Overview

This programme is available either with an industrial placement year, which is taken after your 2nd year of study, or without an industrial placement year.

This is our most general Masters programme and involves the study of software (programs) and hardware (electronics) and how they are integrated into the design of systems.

Here you look at a wide field of applications to see what systems are needed and then go into how they can be best provided. You see not only what is needed now, but how things actually work and how they may work in the future.

This is a four-year programme (or five with placement), leading to a Masters degree. A Masters programme provides you the benefit of an extra year of study with us (as compared with a Bachelors programme), 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 form a solid foundation in the subject. In the final two academic years, special emphasis is given to Software Engineering, where a highly systematic approach is taken to the development and maintenance of software. Subjects central to this include requirements analysis, formal specification of systems, system design methodologies, human factors engineering, software measurement and testing and topics in privacy and security. Both a group project and an individual research project are undertaken in the final year.

Practical and project work receives great emphasis throughout the programme: the Department's teaching laboratories include software laboratories equipped with workstations, first and second year bench laboratories for experiments in digital electronics and microprocessor systems, and project laboratories for final year work.

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 projects list (see tab on this page) and examples of current module options can be found in the fourth year modules list.

Final Year Projects

Typically, you will have a large list of projects to choose from, some recent examples are shown below. It is even possible to define your own final year project.

• Models of safety-critical Java programs
• Neural Mesh Ensembles
• A parallel neural network software system.
• Computation with Molecules
• A generic, Flash-based animation engine for ZLive
• occam-pi for Multiple Robotic Systems
• Creating Believable Avatar Animations in Second Life
• 3D shape retrieval
• Machine learning of spontaneous gestures
• Finding comets in Solar images
• Tuple-Spaces using the Google Data API
• Using the Web to solve Crossword puzzles