Computing Science Modules

To design and implement, in a team, a software system that solves a (more-or-less) well-understood problem; to achieve a deliverable product in the form of a piece of working software.

The aims of the course are to: 
introduce students to modern software development methods and techniques for building and maintaining large systems;
provide an opportunity for the students to apply these methods and techniques presented to them in the context of an extended group-based software development exercise; 
make the students aware of the professional, social and ethical dimensions of software development; 
instil in the students a professional attitude towards software development.

To develop practical expertise in, and understanding of, concurrent programming in Java;
To explore a variety of different concurrency control mechanisms;
To substantially develop the knowledge of C gained during summer preparatory reading;
To develop the students' experience and understanding of programming in a low-level language;
To develop the ability to craft efficient and effective code in a pointer-rich language;
To introduce concurrent programming in C using the PThreads library;
To further develop the ability to select and re-use existing software components and libraries;
To enhance the students' skills in engineering software as interacting sub-systems, using interfaces and libraries to manage medium sized software development projects.

To develop the student's skills in the design and analysis of algorithms; 
To study algorithms for a range of important standard problems; 
To introduce the student to the theory of NP-completeness together with its practical implications;
To make the student aware of fundamental concepts of computability.

This module aims to develop the software engineering and database administration skills required for designing, creating, running and developing a relational database application and its associated application software suite. This will include extension of pre-existing systems and arrangements for extending operational systems; understanding of how conventional programming languages interact with databases; understanding of the fundamental concepts, theories and methods of the relational data model; and an introduction to Information Retrieval concepts and techniques.

The aims of the course are:
to offer students the opportunity to become familiar with one of the most important interaction paradigms;
to enable students to become skilled in the use of techniques and tools for modelling, implementing and evaluating interactive systems;
to enable students to apply the theories, techniques and tools presented in the course via challenging exercises which combine design, implementation and evaluation.

To introduce the fundamental concepts and theory of communications;
To provide a solid understanding of the technologies that support modern networked computer systems;
To introduce low-level network programming concepts;
To provide our students with the ability to evaluate and advise industry on the use and deployment of networked systems.

To introduce the students to the styles of coding required with an OS; 
To give a thorough presentation of the contents of a traditional OS, including the key abstractions;
To show the range of algorithms and techniques available for specific OS problems, and the implications of selection specific algorithms for application behaviour; 
To develop an integrated understanding of what the computer is doing, from a non-naive view of hardware to the behaviour of multi-threaded application processes; present the alternatives and clarify the trade-offs that drive OS and hardware design.

This course aims to:
provide a conceptual framework that will enable students to understand familiar programming languages more deeply and learn new languages more efficiently;
show how the syntax of a programming language can be formalized;
explain the functions of compilers and interpreters, how they interact, and how they work;
show how to implement a compiler using compiler-generation tools.

This course introduces the legal, professional and social issues involved in the widespread development and use of computational devices, and stimulates students to develop their own, well-argued positions on many of these issues.