Master’s in Data Science Courses & Curriculum | Northwestern SPS - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

Course Schedule, Part-time Online Program

Please note that course schedules may be amended due to low enrollment, faculty availability, and/or other factors.

Online Sync Sessions are an integral part of the online learning experience. Additional information about learning concepts and assignments may be discussed and sync sessions offer valuable opportunities for students to interact with their faculty and peers during the term. We encourage all students to attend live, but if they are unable to, sync sessions will be recorded and posted within Canvas to allow for an asynchronous model of success as well.

MSDS 440-DL : Conversational AI Assistants

Description

This is an applied artificial intelligence (AI) course. It introduces the development life cycle process, methods, and technologies for developing, configuring, and training conversational AI assistants. It draws on traditional natural language understanding, large language models, and open-source generative AI frameworks and libraries. The course surveys fundamental concepts of dialogue and domain engineering. It examines three pillars for building conversational AI assistants: business logic flow, dialogue understanding, and automatic conversation repair with fallbacks. Students employ common patterns and templates in dialogue engineering. They learn how to use conversational assistants in business process workflows across various industries, including services, healthcare, transportation, and retail. This is a case-study and project-based course with a programming component. 

Prior to winter 2025, this course was titled "Full-Stack Data Engineering."

Prerequisites: None.