Master of Science (MSc) in IT and Cognition

Applicants to an English-taught master's degree programmes at the Faculty of Humanities are required to document their English language proficiency in accordance with the language requirements for admission. Read more about the language requirements below. 

Prioritisation of applicants

Admission to the programme is competitive and limited to 50 students. 

The applicants who meet the academic requirements will be evaluated and ranked in accordance to the selection criteria below. The specified percentage is to show the weighted relevance of each criteria when the application is evaluated. If the number of qualified applicants exceeds the maximum student intake, students will be selected on the basis of their ranking. The highest ranked of the qualified applicants get an offer to join the programme.

Selection criteria

Please notice: From 1 September 2024 the following selection criteria applies:

• Information provided in the Letter of Academic Relevance. (30%)
• An evaluation of education and vocational experience. (40%)
• Grades for bachelor courses relevant to the MSc in IT and Cognition, i.e. in the following disciplines (30%):
  • Language Technology
  • Computer Science
  • Cognitive Science
  • Linguistics

You are required to provide a separate list of 3-6 courses that you find relevant for the MSc in IT & Cognition. Read more about it here. 

For applicants who have been admitted to the MSc in IT and Cognition with studies commencing on September 2023, the following selection criteria has been applied:

• Overall average of grades. (40%)
• An evaluation of education and vocational experience. (30%)
• Information provided in the Letter of Academic Relevance. (30%)

The MSc in IT and Cognition emphasises technical cutting-edge innovation grounded in deep knowledge of human cognition. The study programme combines cognitive and technical courses with a focus on statistical modeling and natural language processing and is designed to provide candidates with competencies that are useful in both research and business careers. The courses in the IT and Cognition programme use different teaching formats; they include class instruction, so-called "shared tasks", lectures, supervision, and project and group work

Since the programme is very exclusive, the staff offers considerable guidance and support, incl. individual interviews and supervision, guest lectures, supervision of voluntary research projects and the organisation of student workshops. The individual interviews are used to continuously evaluate the study programme, to supervise the students and to be able to better recruit students for research projects and collaborations with industry.

Past guest lectures have, for example, been about language acquisition, authorship attribution, epistemic logic, learning mathematics, social media processing and visual attention. We invite both researchers and industry partners to give guest lectures

The MSc programme in IT and Cognition consists of cognitive and technical courses. In the first year, students gain knowledge of image and text processing, scientific programming, machine learning, data structures and search algorithms, as well as an understanding of computational modeling methodology in cognitive science.

In the third semester, students specialise by taking selective courses offered by the Center for Language Technology or the Department of Computer Science, or by taking courses at other Danish universities or abroad. IT & Cognition students have, for example, taken semesters at University of Amsterdam and University of Edinburgh.

The table below illustrates how the subject elements are distributed across the semesters.

The IT and Cognition programme is research-based, which means that the lecturers are engaged in cutting-edge research in cognitive and computational modeling. Read more about cognitive and computational modeling research at the University of Copenhagen:

• Centre for Language Technology
• Image Analysis, Computational Modelling, and Geometry Section in the Department of Computer Science
• Natural Language Processing in the Department of Computer Science
• Multimodal communication and multimodal interfaces in the Nordic network MUMIN

 Read more about the programme in the curriculum

Candidates will be interesting to industry as well as research, and are popular in both places. They typically work with cognitive technologies in the industry or do frontier research in image and language processing or related areas.

The reason is, of course, that computational modeling becomes more and more important in research, and that in order to create good IT products it is important to know what, cognitively speaking, is easy and difficult for people to understand. This knowledge can help create information and communication technology that can make users' daily lives and workflows easier and facilitate the implementation of new products to achieve greater efficiency and user satisfaction.

Our past students have jobs at places like SAS Institute, Gallup, Textkernel, or continue their studies in PhD programs at universities in Denmark or elsewhere.

IT and Cognition is an interdisciplinary Master's programme where students work with technologies that shape the future. Cutting-edge information and communication technologies not only require technical innovation, but also deep knowledge of language, vision and other aspects of human cognition. For a computer to play Jeopardy, drive a car, or summarise a newspaper article it must mimic human cognitive processes to some extent.

