Computer Science with Cyber Physical Systems BSc

You’ll cover the basic concepts in mathematics which are of relevance to the computer scientists.

These include:

• logic
• sets
• functions and relations
• graphs
• induction
• basic probability
• statistics and matrices

This module runs alongside 'Computer Fundamentals' and provides an expanded view by considering how real computer systems (such as ARM, x86, Linux and *BSD) and networks work.

You’ll also cover the principles of the lower level implementation of I/O using polling and interrupts, and the use of exceptions; how memory and storage are organized as well addressing the issues arising from multicore systems. 

You’ll spend around five hours per week in tutorials, lectures and computer classes.

The module introduces basic principles of programming and algorithms. It covers fundamental programming constructs, such as types and variables, expressions, control structures, and functions.

You'll learn how to design and analyse simple algorithms and data structures that allow efficient storage and manipulation of data. You'll also become familiar with basic software development methodology.

You will spend around six hours per week in lectures, computer classes and tutorials.

You will gain a basic understanding of the fundamental architecture of computers and computer networks.

You’ll learn how the simple building blocks of digital logic can be put together in different ways to build an entire computer.

You’ll also learn how modern computer systems and networks are constructed of hierarchical layers of functionality which build on and abstract the layers below.

You will spend five hours per week in tutorials, lectures and computer classes.

This module considers both the structure of databases, including how to make them fast, efficient and reliable, and the appropriate user interfaces which will make them easy to interact with for users. You will start by looking at how to design a database, gaining an understanding of the standard features that management systems provide and how you can best utilise them, then develop an interactive application to access your database.

Through the lectures and computing sessions you will learn how to design and implement systems using a standard database management system, web technologies and GUI interfaces through practical programming/system examples.

You'll cover the following basic concepts in mathematics which are of relevance to the development of computer software. Topics which will be covered include linear algebra and calculus. 

In this module you will learn the basic principles of the object-oriented and functional approaches to programming, using the languages Java and Haskell. You will also see how they can be used in practice to write a range of different kinds of programs.

You will gain a broad overview of the fundamental theories and techniques of artificial intelligence (AI).

You’ll explore how computers can produce intelligent behaviour, and will consider topics such as the history of AI, AI search techniques, neural networks, data mining, philosophical and ethical issues, and knowledge representation and reasoning.

You will spend two hours per week in lectures for this module. 

You will be introduced to the concept of software engineering and will be taken through the software development process: deciding exactly what should be built (requirements and specification), designing how it should be built (software architecture), development strategies (implementation and testing), and maintaining change (software evolution and maintenance).

 This course covers the fundamental principles that underpin operating systems and concurrency. Topics covered include the architecture of operating systems, process and memory management, storage, I/O, and virtualisation. The principles of concurrency will be introduced from both the perspective of an operating system and user applications. Specific topics on concurrency include: hardware support for concurrency; mutual exclusion and condition synchronisation; monitors; safety and liveness properties of concurrent algorithms, and the use of threads and synchronisation.

Working in groups of around five to six people, you’ll be assigned a supervisor who will provide you with a short written description of a computer application to be designed, programmed, and documented during the course of the module. Each group will meet twice a week, once with your supervisor and once without; you’ll also have four introductory one hour lectures. 

This module covers important aspects of algorithms, namely their correctness and efficiency. To address correctness we use a formal approach to proving that an algorithm meets its specification.

You will study topics such as:

• introduction to program specification and program correctness
• assertions and loop invariants
• proofs of correctness

To address the issue of efficiency we cover the use of mathematical descriptions of the computational resources needed to support algorithm design decisions.

You'll study topics such as

• sorting algorithms
• heaps
• binary search trees
• hashmaps
• graph algorithms

The emphasis is upon understanding data structures and algorithms so as to be able to design and select them appropriately for solving a given problem.

You will gain a broad overview of the fundamental theories and techniques of cyber physical systems. You’ll explore the architecture of cyber physical systems as a network of interacting elements with physical input and output and intelligent mechanisms, increasing their adaptability, autonomy, efficiency, reliability, safety, and usability. You will gain an understanding of the various potential applications of cyber physical systems including autonomous automotive systems, medical monitoring and process control systems.

You'll investigate classes of formal language and the practical uses of this theory, applying this to a series of abstract machines ultimately leading to a discussion on what computation is and what can and cannot be computed.

You'll focus in particular on language recognition, but will study a range of topics including:

• finite state machines
• regular expressions
• context-free grammars
• Turing machines
• Lambda calculus

This module builds on parts of the ACE module addressing data structures and formal reasoning and introduces concepts which are important to understand the analysis of algorithms in terms of their complexity.

