AIMS

The subject will introduce the basics of computer networks to students through a study of layered models of computer networks and applications. The first half of the subject deals with data communication protocols in the lower layers of OSI and TCP/IP reference models. The students will be exposed to the working of various fundamental networking technologies such as wireless, LAN, RFID and sensor networks. The second half of the subject deals with the upper layers of the TCP/IP reference model through a study of several Internet applications.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: Introduction to Internet, OSI reference model layers, protocols and services, data transmission basics, interface standards, network topologies, data link protocols, message routing, LANs, WANs, TCP/IP suite, detailed study of common network applications (e.g., email, news, FTP, Web), network management, current and future developments in network hardware and protocols.

AIMS

The aim of this subject is for students to develop familiarity and competence in assessing and designing computer programs for computational efficiency. Although computers manipulate data very quickly, to solve large-scale problems, we must design strategies so that the calculations combine effectively. Over the latter half of the 20th century, an elegant theory of computational efficiency developed. This subject introduces students to the fundamentals of this theory and to many of the classical algorithms and data structures that solve key computational questions. These questions include distance computations in networks, searching items in large collections, and sorting them in order.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include complexity classes and asymptotic notation; empirical analysis of algorithms; abstract data types including queues, trees, priority queues and graphs; algorithmic techniques including brute force, divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming and greedy approaches; space and time trade-offs; and the theoretical limits of algorithm power.

AIMS

The aims for this subject is for students to develop an understanding of approaches to solving moderately complex problems with computers, and to be able to demonstrate proficiency in designing and writing programs. The programming language used is Java.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered will include:

• Java basics
• Console input/output
• Control flow
• Defining classes
• Using object references
• Programming with arrays
• Inheritance
• Polymorphism and abstract classes
• Exception handling
• UML basics
• Interfaces
• Generics.

AIMS

The subject introduces key topics in modern information organization, particularly with regard to structured databases. The well-founded relational theory behind modern structured query language (SQL) engines, has given them as much a place behind the web site of an organization and on the desktop, as they traditionally enjoyed on corporate mainframes. Topics covered may include: the managerial view of data, information and knowledge; conceptual, logical and physical data modelling; normalization and de-normalization; the SQL language; data integrity; transaction processing, data warehousing, web services and organizational memory technologies. This is a core foundation subject for both the Master of Information Systems and Master of Information Technology.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

This subject serves as an introduction to databases and data modelling from a data management perspective. Database design, from conceptual design through to physical implementation will be covered. This will include Entity Relationship modelling, normalisation and de-normalisation and SQL. Additionally the use of databases in various contexts will be explored (web based databases, connecting programs to databases, data warehousing, health contexts, geospatial databases).

AIMS

The subject aims to provide an understanding of the principles on which the Web, Email, DNS and other interesting distributed systems are based. Questions concerning distributed architecture, concepts and design; and how these meet the demands of contemporary distributed applications will be addressed.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: characterization of distributed systems, system models, interprocess communication, remote invocation, indirect communication, operating system support, distributed objects and components, web services, security, distributed file systems, and name services.

AIMS

Much of the world's knowledge is stored in the form of unstructured data (e.g. text) or implicitly in structured data (e.g. databases). In this subject students will learn algorithms and data structures for extracting, retrieving and analysing explicit knowledge from various data sources, with a focus on the web. Topics include: data encoding and markup, web crawling, regular expressions, document indexing, text retrieval, clustering, classification and prediction, pattern mining, and approaches to evaluation of knowledge technologies.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Introduction to Knowledge Technologies; String search; Genomics; Text processing and search; Web search and retrieval; Introduction to Data Mining; Introduction to basic Probability; Classification; Association Rules; Clustering; Evaluation measures.

Examples of projects that students may completed are:

• A method for automatically predicting the geo-location of a Twitter user on the basis of their posts
• An automatic method for tagging multilingual Wikipedia documents with Wikipedia categories
• A search engine for Twitter data, which takes into account the time stamp of the query and documents
• A search engine for web user forum data
• A search engine servicing mixed monolingual queries (as in monolingual queries from a range of languages) over a large-scale document collection
• Classification and prediction of some real world problems using machine learning techniques.

AIMS

Formal logic and discrete mathematics provide the theoretical foundations for computer science. This subject uses logic and discrete mathematics to model the science of computing. It provides a grounding in the theories of logic, sets, relations, functions, automata, formal languages, and computability, providing concepts that underpin virtually all the practical tools contributed by the discipline, for automated storage, retrieval, manipulation and communication of data.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• Logic: Propositional and predicate logic, resolution proofs, mathematical proof
• Discrete mathematics: Sets, functions, relations, order, well-foundedness, induction and recursion
• Automata: Regular languages, finite-state automata, context-free grammars and languages, parsing
• Computability briefly: Turing machines, computability, decidability.

A functional programming language will be used to implement and illustrate concepts.

