Hasso Plattner Institute

The bachelor's program IT Systems Engineering (80 places per year) is an alternative to classical computer science. The Master programs Cybersecurity (30 places per year), Data Engineering (30 places per year), Digital Health (30 places per year) and IT Systems Engineering (60 places per year), specifically train students for management and leadership positions.

The HPI offers a six-semester Bachelor's program in IT Systems Engineering. It is concerned with the conception, design, and deployment of complex IT systems based on findings and developments in the field of computer and information science as well as on experience with their practical application in the business world and society at large. Engineering-based methods are used to teach students about the models, processes, architectures, and performance of such systems and enable them to gain initial practical experience in this area. It is most comparable to other Software engineering programs.

Graduates from the Master's program IT Systems Engineering are given the academic and practical tools needed to take up leading industry positions such as system architects and project managers. The focus lyes on the analysis, planning, construction, implementation and further development of complex IT systems, IT infrastructures and IT solutions.

The interdisciplinary, English-language, Master’s program Digital Health is aimed at students of computer science and medical students, who want to work as highly qualified experts in the health sector at the interface between IT, computer science and medicine. The master’s program in digital health is composed of fundamental concepts and methods in IT systems engineering, data engineering, medical foundations as well as the knowledge of different systems of healthcare.

The Master’s program Data Engineering is aimed at the next generation of highly talented IT engineers who wish to complete a practical and research-oriented computer science study program and to focus on big data systems; that is, the collecting, linking and analyzing of large and complex data volumes.

The main focus of the Cybersecurity master's program centers on researching and developing a new generation of security policies, methods and techniques for monitoring and securing complex IT infrastructures. Whether the issue concerns the characteristics of different types of attackers, cryptographic algorithms, data protection aspects or open-source intelligence - the degree program is foremost oriented towards practical problems and features engineering-inspired IT security solutions.

The HPI School of Design Thinking[7] – established in 2007 – provides each year 160 students from many different fields of study the opportunity of working in multidisciplinary teams where they learn to become invatores and to develop particularly userfriendly, IT-related products and services. HPI cooperates closely with Stanford University, in Palo Alto, home of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. In 2008, the Hasso Plattner Foundation launched a joint innovation research program, the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program. Via its HPI Academy, the Hasso Plattner Institute also offers professionals an education in Design Thinking and various fields related to information technology.

Since October 2005, the HPI’s Research School[8] for "Service-Oriented Systems Engineering" has been offering a PhD program modeled to support a more interdisciplinary PhD education. All professors of the HPI with their research groups are supporting pillars for this PhD school whose interdisciplinary structure interconnects the HPI research groups and fosters close and fruitful collaborations. Every year, up to ten new PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers are admitted and awarded a scholarship. In 2009, the Research School opened a first international branch in South Africa, the "HPI research school at Cape Town University", with up to 15 PhD students. 2010 another branch was opened in Haifa, where up to 15 PhD students joined the research team of the “HPI Research School at Technion.” In 2011, the “HPI Research School at Nanjing University” was opened as a third branch with up to 15 PhD students.

The research facility, HPI Future SOC Lab,[9] provides a platform for researching how the potential of the newest multicore computer architectures combined with massive main memory resources can be used for new software solutions. The lab was opened in 2010. Using the latest hard- and software, which comes straight from the R&D departments of large IT corporations, HPI scientists and guest researchers from other academic institutions explore and develop new concepts for Service Oriented Computing (SOC). Included in this computing infrastructure is e.g. a 1,000 core computer cluster or a system with 6TB main memory.