The MSc in IT and Cognition at the University of Copenhagen is a very exclusive programme for a small group of talented and focused students who wish to excel in developing advanced cognitive technologies. Students will learn to deal with the complexity of human language, vision and cognition, design innovative and intelligent information and communication technology (ICT) using knowledge of language and human cognition, and identify new interesting applications of cognitive models. In the MSc programme students are presented with cutting-edge technologies such as natural language parsing, object recognition, virtual agents, machine translation, or visual scene analysis.

If you are interested in cognitive phenomena such as memory, attention, visual recognition or language, are keen on interdisciplinary study and want to improve your IT skills, this is the programme for you.

Computational modeling plays a central role in the programme, because computational modeling is important to cognitive research for evaluating theories, and because computational modeling of cognitive processes is important to push the frontiers of information and communication technology. Technologies such as Google Talk translation bots, brain-computer interaction or Google's Driverless Car are examples of computational modeling of cognitive processes that is likely to change the future.

Students of IT and Cognition experience an inspiring international study environment with much support from senior fellow students (tutors) and staff members (supervisors). Since most teaching takes place at the Southern Campus of University of Copenhagen (known as Søndre Campus), most study facilities are located here and are provided by The Department of Nordic Research.

Social events include evening guest lectures, group excursions, and holiday dinners.

IT and Cognition Guest Lectures

The IT and Cognition Guest Lectures serve an academic purpose, as well as a social purpose. Speakers are researchers in related fields or interesting industry partners, and the lectures are typically in the evening. The tradition is to go for a drink by the water front afterwards.

Libraries

The Departmental libraries

There are nine departmental libraries on South Campus. The Saxo library holds the collections and academic litterature for Prehistoric Archaeology, Classical Archaeology, Ethnology, Greek & Latin, History, Applied Cultural Analysis and Advanced Migration Studies. You can find information about the all the departmental libraries and the opening hours here.

The Royal Library on South Campus 

The campus branch of the Royal Library houses an extensive collection on the humanities, has free wireless internet access, and contains 400 workspaces for students to study.

The Royal Library 

The main branch of the Royal library is a popular and centrally located harborfront place for students to study. It has free wireless internet and numerous workspaces for study, and also houses art and photo exhibitions. Visit the Royal Library website.

Student Life on Campus

South Campus at University of Copenhagen offers several cosy meeting points for students. Students at the faculty use the cafés during their breaks to meet up with fellow students or even lecturers. In the evenings the Faculty is often used for cultural events and café nights.

Mødestedet ("The Meeting Point")

This café offers coffee, hot chocolate, cold beer, light lunches and a variety of confectionery. The café stocks various games and has its own pool table.

Departmental cafés

Each department at the Faculty of Humanities has a student café, run by student volunteers from the department. The cafés offer a cosy environment where you can meet fellow students, read newspapers, play board games and buy cheap coffee and snacks. Student groups arrange study circles with representations from authors, artists and intellectuals and mutual discussions of relevant academic subjects. Furthermore the student cafés arrange Friday café nights often with different themes. There are often international student cafés during the semester where you'll get the opportunity to meet other international students and their mentors. We definitely recommend you to experience the atmosphere of the student cafés as the social life of many Danish student revolves around these cafés.

Student parties

Most of the departments at the faculty have a party committee which arrange parties and other social events. 

Your student identity card gives you access to all student parties at the faculty - also at other departments than the one you are enrolled at. Usually, it is possible to bring a guest under the condition that you have obtained a guest ticket from the organisers of the party. Faculty parties are announced through posters on campus.

Sports and student associations and clubs

There is a wide range of associations and clubs at University of Copenhagen. The associations and clubs can be found within all levels of University of Copenhagen. Please visit Studenterhuset's list of more than 100 different associations and
organisations. 

To find more local associations on department or programme level, please refer to your department, posters on campus, social media and your fellow students. 

The students' sports association is KSI (University of Copenhagen student sports association). Signing up normally takes place in August, although it is possible to join at later dates if slots are free on the teams. KSI offers a wide range of different disciplines both on the southern campus and on other locations around Copenhagen. To find information about programmes, prices and contact please visit the KSI website.

Finding Housing

If you are looking for a place to live you can visit University of Copenhagen general information about finding housing.