To build on first year programming modules and further develop programming ability and experience, including ability to develop and understand a large piece of software, build user interfaces and follow a realistic design and testing procedure.

Topic examples include: design diagrams and modelling; GUI programming; testing software engineering methodologies (including agile development and tools), refactoring; design patterns and SOLID principles; all in the context of understanding anddeveloping maintainable third-party code. You will spend around three hours per week in lectures and two hours per week in computer classes studying for this module.

This module builds on the Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence module. The emphasis is on building on the AI research strengths in the School.

You will be introduced to key topics such as AI techniques, fuzzy logic and planning, and modern search techniques such as Iterated Local Search, Tabu Search, Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithms, and Hyper-heuristics, etc.

You will also explore the implementation of some AI techniques.

An overview of the field of human computer interaction which aims to understand people's interactions with technology and how to apply this knowledge in the design of usable interactive computer systems.

The module will introduce the concept of usability and will examine different design approaches and evaluation methods.

Building upon the introductory Functional Programming module in year one, you’ll focus on a number of more advanced topics such as: 

• programming with effects
• reasoning about programs
• control flow
• advanced libraries
• improving efficiency
• type systems
• functional pearls

You’ll spend around four hours per week in lectures and computer classes.

This module introduces the field of digital image processing, a fundamental component of digital photography, television, computer graphics and computer vision.

You’ll cover topics including:

• image processing and its applications
• fundamentals of digital images
• digital image processing theory and practice
• applications of image processing

You’ll spend around three hours in lectures and computer classes each week.

You will cover the programming material and concepts necessary to obtain an understanding of the C++ programming language.

You will spend around four hours per week in lectures and computer classes for this module and will be expected to take additional time to practice and to produce your coursework.

You will cover two main aspects of the software engineering process in depth: requirements and design. This will cover modern approaches to large scale requirements and engineering and specification and approaches to systems and architectural design. 

This module covers the following topics:

• overview of parallel and distributed computing
• applications of distributed systems
• fundamental concepts of distributed systems (processes and message passing, naming and discovery, fault tolerance and partial failure, consistency and cacheing, security)
• reliable network communication
• distributed system design approaches (direct vs indirect communication, client-server vs peer-to-peer, stateful vs stateless interfaces)
• introduction to distributed data management
• introduction to distributed algorithms

You’ll perform an individual project on a topic in computer science with emphasis on cyber physical. You’ll produce a 15-25,000 word project report under the guidance of your supervisor. The topic can be any area of the subject which is of mutual interest to both you and your supervisor, but should involve a substantial cyber physical component. 

This module looks broadly into professional ethics within the scope of the computing discipline. It covers a range of professional, ethical, social and legal issues in order to study the impact that computer systems have in society and the implications of this from the perspective of the computing profession. In particular, the module covers topics such as introduction to ethics, critical thinking, professionalism, privacy, intellectual and intangible property, cyber-behaviour, safety, reliability accountability, all these within the context of computer systems development.

Spending four hours a week in lectures and computer classes, you’ll cover the following topics:

• security of the computer
• security of networks
• security and the internet
• software and hardware security
• mobile security
• basic cryptography

Providing you with an introduction to machine learning, pattern recognition, and data mining techniques, this module will enable you to consider both systems which are able to develop their own rules from trial-and-error experience to solve problems, as well as systems that find patterns in data without any supervision. In the latter case, data mining techniques will make the generation of new knowledge possible, including very big data sets. This is now fashionably termed 'big data' science.

You'll cover a range of topics including:

• machine learning foundations
• pattern recognition foundations
• artificial neural networks
• deep learning
• applications of machine learning
• data mining techniques and evaluating hypotheses

This module is an introduction to the design of human-AI interaction to ensure the AI-driven systems we build are beneficial and useful to people.

The module will cover practical design topics including methods and techniques such as natural language processing and human-robot interaction. The module will also consider societal and theoretical concerns of human-AI interaction, including the ethics of AI, responsible innovation, trust, accountability and explainable AI.

The practical component of the module will involve building AI-driven systems that drive conversational experiences, such as a text-based ‘chatbots’ and speech-controlled services/ ‘skills’, involving automatic speech recognition and natural language processing.

You’ll examine aspects of language and compiler design by looking at the techniques and tools that are used to construct compilers for high level programming languages. Topics covered include: parsing; types and type systems; run-time organisation; memory management; code generation; and optimisation. You’ll spend around four hours each week in lectures and computer classes. 