AIMS

The aims for this subject is for students to develop an understanding of the main algorithms used in natural language processing and text retrieval, for use in a diverse range of applications including search engines, machine translation, text mining, sentiment analysis, and question answering. Topics to be covered include text pre-processing, part-of-speech tagging, context-free grammars, n-gram language modelling, and text classification. The programming language used is Python.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered may include:

• Text classification algorithms such as logistic regression
• Vector space models for natural language semantics
• Structured prediction, Hidden Markov models
• N-gram language modelling, including statistical estimation
• Alignment of parallel corpora
• Term indexing, term weighting for information retrieval
• Query expansion and relevance feedback

AIMS

The subject will explore foundational knowledge in the area of cryptography and information security. The overall aim is to gain an understanding of fundamental cryptographic concepts like encryption and signatures and use it to build and analyse security in computers, communications and networks. This subject covers fundamental concepts in information security on the basis of methods of modern cryptography, including encryption, signatures and hash functions.

This subject is an elective subject in the Master of Engineering (Software). It can also be taken as an advanced elective in Master of Information Technology.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

The subject will be made up of three parts:

• Cryptography: the essentials of public and private key cryptography, stream ciphers, digital signatures and cryptographic hash functions
• Access Control: the essential elements of authentication and authorization; and
• Secure Protocols; which are obtained through cryptographic techniques.

A particular emphasis will be placed on real-life protocols such as Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Kerberos.

Topics drawn from:

• Symmetric key crypto systems
• Public key cryptosystems
• Hash functions
• Authentication
• Secret sharing
• Protocols
• Key Management.

AIMS

Good craftsmen know their tools, and compilers are amongst the most important tools that programmers use. There are many ways in which familiarity with compilers helps programmers.

For example, knowledge of semantic analysis helps programmers understand error messages, and knowledge of code generation techniques helps programmers debug problems at assembly language level. The technologies used in compiler development are also useful when implementing other kinds of programs. The concepts and tools used in the analysis phases of a compiler are useful for any program whose input has a structure that is non-trivial to recognize, while those used in the synthesis phases are useful for any program that generates commands for another system. This subject provides an understanding of the main principles of programming language implementation, as well as first hand experience of the application of those principles.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

The subject describes how compilers analyse source programs, how they translate them to target programs, and what tools are available to support these tasks. Topics covered include compiler structures; lexical analysis; syntax analysis; semantic analysis; intermediate representations of programs; code generation; and optimisation.

AIMS

Declarative programming languages provide elegant and powerful programming paradigms which every programmer should know. This subject presents declarative programming languages and techniques.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• The dangers of destructive update
• Functional programming
• Recursion
• Strong type systems
• Parametric polymorphism
• Algebraic types
• Type classes
• Defensive programming practice
• Higher order programming
• Currying and partial application
• Lazy evaluation
• Monads
• Logic programming
• Unification and resolution
• Nondeterminism, search, and backtracking

AIMS

With exponential increases in the amount of data becoming available in fields such as finance and biology, and on the web, there is an ever-greater need for methods to detect interesting patterns in that data, and classify novel data points based on curated data sets. Learning techniques provide the means to perform this analysis automatically, and in doing so to enhance understanding of general processes or to predict future events.

Topics covered will include: supervised learning, semi-supervised and active learning, unsupervised learning, kernel methods, probabilistic graphical models, classifier combination, neural networks.

This subject is intended to introduce graduate students to machine learning though a mixture of theoretical methods and hands-on practical experience in applying those methods to real-world problems.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered will include: linear models, support vector machines, random forests, AdaBoost, stacking, query-by-committee, multiview learning, deep neural networks, un/directed probabilistic graphical models (Bayes nets and Markov random fields), hidden Markov models, principal components analysis, kernel methods.

AIMS

This subject asks the question ‘what makes a successful entrepreneur?’ It’s a complex topic and the subject of heated debate in the business, education and the economics communities, and also in discussions of international development, sustainability and social philanthropy. The way we will approach this subject is by looking at the behaviours, attitudes, values and skills that entrepreneurs need to create the climate for successful innovation - whether they are entrepreneurs starting new ventures or ‘Entrepreneurs’ in large organisations. What you will discover in this subject is that innovation isn’t just about having great ideas, and that entrepreneurs aren’t who you think they are. The subject will do this by looking at topics such as how innovation works and how it can be managed, different modes of entrepreneurialism, how entrepreneurs think and how to create, build and sustain an entrepreneurial business.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

The subject comprises 5 themes:

• ’Making New Things’, a survey of current thinking about innovation and entrepreneurship
• ’The Customers’ Point of View’, looking at techniques for understanding customers and consumer-led innovation
• ’Everything is Negotiable’, including work done at the Harvard negotiation project on win/win negotiation and emotional negotiation
• ’Everyone Needs Help’, exploring the ways entrepreneurs create support networks to help them be successful innovation and mentoring
• ’Inspire People’ - an examination of the importance of vision and commitment in innovation and entrepreneurship.

The subject involves advanced learning activities including case-based, experiential, and team-based approaches.

