This unit will provide an overview of the different research methods that are used in Computer Science. Students will learn to find and evaluate research on their topic and to present their own research plan or results for evaluation by others, write a literature review, learn about research quality metrics and ethics. This unit of study is required for students in Computer Science who are enrolled in a research project as part of their Honours degree, and for students starting their research degree (PhD, MPhil) in the School of Computer Science.

In many areas of computer science- robotics, computer graphics, virtual reality, and geographic information systems are some examples- it is necessary to store, analyse, and create or manipulate spatial data. This course deals with the algorithmic aspects of these tasks: we study techniques and concepts needed for the design and analysis of geometric algorithms and data structures. Each technique and concept will be illustrated on the basis of a problem arising in one of the application areas mentioned above.

This unit introduces computational linguistics and the statistical techniques and algorithms used to automatically process natural languages (such as English or Chinese). It will review the core statistics and information theory, and the basic linguistics, required to understand statistical natural language processing (NLP). Statistical NLP is used in a wide range of applications, including information retrieval and extraction; question answering; machine translation; and classifying and clustering of documents. This unit will explore the key challenges of natural language to computational modelling, and the state of the art approaches to the key NLP sub-tasks, including tokenisation, morphological analysis, word sense representation, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition and other information extraction, text categorisation, phrase structure parsing and dependency parsing. You will implement many of these sub-tasks in labs and assignments. The unit will also investigate the annotation process that is central to creating training data for statistical NLP systems. You will annotate data as part of completing a real-world NLP task.

This is an advanced course on Pervasive Computing, with a focus on the Internet of Things (IoT). It introduces the key aspects of the IoT and explores these in terms of the new research towards creating user interfaces that disappear into the environment and are available pervasively, for example in homes, workplaces, cars and carried.

Visual Analytics aims to facilitate the data analytics process through Information Visualisation. Information Visualisation aims to make good pictures of abstract information, such as stock prices, family trees, and software design diagrams. Well designed pictures can convey this information rapidly and effectively. The challenge for Visual Analytics is to design and implement effective Visualisation methods that produce pictorial representation of complex data so that data analysts from various fields (bioinformatics, social network, software visualisation and network) can visually inspect complex data and carry out critical decision making. This unit will provide basic HCI concepts, visualisation techniques and fundamental algorithms to achieve good visualisation of abstract information. Further, it will also provide opportunities for academic research and developing new methods for Visual Analytic methods.

Mobile computing is becoming a main stream for many IT applications, due to the availability of more and more powerful and affordable mobile devices with rich sensors such as cameras and GPS, which have already significantly changed many aspects in business, education, social network, health care, and entertainment in our daily life. Therefore it has been critical for students to be equipped with sufficient knowledge of such new computing platform and necessary skills. The unit aims to provide an in-depth overview of existing and emerging mobile computing techniques and applications, the eco-system of the mobile computing platforms, and its key building components. The unit will also train students with hand-on experiences in developing mobile applications in a broad range of areas.

The growing connected-ness of modern society translates into simplifying global communication and accelerating spread of news, information and epidemics. The focus of this unit is on the key concepts to address the challenges induced by the recent scale shift of complex networks. In particular, the course will present how scalable solutions exploiting graph theory, sociology and probability tackle the problems of communicating (routing, diffusing, aggregating) in dynamic and social networks.

Nowadays most client facing enterprise applications are running on web or at least with a web interface. The design and implementation of a web application require totally different set of skills to those are required for traditional desktop applications. All web applications are of client/ server architecture. Requests sent to a web application are expected to go through the public Internet, which slows the responsiveness and increases the possible security threat. A typical web application is also expected to handle large number of requests coming from every corner of the Internet and sent by all sorts of client systems. This further complicates the design of such system.
This course aims at providing both conceptual understanding and hand-on experiences for the technologies used in building web applications. We will examine how data/messages are communicated between client and server; how to improve the responsiveness using rich client technology; as well as how to build a secure web application.
At the end of this course, students are expected to have a clear understanding of the structure and technologies of web applications. Students are also expected to have practical knowledge of some major web application environments and to be able to develop and deploy simple web applications. Cloud based platform are increasingly popular as the development and deployment platform. This course will incorporate the cloud aspect of web application development as well.

This unit covers topics on software architecture for large-scale enterprises. Computer systems for large-scale enterprises handle critical business processes, interact with computer systems of other organisations, and have to be highly reliable, available and scalable. This class of systems are built up from several application components, incorporating existing "legacy" code and data stores as well as linking these through middleware technologies, such as distributed transaction processing, remote objects, message-queuing, publish-subscribe, and clustering. The choice of middleware can decide whether the system achieves essential non- functional requirements such as performance and availability. The objective of this unit of study is to educate students for their later professional career and it covers Software Architecture topics of the ACM/IEEE Software Engineering curriculum. Objective: The objective of this unit of study is to educate students for their later professional career and it covers topics of the ACM/IEEE Software Engineering curriculum.

