and set out to search for the best faculty who could lead AIM's MSDS program.  It took more than a year, but she found Dr. Erika Legara, who was, at that time, working in A*STAR in Singapore, and persuaded her to come back to the Philippines to start the MSDS program.

Indeed, Dr. Legara became the founding Academic Program Director of AIM's MSDS program. Prior to the program launch in 2017, she was tasked to design a truly exceptional curriculum, different from any data science program in the world and, of course, the first of its kind in the Philippines, and one of the pioneers in the region.

The AIM's Data Science team was in a unique position to craft a truly innovative program for several reasons. Firstly, AIM is an autonomous private Institution, offering business and management programs, so there was no campus politics involved. Secondly, since both, Dr. Erika Legara and Dr. Christopher Monterola, the founding School Head of AIM's Aboitiz School of Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, have strong grounding from R&D engagements with various sectors of society, they were able to design the program that educates and trains students who can generate actionable insights, business value, and societal impact from data-driven decisions. Additionally, with rigorously trained and practicing scientists and academics, AIM's Data Science team has also made sure that the core courses are exacting the competencies of the institute's graduates include strong technical skills to build and scale artificial intelligence models and make them useful to stakeholders.

The program has grown from an initial intake of 42 students in 2018 to its fourth intake of 84 students in April 2021. This increase in enrollment speaks volumes not only for the field of Data Science but also of the program and AIM's remarkable reputation for shaping data science leaders.

Equipping the Course with Unique Scientific Features

There are four aspects that make AIM's Analytics and Data Science Program stand out from the rest. To begin with, the curriculum is designed to develop data scientists who are not only skilled at building tools and developing techniques in the fields of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics but are also fluent in the language of the enterprise.  The MSDS program is two-thirds technical data science courses and one-third leadership and management courses. The aim is to produce data scientists who are critical data-driven thinkers, decision-makers, and effective communicators. The program also covers ethics and human behavior in organizations, for example, to ensure that future leaders also become ethical and effective team players.

The MSDS capstone project is another key feature of the program that makes it quite unique compared to other data science programs. It is a culminating activity where students take on projects (real-world problems) from various companies, organizations, and government agencies for which there are no existing solutions. In this exercise, MSDS students are trained as data science consultants and, as part of their training, they work closely with world-class professors, full-time data scientists at the Analytics, Computing, and Complex Systems lab (ACCeSs@AIM), and domain experts.

AIM MSDS students have access to a world-class computing facility housed at AIM, where they learn how to handle, manipulate, and analyze big datasets. The facility is part of the Institute's Analytics, Computing, and Complex Systems lab (ACCeSs@AIM).

ACCeSs@AIM is equipped with a 1.2-petaflops AI GPU-powered Acer supercomputer. The advanced analytics lab is envisioned to bridge public-private R&D collaboration to develop real-world solutions that address business and societal issues. It is designed to become a center of excellence in data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational modeling.

Along with those key markers, in 2004, the Asian Institute of Management gained accreditation from AACSB, the premier accrediting agency and member service organization for business schools. AIM's accreditation was only the third in Asia after two schools in Hong Kong received their AACSB accreditation in 1999. To date, AIM is still the only school in the Philippines with an AACSB accreditation.

AACSB is a not-for-profit organization composed of member organizations and institutions devoted to the promotion and continuous improvement of higher education for business administration and management. It's not just a 'stamp of approval,' as the process of earning AACSB accreditation requires a serious, long-term commitment by the school to develop, implement, and maintain the highest level of quality education delivered to its students.

The Path to Becoming Real World Leaders

Throughout the program, students gain exposure as junior data science consultants for the industry, government, and international organizations. The MSDS program provides its students with a sandbox where they can test and launch their ideas, make mistakes, and learn from them under the close supervision of data science mentors and practitioners. In their capstone journey, students do not just jump straight into data analysis and model building, instead, they go through the whole data science project workflow– from writing project proposals to defending and winning the proposals, to data extraction, data mining and wrangling and building AI models, to model/platform deployment, and of course, to communicating actionable insights to stakeholders.  Across terms, students are also tasked to come up with culminating projects and are often required to present their completed end-of-term projects to the general public.

Merits Received by the Institution

For three consecutive years since the launch of the MSDS program, Eduniversal's ranking has placed MSDS third among all other data analytics masters' programs in Far East Asia. AIM bested similar programs in Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Malaysia. Eduniversal is a global ranking and rating agency that evaluates programs of business schools and universities in over 150 countries since 1994. Rankings are based on criteria that include the program's reputation, prospective income and job offers of the graduates, and the students' satisfaction.

Adding another feather to the cap, in 2020, the MSDS program received over 25 real-world use cases from various organizations and enterprises for AIM's students to work on, 15 of which made it to the program portfolio. Partners and stakeholders estimated total potential revenue of about US$40 million from these short-term student-led projects.

In 2019, this estimate was US$10 million for 10 capstone projects. Indeed, through the program's partnerships, MSDS students become data science consultants even while studying; at the same time, the program gets to help organizations innovate through data science and artificial intelligence.

The laurels didn't stop there. In 2019, AIM's Analytics, Computing, and Complex Systems (ACCeSs) won the Technological Innovation of the Year trophy during the Times Higher Education Award inauguration in Dubai. The award was given to the Institute for the project hailed as "exemplary" by the judges for its multifaceted approach to engagement within research. The laboratory set-up in March 2018 was built to complement its existing academic programs such as the MSDS and from then on was able to bridge the gap between theory and practice for research-led training in higher education. Through ACCeSs@AIM, students were given the opportunity to learn and upskill themselves in Data Science with the capacity to use a leading-edge technology that would provide advancement in their future careers.

Solving the Toughest Problems

One of the major challenges the institute is facing right now is the fact that as the program continues to grow and mature, there is a scarcity of data science practitioners – not just regionally but also globally. In fact, academia also finds it difficult to compete against the industry in terms of attracting data science talents. Furthermore, of the already few data scientists who may be available to academia, fewer still have the right skill level to teach and mentor future data science leaders.

To address this pressing issue, AIM launched Ph.D. in Data Science program in late 2020 to fill this gap. Furthermore, AIM's MSDS program has been fortunate to have many of its best alumni give back to the Institute and the program. They lend their time and expertise to help the Asian Institute of Management educate and mold MSDS students. This is crucial to the program, especially now that its student population is growing.

The Future of Analytics Education

As companies continue to increase their investments and efforts in big data analytics and artificial intelligence, the institution expects analytics education to grow with them. According to research done by Quant Hub, in terms of job listings, the demand for data scientists has been growing at the rate of 37% year-on-year in 2019. There is a very high likelihood that this rate will grow further, especially now that many national governments – not just enterprises – see data science and AI as nation-defining capabilities.  Because of this increasing demand for data scientists and analysts, the need to nurture analytics talents will not just grow but will grow in an accelerating trend.