AIMS

To construct a software system, requirements must be analysed and modelled, and designs developed and evaluated; this subject teaches knowledge and skills needed for these tasks. This includes the development of static and dynamic models for aspects of both the problem space and the solution space. The emphasis here is on an Agile approach, and on techniques appropriate for object-oriented development.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include:

• Analysis and modelling requirements
• Developing, modelling and evaluating designs
• Modelling using the Unified Modelling Language (UML)
• Software design processes and principles
• Common design patterns and software architectures
• Tools for design and development

AIMS

The aim of this subject is to introduce students to the software engineering principles, processes, tools and techniques for analysing and managing complex software projects.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: software engineering processes; project management; planning and scheduling; estimation and metrics; quality assurance; risk; configuration management; individuals and teams; ethics; change management; and project management tools.

This subject involves in-depth investigation of a significant problem related to Computing. The subject also provides students with skills and knowledge for analysing and solving problems, and enhanced written and oral communication skills.

The subject is fundamentally a research-based project, giving a capstone experience and piece of scholarship to students.

AIMS

This subject involves an in-depth innovation investigation under the supervision of a member of the academic staff and in the context of the University's engagement initiatives. Students working in groups will be required to perform research, customer and problem discovery, ideation, concept creation and validation, and technical implementation for a real-world challenge. The subject also provides students with skills and knowledge for improving written and oral communication.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Indicative content includes innovation methodology, customer & problem discovery, customer & problem validation, innovation experiments, and innovation presentations.

AIMS

Good craftsmen know their tools, and compilers are amongst the most important tools that programmers use. There are many ways in which familiarity with compilers helps programmers.

For example, knowledge of semantic analysis helps programmers understand error messages, and knowledge of code generation techniques helps programmers debug problems at assembly language level. The technologies used in compiler development are also useful when implementing other kinds of programs. The concepts and tools used in the analysis phases of a compiler are useful for any program whose input has a structure that is non-trivial to recognize, while those used in the synthesis phases are useful for any program that generates commands for another system. This subject provides an understanding of the main principles of programming language implementation, as well as first hand experience of the application of those principles.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

The subject describes how compilers analyse source programs, how they translate them to target programs, and what tools are available to support these tasks. Topics covered include compiler structures; lexical analysis; syntax analysis; semantic analysis; intermediate representations of programs; code generation; and optimisation.

AIMS

Many applications require access to very large amounts of data. These applications often require reliability (data must not be lost even in the presence of hardware failures), and the ability to retrieve and process the data very efficiently.

The subject will cover the technologies used in advanced database systems. Topics covered will include: transactions, including concurrency, reliability (the ACID properties) and performance; and indexing of both structured and unstructured data. The subject will also cover additional topics such as: uncertain data; Xquery; the Semantic Web and the Resource Description Framework; dataspaces and data provenance; datacentres; and data archiving.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics include:

• Introduction to High Performance Database Systems
• Issues of Performance and Reliability
• Transaction Processing
• Recovery from Failures
• Map Reduce Models.

AIMS

Mobile devices are ubiquitous nowadays. Mobile computing encompasses technologies, devices and software that enable (wireless) access to services anyplace, anytime, and anywhere. This subject will cover fundamental mobile computing techniques and technologies, and explain challenges that are unique to mobile computing. In particular, the development of software for mobile devices requires hands-on experience that cannot be captured using simulation environments or emulators. Mobile device have limited computing power and restrictions on the communication bandwidth, latency and network availability. Equally important, mobile device are also confined by their input mechanisms and their output capabilities such as screen size and resolution. This subject will enable students to develop mobile phone applications and provide them with hands-on experience.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• A survey of mobile operating systems and development environments; including a discussion of Android and iOS
• Development of interfaces for mobile devices and dealing with different input modalities
• Wireless messaging fundamentals such as push and pull, as well as messaging services such as SMS and MMS and their implementation
• Wireless personal area network standards such as Bluetooth, UWB (ultra-wide band) and ZigBee
• Fundamentals of wireless wide area networks (WWAN) and 4G standards such as LTE and WiMAX enabling wireless broadband access, and the underlying code-, frequency- and time-based multiplexing techniques
• Architectures for thin clients
• Routing in mobile ad-hoc networks and vehicular ad-hoc networks
• RFID (radio frequency identification), in particular how to interrogate RFID tags and anti-collision, and how to maintain security and privacy
• In- and outdoor positioning techniques (GPS) for mobile devices, as location-based services are seen to be one of the key emerging application areas in mobile computing
• Location privacy in mobile computing applications
• Mobile agents, i.e., software programs that can migrate between different hosts.

AIMS

With exponential increases in the amount of data becoming available in fields such as finance and biology, and on the web, there is an ever-greater need for methods to detect interesting patterns in that data, and classify novel data points based on curated data sets. Learning techniques provide the means to perform this analysis automatically, and in doing so to enhance understanding of general processes or to predict future events.

Topics covered will include: supervised learning, semi-supervised and active learning, unsupervised learning, kernel methods, probabilistic graphical models, classifier combination, neural networks.

This subject is intended to introduce graduate students to machine learning though a mixture of theoretical methods and hands-on practical experience in applying those methods to real-world problems.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered will include: linear models, support vector machines, random forests, AdaBoost, stacking, query-by-committee, multiview learning, deep neural networks, un/directed probabilistic graphical models (Bayes nets and Markov random fields), hidden Markov models, principal components analysis, kernel methods.

