Emerging Technologies and Their Applications to Business

The program’s curriculum includes the following four required courses (three academic credits per course; 12 total credits):

• BUS 432—Artificial Intelligence
• BUS 434—Blockchain
• BUS 436—Internet of Things
• BUS 401—Managerial Communications (business English course)

Course Descriptions

Artificial Intelligence
This course is designed to provide an introduction to the evolving area of AI, with an emphasis on potential business applications and related managerial insights. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the science behind systems that can program themselves to classify, predict, and offer solutions based on structured and unstructured data. For millennia, humans have pondered the idea of building intelligent machines. Ever since, AI has had highs and lows, demonstrated successes and unfulfilled potential. Today, AI is empowering people and changing our world. Netflix recommends movies, Amazon recommends popular products, self-driving cars learn to navigate safely around other vehicles without human assistance, and programmed robots distinguish trash from dishes that are to be washed. This course focuses on how AI systems understand, reason, learn and interact; learn from industry’s experience on several AI cases; develop a deeper understanding of machine learning (ML) techniques and the algorithms that power those systems, and propose solutions to real world scenarios leveraging AI methodologies.

Blockchain
Every second of every day, businesses exchange value with suppliers, partners, customers and others. By value, we mean goods, services, money, data and more. Each exchange of value is a transaction. Successful transactions need to be fast, precise and easily agreed on by parties participating in the transaction. Blockchain for business provides a way to execute many more of these transactions—a much better way. Blockchain is an open, distributed ledger technology that establishes trust, transparency and accountability in transactional business processes by creating a shared system of record among business network members, eliminating the need to reconcile disparate ledgers. Data associated with every event or transaction is time stamped, appended to the record preceding it and available to authorized participants in real time, shifting the lens from disparate bits of information held by different owners to an always up-to-date lifetime history of data related to a person, place or thing. Blockchain can do for business what the internet did for communication.

Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the growing range of connected devices that send data across the Internet. The IoT is now a reality due to the convergence of several technologies. This course will provide students with a basic understanding of the need, implementation, and business value of Internet of Things. This class will mainly focus on Business applications for IoT along with the introduction of how these systems could be implemented in the ‘real world’. The class will consist of a set of theory lectures and hands-on labs. The theory section will cover the business needs for a IoT, the business processes required to create an industrial grade IoT application and the logical steps to design a IoT. The hands-on labs will provide the basic knowledge to become familiar with the IBM Cloud with a focus on IoT applications, how to set up the cloud to receive sensor readings from IoT, and how to create a dashboard to display the reading values over time, and setup ‘alarms’ for ‘out of band’ sensor readings. There will be six labs and one final team project. All of these projects will be completed in the IBM cloud based IoT environment.
 

• The specially negotiated tuition fee is $9,000/student. Students are also responsible for $2,681 in fees.
• Students are also expected to stay on the Illinois Tech campus and will be responsible for housing and meals expenses. Total costs are $18,853 or $19,576, depending on the meal plan chosen.
• Learn more about Illinois Tech’s residence halls and dining on campus.

• Undergraduate students attending an accredited Korean university are eligible to apply for this program.
• Students will apply and be admitted as visiting students at Illinois Tech. 
• Students will receive J1 visas to travel to the United States and participate in the program.

Requirements for Admission

• English proficiency requirement of TOEFL: 70, IELTS: 5.0, or Duolingo: 90  
• Undergraduate grade-point average of 3.3/4.5 (73%)
• Good communication skills in English and basic computer skills
• No requirement of computer science or coding knowledge