Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences recently launched a master’s degree in data science and artificial intelligence.
The Master of Science program — which will take its first students in fall 2027 — will be jointly administered by the Computer and Information Science and Electrical and Systems Engineering departments. The degree is designed to give students an interdisciplinary technical foundation while also allowing them to specialize in either data science or artificial intelligence.
According to CIS professor and program co-director Linh Phan, the new degree is the “next evolution” of Penn Engineering’s existing master’s program in data science.
Students complete coursework and research projects that apply AI and data science to real-world problems.
“It is no longer enough to analyze data, train models, or build infrastructure separately,” Phan wrote in a statement. “Students need to understand how data, algorithms, models, and infrastructure interact in practice.”
Instead of adding “AI” to the title of Penn’s existing master of data science program, faculty reorganized the program around both fields. Students currently enrolled in the data science program will have the option to transfer into the new degree.
CIS professor Susan Davidson, the degree’s other co-director, explained in an interview that this decision is a product of the two fields becoming inseparable.
“It’s not just how do we make sense of the data, but how do we build systems that reason with it?” Davidson said. “Theoretically, you could create a new master’s in AI, but it’s so completely interwoven with the data that it made more sense to expand the existing, highly successful program.”
Students in the program will have the flexibility to take courses related to data science and AI in social science, medicine, and business across other schools.
“We really think that it’s important for our students to see the context in which these methods and techniques are going to be used, and so there is some latitude there,” Davidson said.
The rise of generative AI also shaped the program’s design, according to Phan.
“Students should use those tools, and they will,” she wrote. “But the goal is not just to judge whether an AI system’s output can be trusted. It is to understand how these systems work and how they can fail or cause harm, to recognize when they should not be used, and to build better and safer ones.”
This degree was developed as Penn continues to expand access to artificial intelligence across the University. Earlier this month, Penn announced that community members can gain access to Anthropic’s Claude Enterprise.