AIMS

The key focus of this subject is the foundations of automated planning and reasoning and their real-world applications. Automated planning is the AI approach to developing agents that make their own decisions and is becoming increasingly popular. Autonomous agents are active entities that perceive their environment, reason, plan and execute appropriate actions to achieve their goals, in service of their users (the real world, human beings, or other agents). This subject shows how this work is relevant for many applications beyond the traditional area of artificial intelligence, such as resource scheduling, logistics, process management, service composition, intelligent sensing and robotics. The subject focuses on the foundations that enable agents to reason autonomously about goals, perception, actions and the knowledge of other agents during collaborative task execution.

This subject is an elective subject in the Master of Science (Computer Science) and Master of Information Technology, in particular for the Distributed Computing and the Computing Specialisations. It can also be taken as an Advanced Elective subject in the Master of Engineering (Software).

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics are drawn from the field of advanced artificial intelligence including:

• Search algorithms and heuristic functions
• Classical (AI) planning
• Probabilistic planning
• Non-deterministic planning
• Reinforcement learning
• Multi-agent and epistemic planning
• Game theory
• Ethics in AI planning

AIM

With exponential growth in data generated from sensor data streams, search engines, spam filters, medical services, online analysis of financial data streams, and so forth, there is demand for fast monitoring and storage of huge amounts of data in real-time. Traditional technologies were not aimed to such fast streams of data. Usually they required data to be stored and indexed before it could be processed.

Stream computing was created to tackle those problems that require processing and classification of continuous, high volume of data streams. It is highly used on applications such as Twitter, Facebook, High Frequency Trading and so forth.

This subject will focus on the algorithms and data structures behind the analysis and management of streams. Theoretical underpinnings are emphasized, with implementation of some fundamental algorithms.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• Why stream processing is important
• Hash functions, probability, and fundamental data structures
• Data stream model
• Data stream algorithms: Sampling, sketching, distinct items, frequent items, frequency moments, etc.
• Data stream mining: clustering, histograms, query tracking
• Graph streams: connectivity, matchings, covers.
  

AIMS

At the heart of theoretical computer science are questions of both philosophical and practical importance. What does it mean for a problem to be solvable by computer? What are the limits of computability? Which types of problems can be solved efficiently? What are our options in the face of intractability? This subject covers such questions in the content of a wide-ranging exploration of the nexus between logic, complexity and algorithms, and examines many important (and sometimes surprising) results about the nature of computing.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• Turing machines
• The Church-Turing Thesis
• Decidable languages
• Reducability
• Time Complexity: The classes P and NP, NP-complete problems
• Space complexity: including sub-linear space
• Circuit complexity
• Approximation algorithms
• Probabilistic complexity classes
• Additional topics may include descriptive complexity, interactive proofs, communication complexity, complexity as applied to cryptography
• Space complexity, including sub-linear space
• Finite state automata, pushdown automata, regular languages, context-free languages to the Recommended Background Knowledge.

Example of assignment

• Proving the equivalence of a variant of a standard machine to the original version
• Describing an NP-hardness reduction
• Designing an approximation algorithm for an NP-hard problem.

AIMS

Spatial Visualisation is about using and designing effective mechanisms for presenting and exploring the patterns embedded in large and complex data sets. Spatial Visualisation is especially important to spatial decision making, since geographic data sets are both voluminous and rich in structure. By addressing the presentation and interaction with spatial information, this subject complements other topics that deal with the storage and querying of spatial information (e.g. GEOM90018 Spatial Databases), and the processing of spatial information (e.g. GEOM90006 Spatial Analysis). This subject is vital for anyone wishing to work with geographic information systems or spatial databases, or in the area of geographic information science. It will also be of relevance to those with an interest in design, especially graphical and interaction design.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Fundamentals of information visualisation and data graphics; human perception; foundations of user interface design; cartographic design; geovisualisation; exploratory spatial data analysis; evaluation of visualisation interfaces.

AIMS

This subject involves students undertaking professional work experience at a Host Organisation’s premises. Students will work under the supervision of both a member of academic staff and an external supervisor at the Host Organisation.

During the period of work experience, students will be introduced to workplace culture and be offered the opportunity to strengthen their employability. Students will undertake seminars covering topics that will include professional standards of behaviour and ethical conduct, working in teams, time management and workplace networking.

AIMS

With the ever increasing power of modern computers, the use of computer simulation is becoming more common in engineering practice. This course will introduce topics in high performance computing through a number of applications in science and engineering, including problems in linear algebra, partial differential equations (e.g. computational fluid dynamics), molecular dynamics, and agent based modelling. These applications will necessitate the inclusion of some theory regarding numerical methods for ordinary and partial differential equations (e.g. finite difference and finite element methods), but the key focus of the course will be on how large scale problems can be decomposed onto supercomputing architectures and introducing aspects of large scale visualization.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

This course will include study of various numerical methods used in engineering practice and how these applied to solving computational problems and hence programmed for execution on a supercomputer. The course will include both the higher level mathematics as well as practical issues associated with using a supercomputer.

AIMS

Mathematical modelling is important for understanding and engineering many facets of complex systems. The aim of this subject is for students to understand the range and use of mathematical theories and notations in the analysis of discrete systems, how to abstract the key aspects of a problem into a model to handle complexity, and how models can be employed to verify large-scale complex software systems.


INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered will be selected from: Deterministic and stochastic modelling; dynamical systems; cellular automata; agent-based modelling; complex networks; simulation and analysis of complex systems; concurrent systems modelling, analysis and implementation; process algebra; temporal logic and model checking.

AIMS

The subject will introduce the basics of computer networks to students through a study of layered models of computer networks and applications. The first half of the subject deals with data communication protocols in the lower layers of OSI and TCP/IP reference models. The students will be exposed to the working of various fundamental networking technologies such as wireless, LAN, RFID and sensor networks. The second half of the subject deals with the upper layers of the TCP/IP reference model through a study of several Internet applications.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: Introduction to Internet, OSI reference model layers, protocols and services, data transmission basics, interface standards, network topologies, data link protocols, message routing, LANs, WANs, TCP/IP suite, detailed study of common network applications (e.g., email, news, FTP, Web), network management, current and future developments in network hardware and protocols.

AIMS

The aim of this subject is for students to develop familiarity and competence in assessing and designing computer programs for computational efficiency. Although computers manipulate data very quickly, to solve large-scale problems, we must design strategies so that the calculations combine effectively. Over the latter half of the 20th century, an elegant theory of computational efficiency developed. This subject introduces students to the fundamentals of this theory and to many of the classical algorithms and data structures that solve key computational questions. These questions include distance computations in networks, searching items in large collections, and sorting them in order.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include complexity classes and asymptotic notation; empirical analysis of algorithms; abstract data types including queues, trees, priority queues and graphs; algorithmic techniques including brute force, divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming and greedy approaches; space and time trade-offs; and the theoretical limits of algorithm power.

AIMS

The aims for this subject is for students to develop an understanding of approaches to solving moderately complex problems with computers, and to be able to demonstrate proficiency in designing and writing programs. The programming language used is Java.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered will include:

• Java basics
• Console input/output
• Control flow
• Defining classes
• Using object references
• Programming with arrays
• Inheritance
• Polymorphism and abstract classes
• Exception handling
• UML basics
• Interfaces
• Generics.

AIMS

The subject introduces key topics in modern information organization, particularly with regard to structured databases. The well-founded relational theory behind modern structured query language (SQL) engines, has given them as much a place behind the web site of an organization and on the desktop, as they traditionally enjoyed on corporate mainframes. Topics covered may include: the managerial view of data, information and knowledge; conceptual, logical and physical data modelling; normalization and de-normalization; the SQL language; data integrity; transaction processing, data warehousing, web services and organizational memory technologies. This is a core foundation subject for both the Master of Information Systems and Master of Information Technology.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

This subject serves as an introduction to databases and data modelling from a data management perspective. Database design, from conceptual design through to physical implementation will be covered. This will include Entity Relationship modelling, normalisation and de-normalisation and SQL. Additionally the use of databases in various contexts will be explored (web based databases, connecting programs to databases, data warehousing, health contexts, geospatial databases).

AIMS

The subject aims to provide an understanding of the principles on which the Web, Email, DNS and other interesting distributed systems are based. Questions concerning distributed architecture, concepts and design; and how these meet the demands of contemporary distributed applications will be addressed.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: characterization of distributed systems, system models, interprocess communication, remote invocation, indirect communication, operating system support, distributed objects and components, web services, security, distributed file systems, and name services.

AIMS

The subject will explore foundational knowledge in the area of cryptography and information security. The overall aim is to gain an understanding of fundamental cryptographic concepts like encryption and signatures and use it to build and analyse security in computers, communications and networks. This subject covers fundamental concepts in information security on the basis of methods of modern cryptography, including encryption, signatures and hash functions.

This subject is an elective subject in the Master of Engineering (Software). It can also be taken as an advanced elective in Master of Information Technology.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

The subject will be made up of three parts:

• Cryptography: the essentials of public and private key cryptography, stream ciphers, digital signatures and cryptographic hash functions
• Access Control: the essential elements of authentication and authorization; and
• Secure Protocols; which are obtained through cryptographic techniques.

A particular emphasis will be placed on real-life protocols such as Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Kerberos.

Topics drawn from:

• Symmetric key crypto systems
• Public key cryptosystems
• Hash functions
• Authentication
• Secret sharing
• Protocols
• Key Management.

AIMS

Much of the world's knowledge is stored in the form of unstructured data (e.g. text) or implicitly in structured data (e.g. databases). In this subject students will learn algorithms and data structures for extracting, retrieving and analysing explicit knowledge from various data sources, with a focus on the web. Topics include: data encoding and markup, web crawling, regular expressions, document indexing, text retrieval, clustering, classification and prediction, pattern mining, and approaches to evaluation of knowledge technologies.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Introduction to Knowledge Technologies; String search; Genomics; Text processing and search; Web search and retrieval; Introduction to Data Mining; Introduction to basic Probability; Classification; Association Rules; Clustering; Evaluation measures.

