Overview

This course is available with a year in industry, which is taken after your 2nd year of study.

This is a four-year course (or five with placement), leading to a Masters degree, in which you can investigate how human reasoning and behaviour can be imitated, and even surpassed, by computer systems: in language understanding, vision and games.

A Masters course such as this provides you the benefit of an extra year of study with us (as compared with a Bachelors course), allowing you to study more topics at a deeper level, thus connecting you with the state-of-the-art in your selected study areas.

The first two years provide a solid foundation in core areas of Computer Science, and introduce some of the fundamental Artificial Intelligence concepts. The third and fourth year lead to a gradual specialisation in your areas of interest, allowing you to obtain a deeper knowledge of selected AI and other CS topics through a large range of options. These usually represent the research areas of our staff and so provide a picture of the latest achievements in the field. The same is valid for your individual final-year project.

Course Structure

First Year

The first year contains essential fundamental material in programming, computer architectures and human-computer interfaces. It also contains mathematical and theoretical foundations of computer science. The structure of the first year modules can be found in the first year modules table.

Second Year

The second year continues with fundamental material, such as 'Principles of Programming Languages', 'Systems and Compilers', and 'Computability and Complexity'. Slightly more specialised topics start to be introduced, for example 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'Vision and Graphics'. Furthermore, all students can choose between a large Software Engineering project or a Hardware project. The structure of the second year modules can be found in the second year modules table.

Third Year

Once you reach your third year, there is more flexibility and you can choose 6 modules from a range of options. Examples of current module options can be found in the third year modules list.

Fourth Year

In the fourth year, you do a large individual research project, a group project and five modules. Examples of individual projects can be found in the final year project list (see the tab on this page) and examples of current moule options can be found in the fourth year modules list.

Final Year Projects

Typically, you will have a list of more than 100 projects to choose from, a short list of recent examples is shown below. It is even possible to define your own final year project.

• Learning dependency parsers using ILP
• Neural Mesh Ensembles
• occam-pi for Multiple Robotic Systems
• Modelling Degeneracy in the Immune System
• Robots in fractal-patterned mazes
• Interrogating Brooks' robots with Turing tests
• Validation of complex emergent systems simulation
• Feature Selection for classifiers
• Fuzzy reasoning with a neural network
• Machine learning of spontaneous gestures
• Hazard Analysis of Game AI
• Simulation of learning agents within a subsumption architecture