Theseus is part of the “Education, Scholarships, Apprenticeships and Youth Entrepreneurship Programme” in Romania, funded by the EEA Grants – Financial Mechanism 2014-2021 under Grant Agreement number: 18-COP-0017.
The context which this project was born into is directly related to the broad availability of data which has led to increasing interest in methods for extracting useful information and knowledge from data, determining the emergence of new fields of science (e.g. data science).
At the same time, big data algorithms have been signaled as a potential leverage that can lead to digital dictatorship if insufficiently understood, poorly handled and unethically regulated. Companies in every industry focus on ways to structure, process and analyze the growing volume and diversity of data so as to streamline decisions and gain a competitive edge. State institutions, regular citizens, social and political science practitioners on the other hand, are not yet sufficiently equipped to properly mitigate the economic, social and political impact of the information technology revolution that awaits us in the decades to come. Therefore, in the process of understanding and mitigating risks and opportunities of Big Data, complex workloads, new skills and competences have to be acquired:
- a fundamental understanding of the principles of the data-analytical process
- technical skills to carry out specific tasks using specific software