Examples of projects that students may completed are:

• A method for automatically predicting the geo-location of a Twitter user on the basis of their posts
• An automatic method for tagging multilingual Wikipedia documents with Wikipedia categories
• A search engine for Twitter data, which takes into account the time stamp of the query and documents
• A search engine for web user forum data
• A search engine servicing mixed monolingual queries (as in monolingual queries from a range of languages) over a large-scale document collection
• Classification and prediction of some real world problems using machine learning techniques.

AIMS

This subject introduces a range of information security consulting services typically provided by leading management consultants in industry. The subject will cover the fundamental principles and practice of security risk assessment, incident response and disaster recovery, knowledge leakage, systems and network security, and policy and culture. Students will develop an appreciation for the kinds of consulting services that can be developed and marketed to industry in each of these areas. Consulting techniques in proposal writing, pricing, and marketing to prospective clients will also be discussed.

This subject supports course-level objectives by allowing students to have in-depth knowledge of the specialist area of information security management. The subject’s assessment tasks include the writing of a comprehensive consulting proposal and research into critical security issues faced by organizations. These tasks will encourage students to work in a team to develop a high-level of achievement in writing, research activities, and presentation skills.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Security principles and techniques discussed are: Models for understanding knowledge leakage, Security Risk Assessment Methods including OCTAVE, Firewall and VPN security scenarios, SANS Incident Response Methodology. Real world cases will be drawn from a range of organization types including critical infrastructure installations in Australia.

AIMS

Software is present in almost every part of our lives, and continues to change the world. Of importance to users is that software is correct, secure, reliable and efficient. The scale and complexity of most software ensures that achieving these qualities is non-trivial. This subject introduces students to the software engineering principles, processes, tools and techniques for analysing, measuring and developing correct, secure, and reliable software.

The subject is one of the foundation subjects for the MC-ENG Master of Engineering (Software) and (Software with Business).

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered may include: methods for static and dynamic software testing; software security, quality and dependability; reliability measurement and engineering; performance measurement and engineering;software problem analysis and fault isolation; and software engineering tools.

This subject involves in-depth investigation of a significant problem related to Computing. The subject also provides students with skills and knowledge for analysing and solving problems, and enhanced written and oral communication skills.

The subject is fundamentally a research-based project, giving a capstone experience and piece of scholarship to students.

AIMS

The aim of this subject is to introduce students to the software engineering principles, processes, tools and techniques for analysing and managing complex software projects.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: software engineering processes; project management; planning and scheduling; estimation and metrics; quality assurance; risk; configuration management; individuals and teams; ethics; change management; and project management tools.

Aims

As we become more dependent on networks in every aspect of our lives the task of protecting those networks becomes harder. The sheer quantity of data and sophistication of the attacks is rapidly making manual analysis infeasible. Security Analytics will examine how we can automate the analysis of such data to better detect and predict security incidents and vulnerabilities within our networks and organisations.

Indicative Content

The subject will first introduce the types of data sources that are relevant to detecting different types of security threats in practice. Indicative examples are operating system logs, web server logs, packet traces, flow records and deep packet inspection traces. The second part of the subject will introduce methods from machine learning that are widely used for cyber security analysis. Specific unsupervised machine learning techniques will be covered in more detail, which include methods for anomaly detection, alarm correlation and intrusion detection. The third part of the subject will introduce some of the theoretical challenges and emerging issues for security analytics research, based on recent trends in the evolution of security threats.

Indicative examples of the emerging challenges and issues that will be studied are privacy‐preserving analytics, adversarial machine learning, concept drift and new applications in monitoring critical infrastructure

Aims

The Internet pervades nearly every aspect of our lives, from banking through to dating, and onto our interactions with government. As more of our lives move online we face ever greater risks to our data and way of life from internet vulnerabilities and attacks. Web Security will examine the fundamentals behind common vulnerabilities and attacks, and will introduce students to ways of mitigating the risks associated with them. It will also examine some of the ethical challenges faced when evaluating security and disclosing vulnerabilities.

Indicative Content

The subject will examine some of the cyber security challenges faced during system implementation and deployment. In particular it will identity common attack vectors, covering in more detail some of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 list of web application vulnerabilities, which may include topics such as injection, cross‐site scripting, session hijacking, and cross‐site request forgery, amongst others. Where appropriate practical examples will be examined to relate theory to practice. The subject will discuss methods for mitigating the risks associated with such vulnerabilities, and may include discussions on distributed denial of service, input validation and sanitization, penetration testing, and the associated ethical and legal constraints, automated vulnerability scanning, and web application firewalls.

AIMS

High integrity systems are systems that must be engineered to a high level of dependability, that is, a high level of safety, security, reliability and performance. In this subject students will explore the aims, principles, techniques and tools that are used to analyse, design and implement dependable systems.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics include: an introduction to high-integrity systems; safety critical systems and safety engineering; mathematical modelling of systems; fault tolerant systems design; design by contract; static verification; and model-based testing.

