Computing Science Modules

The aim of the individual project is to allow students to undertake a substantial piece of individual work, involving planning, specification, design, execution, evaluation, presentation and report-writing.

Big Data is nowadays manifested in a very large number of environments and application fields pertaining to our education, entertainment, health, public governance, enterprising, etc. The course will endow students with the understanding of the new challenges big data introduces and the currently available solutions. These include (i) challenges pertaining to the modelling, accessing, and storing of big data, (ii) an understanding of the fundamentals of systems designed to store and access big data, and (iii) programming paradigms for efficient scalable access to big data.

This course provides an introduction to the foundational aspects of computer security, such as algorithms and protocols. It also covers ways in which these systems can be attacked and techniques for thwarting these attacks.

Distributed systems are ubiquitous in commerce and industry, from the international banking network to process control in large industrial sites. This course builds on the introductions to operating systems and networked systems in level 3, specifically focussing on the software engineering issues raised by distributed systems and algorithms for use in distributed systems.

The key feature of this course will be the assumption that a distributed system is one in which: partial failure is to be expected; local and remote operations differ greatly in cost; and an element of message passing is required for communication.

The aim of this course is to give the students an overview of advanced topics in Human-Computer Interaction, covering the key areas of multimodal interaction, novel interaction techniques, interactions for users with different abilities and collaborative media. These are all key issues for designing future interactive systems. There will also be a significant piece of coursework where the students will have to design, implement and test a multimodal interactive application. This will give them valuable experience in developing using these new forms of interaction. A further aim is to enable students to assess the potential of new interaction techniques to solve interaction challenges.

Mobile Human-Computer Interaction gives students an overview of the fields of mobile HCI and ubiquitous computing, and an understanding of the practical challenges associated with embedded software development for mobile interactive systems, and associated services.

Multimedia has become an indispensable part of modern computer technology. It is part of everyday life be it broadcasting material, educational or entertainment materials and/or personal videos or images. Better solutions are needed due to the growth and proliferation of multimedia in our daily life. The course will focus on advances in the development of multimedia systems and will be delivered with an emphasis on the practical side. It will introduce the theoretical and practical skills needed in handling multimedia data.

This course encourages students to apply engineering techniques to support the development of safety-critical applications. It also encourages students to consider the particular methodological and professional issues that surround the development of safety-critical systems.

Functional programming is introduced using Haskell. The standard programming techniques, as well as some advanced topics, are covered and applied to realistic programming problems.