This unit covers topics of active and cutting-edge research within IT in the area of 'Cloud Computing'.
Cloud Computing is an emerging paradigm of utilising large-scale computing services over the Internet that will affect individual and organization's computing needs from small to large. Over the last decade, many cloud computing platforms have been set up by companies like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Ebay and Facebook. Some of the platforms are open to public via various pricing models. They operate at different levels and enable business to harness different computing power from the cloud.
In this course, we will describe the important enabling technologies of cloud computing, explore the state-of-the art platforms and the existing services, and examine the challenges and opportunities of adopting cloud computing. The unit will be organized as a series of presentations and discussions of seminal and timely research papers and articles. Students are expected to read all papers, to lead discussions on some of the papers and to complete a hands-on cloud-programming project.

This unit provides principles and practicalities of creating interactive and effective multimedia products. It gives an overview of the complete spectrum of different media platforms and current authoring techniques used in multimedia production. Coverage includes the following key topics: enabling multimedia technologies; multimedia design issues; interactive 2D and 3D computer animation; multimedia object modelling and rendering; multimedia scripting programming; post-production and delivery of multimedia applications.

Information technology (IT) has significantly contributed to the research and practice of medicine, biology and health care. The IT field is growing enormously in scope with biomedicine taking a lead role in utilising the evolving applications to its best advantage. The goal of this unit of study is to provide students with the necessary knowledge to understand the information technology in biomedicine. The major emphasis will be on the principles associated with biomedical digital imaging systems and related biomedicine data processing, analysis, visualisation, registration, modelling, retrieval and management. A broad range of practical integrated clinical applications will be also elaborated.

The explosive growth of multimedia data, including text, audio, images and video has imposed unprecedented challenges for search engines to meet various information needs of users. This unit provides students with the necessary and updated knowledge of this field in the context of big data, from the information retrieval basics of a search engine, to many advanced techniques towards next generation search engines, such as content based image and video retrieval, large scale visual information retrieval, and social media.

This unit is intended to introduce and motivate the study of high performance computer systems. The student will be presented with the foundational concepts pertaining to the different types and classes of high performance computers. The student will be exposed to the description of the technological context of current high performance computer systems. Students will gain skills in evaluating, experimenting with, and optimising the performance of high performance computers. The unit also provides students with the ability to undertake more advanced topics and courses on high performance computing.

Usability engineering is the systematic process of designing and evaluating user interfaces so that they are usable. This means that people can readily learn to use them efficiently, can later remember how to use them and find it pleasant to use them. The wide use of computers in many aspects of people's lives means that usability engineering is of the utmost importance.
There is a substantial body of knowledge about how to elicit usability requirements, identify the tasks that a system needs to support, design interfaces and then evaluate them. This makes for systematic ways to go about the creation and evaluation of interfaces to be usable for the target users, where this may include people with special needs. The field is extremely dynamic with the fast emergence of new ways to interact, ranging from conventional WIMP interfaces, to touch and gesture interaction, and involving mobile, portable, embedded and desktop computers.
This unit will enable students to learn the fundamental concepts, methods and techniques of usability engineering. Students will practice these in small classroom activities. They will then draw them together to complete a major usability evaluation assignment in which they will design the usability testing process, recruit participants, conduct the evaluation study, analyse these and report the results.

This unit will introduce the key ideas in modern wireless telecommunications networks. It will address both physical layer issues such as propagation and modulation, plus network layer issues such as capacity, radio resource management and mobility management issues.
The following topics are covered. Wireless channel: Multipath fading, frequency selective fading, Doppler spread, statistical models, diversity, GSM, OFDM. Capacity and Interference: Cell types, coverage, frequency reuse, interference management, SIMO, MISO, multiuser diversity, CDMA, OFDMA, beamforming, superposition coding. MIMO: SVD, waterfilling, beamforming, V-BLAST, SIC, MMSE, Power Allocation. LTE/LTE-Advanced: Uplink-downlink channels, control signals, data transmission, spatial multiplexing, CoMP, spectrum reuse, heterogeneous networks, inter-cell interference coordination, carrier aggregation. Queueing theory: basic models, queueing systems, waiting time, delay, queue length, priority queues, wireless network virtualization (WNV) queues.