AIMS

Mobile devices are ubiquitous nowadays. Mobile computing encompasses technologies, devices and software that enable (wireless) access to services anyplace, anytime, and anywhere. This subject will cover fundamental mobile computing techniques and technologies, and explain challenges that are unique to mobile computing. In particular, the development of software for mobile devices requires hands-on experience that cannot be captured using simulation environments or emulators. Mobile device have limited computing power and restrictions on the communication bandwidth, latency and network availability. Equally important, mobile device are also confined by their input mechanisms and their output capabilities such as screen size and resolution. This subject will enable students to develop mobile phone applications and provide them with hands-on experience.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• A survey of mobile operating systems and development environments; including a discussion of Android and iOS
• Development of interfaces for mobile devices and dealing with different input modalities
• Wireless messaging fundamentals such as push and pull, as well as messaging services such as SMS and MMS and their implementation
• Wireless personal area network standards such as Bluetooth, UWB (ultra-wide band) and ZigBee
• Fundamentals of wireless wide area networks (WWAN) and 4G standards such as LTE and WiMAX enabling wireless broadband access, and the underlying code-, frequency- and time-based multiplexing techniques
• Architectures for thin clients
• Routing in mobile ad-hoc networks and vehicular ad-hoc networks
• RFID (radio frequency identification), in particular how to interrogate RFID tags and anti-collision, and how to maintain security and privacy
• In- and outdoor positioning techniques (GPS) for mobile devices, as location-based services are seen to be one of the key emerging application areas in mobile computing
• Location privacy in mobile computing applications
• Mobile agents, i.e., software programs that can migrate between different hosts.

AIMS

With exponential increases in the amount of data becoming available in fields such as finance and biology, and on the web, there is an ever-greater need for methods to detect interesting patterns in that data, and classify novel data points based on curated data sets. Learning techniques provide the means to perform this analysis automatically, and in doing so to enhance understanding of general processes or to predict future events.

Topics covered will include: supervised learning, semi-supervised and active learning, unsupervised learning, kernel methods, probabilistic graphical models, classifier combination, neural networks.

This subject is intended to introduce graduate students to machine learning though a mixture of theoretical methods and hands-on practical experience in applying those methods to real-world problems.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered will include: linear models, support vector machines, random forests, AdaBoost, stacking, query-by-committee, multiview learning, deep neural networks, un/directed probabilistic graphical models (Bayes nets and Markov random fields), hidden Markov models, principal components analysis, kernel methods.

AIMS

The key focus of this subject is the foundations of automated planning and reasoning and their real-world applications. Automated planning is the AI approach to developing agents that make their own decisions and is becoming increasingly popular. Autonomous agents are active entities that perceive their environment, reason, plan and execute appropriate actions to achieve their goals, in service of their users (the real world, human beings, or other agents). This subject shows how this work is relevant for many applications beyond the traditional area of artificial intelligence, such as resource scheduling, logistics, process management, service composition, intelligent sensing and robotics. The subject focuses on the foundations that enable agents to reason autonomously about goals, perception, actions and the knowledge of other agents during collaborative task execution.

This subject is an elective subject in the Master of Science (Computer Science) and Master of Information Technology, in particular for the Distributed Computing and the Computing Specialisations. It can also be taken as an Advanced Elective subject in the Master of Engineering (Software).

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics are drawn from the field of advanced artificial intelligence including:

• Search algorithms and heuristic functions
• Classical (AI) planning
• Probabilistic planning
• Non-deterministic planning
• Reinforcement learning
• Multi-agent and epistemic planning
• Game theory
• Ethics in AI planning

AIMS

At the heart of theoretical computer science are questions of both philosophical and practical importance. What does it mean for a problem to be solvable by computer? What are the limits of computability? Which types of problems can be solved efficiently? What are our options in the face of intractability? This subject covers such questions in the content of a wide-ranging exploration of the nexus between logic, complexity and algorithms, and examines many important (and sometimes surprising) results about the nature of computing.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• Turing machines
• The Church-Turing Thesis
• Decidable languages
• Reducability
• Time Complexity: The classes P and NP, NP-complete problems
• Space complexity: including sub-linear space
• Circuit complexity
• Approximation algorithms
• Probabilistic complexity classes
• Additional topics may include descriptive complexity, interactive proofs, communication complexity, complexity as applied to cryptography
• Space complexity, including sub-linear space
• Finite state automata, pushdown automata, regular languages, context-free languages to the Recommended Background Knowledge.

Example of assignment

• Proving the equivalence of a variant of a standard machine to the original version
• Describing an NP-hardness reduction
• Designing an approximation algorithm for an NP-hard problem.

Aims

As we become more dependent on networks in every aspect of our lives the task of protecting those networks becomes harder. The sheer quantity of data and sophistication of the attacks is rapidly making manual analysis infeasible. Security Analytics will examine how we can automate the analysis of such data to better detect and predict security incidents and vulnerabilities within our networks and organisations.

Indicative Content

The subject will first introduce the types of data sources that are relevant to detecting different types of security threats in practice. Indicative examples are operating system logs, web server logs, packet traces, flow records and deep packet inspection traces. The second part of the subject will introduce methods from machine learning that are widely used for cyber security analysis. Specific unsupervised machine learning techniques will be covered in more detail, which include methods for anomaly detection, alarm correlation and intrusion detection. The third part of the subject will introduce some of the theoretical challenges and emerging issues for security analytics research, based on recent trends in the evolution of security threats.