This module examines how knowledge can be represented symbolically and how it can be manipulated in an automated way by reasoning programs.

Some of the topics you’ll cover include:

• first order logic
• resolution
• description logic
• default reasoning
• rule-based systems
• belief networks

In this module, you will consider the design of collaboration and communication technologies used in a variety of different contexts including workplace, domestic and leisure environments. You will consider the basic principles of such technologies, explore the technologies from a social perspective, consider their impact on human behaviour and critically reflect on their design from a human-centred perspective.

Students will be introduced to concepts and techniques that are widely used in industry to develop high quality software.

Through a two hour lecture each week, you will be introduced to concepts and techniques that are widely used in industry to develop high quality software. These include the following:

• What makes high quality software? Including procedures and approaches to quality management and quality assurance for software projects. Also, a brief history of software metrics
• Software testing. Including unit testing, integration testing, and acceptance testing, with a particular emphasis upon testing strategy and the automation of testing
• Software deployment. Including techniques used to minimise risk, and also continuous integration

These will all be put into the context of recent industry trends. Training will also be provided in common tools and techniques that are used in professional software development including:

• Version control and the use of code repositories
• Release/configuration Build management tools
• Automated testing frameworks

You are given the opportunity to combine your developing CCT knowledge with your programming abilities. You have the whole semester to build a working collaborative project either individually, or you can opt to work in a team, and produce a report on how it supports collaboration according to CCT theory. The primary focus is on building a working application, and so existing strong programming ability is required. 

You’ll look at the development of software applications for mobile devices, with a practical focus on the Android operating system. You’ll consider and use the software development environments for currently available platforms and the typical hardware architecture of mobile devices. You’ll spend around three hours per week in lectures and computer classes.

You’ll begin by considering the attempts to characterise the problems that can theoretically be solved by physically-possible computational processes.

You’ll then consider the area of complexity theory, looking at whether or not problems can be solved under limitations on resources such as time or space. A key topic is an examination of the classes P and NP and the definition of the term NP-complete.

You’ll examine the principles of 3D computer graphics, focusing on modelling the 3D world on the computer, projecting onto 2D display and rendering 2D display to give it realism.

Through weekly lectures and laboratory sessions, you’ll explore various methods and requirements in 3D computer graphics, balancing efficiency and realism.

Information Visualisation is the process of extracting knowledge from complex data, and presenting it to a user in a manner that this appropriate to their needs. This module provides a foundational understanding of some important issues in information visualisation design. You will learn about the differences between scientific and creative approaches to constructing visualisations, and consider some important challenges such as the representation of ambiguous or time-based data. You will also learn about psychological theories that help explain how humans process information, and consider their relevance to the design of effective visualisations.

If you want to learn how to design and implement your own interactive information visualisation, you should also take the linked module G53IVP (Information Visualisation Project). Together, these two modules form an integrated 20 credit programme of study.

In this module you will gain practical experience of how to design and evaluate a distinctive interactive visualisation which presents information gathered from a complex and interesting data source.

You will gain experience in web-based technologies that enable the implementation of multi-layered and interactive information visualisations, supported through lab work that introduces specific features of these technologies.

This module will require some challenging programming work and assumes some basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript. Introductory tutorials will be provided to those without this prior knowledge.

Students taking part in approved activities, such as running code clubs in schools, organising school computing activity days, or becoming active STEM ambassadors, may receive academic credit for demonstrating they have actively contributed to the development of younger students. Students will have undertaken an agreed number of hours on the activities, identified personal goals and targets in relation to these activities and maintained a reflective portfolio as a record of evidence of their competence and achievements. Students will only be able to register for this module with the approval of the convenor/school, once the material for assessment has been discussed.

Students taking part in activities relating to industrial experience in a computer science or software engineering enterprise may obtain academic credit for them. A full list of approved activities is available from the School Office. Activities will be related to demonstration of involvement in development of complex software in a team situation, subject to quality control procedures of an industrial or business practice. Evidence of working to and completing tasks relating to targets set by an employer and directly related to software development/programming will be required. Students will have undertaken an agreed number of hours on the activities, identified personal goals and targets in relation to these activities and maintained a reflective portfolio as a record of evidence of their competence and achievements. The nature of the activities undertaken will be subject to the approval of the module convenor before acceptance on the module.

Students taking part in activities relating to programming experience such as developing apps in their spare time, contributing to open source projects, or building things in hackathons may receive academic credit for showing they have experience and excellent development skills. The emphasis of this module is that you provide evidence of your significant extra-curricular software development experience. Students will only be able to register for this module with the approval of the convenor/school, once the material for assessment has been checked.