This unit examines the basic cryptographic building blocks of security, working through to their applications in authentication, key exchange, secret and public key encryption, digital signatures, protocols and systems. It then considers these applications in the real world, including models for integrity, authentication, electronic cash, viruses, firewalls, electronic voting, risk assessment, secure web browsers and electronic warfare. Practical cryptosystems are analysed with regard to the assumptions with which they were designed, their limitations, failure modes and ultimately why most end up broken.

This unit will cover software quality planning, validation and verification methods and techniques, risk analysis, software review techniques, software standards and software process improvement and software reliability.
Students who successfully complete this unit will understand the fundamental concepts of software quality engineering and be able to define software quality requirements, assess the quality of a software design, explain specific methods of building software quality, understand software reliability models and metrics, develop a software quality plan, understand quality assurance and control activities and techniques, understand various testing techniques including being able to verify and test a unit of code and comprehend ISO standards, SPICE, CMM and CMMI.

This unit aims to introduce students to the main issues involved in producing large Internet systems by using and building application frameworks. Frameworks allow great reuse so developers do not have to design and implement applications from scratch, as students have done in ELEC3610 The unit lays down the basic concepts and hands on experience on the design and development of enterprise systems, emphasizing the development of systems using design patterns and application frameworks.
A project-based approach will introduce the problems often found when building such systems, and will require students to take control of their learning. A project-based approach will introduce the problems often found when building such systems, and will require students to take control of their learning. Several development Java frameworks will be used, including Spring, Hibernate, and others. Principles of design patterns will also be studied.

Model-Based Software Engineering focuses on modern software engineering methods, technologies, and processes used in professional development projects. It covers both the pragmatic engineering elements and the underlying theory of the model-based approach to the analysis, design, implementation, and maintenance of complex software-intensive systems.
Students will participate in a group project, which will entail developing and/or evolving a software system, following a full development cycle from requirements specification through to implementation and testing using up-to-date industrial development tools and processes. At the end of the course they will provide a presentation and demonstration of their project work to the class. There is no formal teaching of a programming language in this unit, although students will be expected to demonstrate through their project work their general software engineering and architectural skills as well as their mastery of model-based methods and technologies.
Students successfully completing this unit will have a strong practical and theoretical understanding of the modern software development cycle as applied in industrial settings. In particular, they will be familiar with the latest model-based software engineering approaches necessary for successfully dealing with today's highly complex and challenging software systems.
The pedagogic grounds for this course and its focus on model-based approaches are to arm new software engineers with skills and perspectives that extend beyond the level of basic programming. Such skills are essential to success in software development nowadays, and are in great demand but very low supply. The dearth of such expertise is one of the key reasons behind the alarmingly high failure rate of industrial software projects (currently estimated at being greater than 40%). Therefore, this unit complements SQE and strengthens a key area in the program.

This unit will cover recent topics of active and cutting-edge research within Computer Science and its related areas. The content of this unit may vary depending on the academic staff member's research expertise and/or opportunities such as a distinguished researcher visiting the University.

The need to track and facilitate the sharing of the core knowledge resources in contemporary organisations is widely recognised. This course will provide a comprehensive introduction to the area of Knowledge Management (KM) from both technological and organisational perspectives. We will review and discuss a range of published papers, case studies, and other publications that deal with a range of important KM-related topics. One of the key knowledge management technologies, Business Intelligence Systems, will be covered in detail. It will also include hands-on work using the BI (Online Analytical Processing- OLAP) tool, COGNOS.
Some of the main themes to be covered will include: KM- Conceptual Foundations; Taxonomies of organizational knowledge and KM mechanisms; Case/Field Studies of KM Initiatives; Data Warehousing and OLAP/Business Analytics; Data, text, and web mining; Social media,crowdsourcing, and KM; Big data and actionable knowledge.

Students enrolled in the Honours programs study various advanced aspects of Software Development. The program may include lectures, tutorials, seminars and practicals. They will undertake a research project. Assessment will include the project and may include examinations and classwork.

Students enrolled in the Honours programs study various advanced aspects of Software Development. The program may include lectures, tutorials, seminars and practicals. They will undertake a research project. Assessment will include the project and may include examinations and classwork.

Students enrolled in the Honours programs study various advanced aspects of Software Development. The program may include lectures, tutorials, seminars and practicals. They will undertake a research project. Assessment will include the project and may include examinations and classwork.

Students enrolled in the Honours programs study various advanced aspects of Software Development. The program may include lectures, tutorials, seminars and practicals. They will undertake a research project. Assessment will include the project and may include examinations and classwork.

All students in Science Honours must enrol in this non-assessable unit of study in their final semester. This unit will contain your final Honours mark as calculated from your coursework and research project units.