The project SmartCityAlert, developed by students Carles Maggi, Jesús Llevadias and José Manuel Reche from the postgraduate in Big Data Management & Analytics at UPC School was a finalist in the category of "Best MSc or Postgraduate Project" at the Big Data Talent Awards, organized as part of the Big Data Congress celebrated in Barcelona.

The Big Data Congress gathered in Barcelona around one thousand assistants between the 3rd and 4th of November. Its aim is to tackle future challenges in Big Data management, share experiences and create a networking space. The Center of Excellence in Big Data (CoE) organized for the occasion the first edition of the Big Data Talent Awards, a set of prizes that aim to recognize the best PhD, MSc, BSc and Postgraduate thesis revolving around Business Analytics with greater socio-economic impact and technological innovation.

The project SmartCityAlert (SCA) aims to create a platform to classify, categorize and monitor the social level of discontentment in a city based on Twitter's opinions written by its inhabitants. Such work has been carried on and supervised in the framework of the Big Data Management & Analytics postgraduate course, directed and taught by members in DTIM, at UPC School. Such course provides a mixed view from different perspectives of the Big Data ecosystem: data management, data analytics and startup business.

Big Data is a professional area with great future perspectives. It is estimated that it will generate 900.000 job positions in Europe in the following 6 years.