Indicative examples of the emerging challenges and issues that will be studied are privacy‐preserving analytics, adversarial machine learning, concept drift and new applications in monitoring critical infrastructure

Aims

The Internet pervades nearly every aspect of our lives, from banking through to dating, and onto our interactions with government. As more of our lives move online we face ever greater risks to our data and way of life from internet vulnerabilities and attacks. Web Security will examine the fundamentals behind common vulnerabilities and attacks, and will introduce students to ways of mitigating the risks associated with them. It will also examine some of the ethical challenges faced when evaluating security and disclosing vulnerabilities.

Indicative Content

The subject will examine some of the cyber security challenges faced during system implementation and deployment. In particular it will identity common attack vectors, covering in more detail some of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 list of web application vulnerabilities, which may include topics such as injection, cross‐site scripting, session hijacking, and cross‐site request forgery, amongst others. Where appropriate practical examples will be examined to relate theory to practice. The subject will discuss methods for mitigating the risks associated with such vulnerabilities, and may include discussions on distributed denial of service, input validation and sanitization, penetration testing, and the associated ethical and legal constraints, automated vulnerability scanning, and web application firewalls.

AIMS

This subject involves students undertaking professional work experience at a Host Organisation’s premises. Students will work under the supervision of both a member of academic staff and an external supervisor at the Host Organisation.

During the period of work experience, students will be introduced to workplace culture and be offered the opportunity to strengthen their employability. Students will undertake seminars covering topics that will include professional standards of behaviour and ethical conduct, working in teams, time management and workplace networking.

AIMS

High integrity systems are systems that must be engineered to a high level of dependability, that is, a high level of safety, security, reliability and performance. In this subject students will explore the aims, principles, techniques and tools that are used to analyse, design and implement dependable systems.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics include: an introduction to high-integrity systems; safety critical systems and safety engineering; mathematical modelling of systems; fault tolerant systems design; design by contract; static verification; and model-based testing.

AIMS

The subject will introduce the basics of computer networks to students through a study of layered models of computer networks and applications. The first half of the subject deals with data communication protocols in the lower layers of OSI and TCP/IP reference models. The students will be exposed to the working of various fundamental networking technologies such as wireless, LAN, RFID and sensor networks. The second half of the subject deals with the upper layers of the TCP/IP reference model through a study of several Internet applications.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: Introduction to Internet, OSI reference model layers, protocols and services, data transmission basics, interface standards, network topologies, data link protocols, message routing, LANs, WANs, TCP/IP suite, detailed study of common network applications (e.g., email, news, FTP, Web), network management, current and future developments in network hardware and protocols.

AIMS

The aim of this subject is for students to develop familiarity and competence in assessing and designing computer programs for computational efficiency. Although computers manipulate data very quickly, to solve large-scale problems, we must design strategies so that the calculations combine effectively. Over the latter half of the 20th century, an elegant theory of computational efficiency developed. This subject introduces students to the fundamentals of this theory and to many of the classical algorithms and data structures that solve key computational questions. These questions include distance computations in networks, searching items in large collections, and sorting them in order.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include complexity classes and asymptotic notation; empirical analysis of algorithms; abstract data types including queues, trees, priority queues and graphs; algorithmic techniques including brute force, divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming and greedy approaches; space and time trade-offs; and the theoretical limits of algorithm power.

AIMS

The aims for this subject is for students to develop an understanding of approaches to solving moderately complex problems with computers, and to be able to demonstrate proficiency in designing and writing programs. The programming language used is Java.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered will include:

• Java basics
• Console input/output
• Control flow
• Defining classes
• Using object references
• Programming with arrays
• Inheritance
• Polymorphism and abstract classes
• Exception handling
• UML basics
• Interfaces
• Generics.

AIMS

The subject introduces key topics in modern information organization, particularly with regard to structured databases. The well-founded relational theory behind modern structured query language (SQL) engines, has given them as much a place behind the web site of an organization and on the desktop, as they traditionally enjoyed on corporate mainframes. Topics covered may include: the managerial view of data, information and knowledge; conceptual, logical and physical data modelling; normalization and de-normalization; the SQL language; data integrity; transaction processing, data warehousing, web services and organizational memory technologies. This is a core foundation subject for both the Master of Information Systems and Master of Information Technology.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

This subject serves as an introduction to databases and data modelling from a data management perspective. Database design, from conceptual design through to physical implementation will be covered. This will include Entity Relationship modelling, normalisation and de-normalisation and SQL. Additionally the use of databases in various contexts will be explored (web based databases, connecting programs to databases, data warehousing, health contexts, geospatial databases).

AIMS

The subject aims to provide an understanding of the principles on which the Web, Email, DNS and other interesting distributed systems are based. Questions concerning distributed architecture, concepts and design; and how these meet the demands of contemporary distributed applications will be addressed.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: characterization of distributed systems, system models, interprocess communication, remote invocation, indirect communication, operating system support, distributed objects and components, web services, security, distributed file systems, and name services.

AIMS

The aims for this subject is for students to develop an understanding of the main algorithms used in natural language processing and text retrieval, for use in a diverse range of applications including search engines, machine translation, text mining, sentiment analysis, and question answering. Topics to be covered include text pre-processing, part-of-speech tagging, context-free grammars, n-gram language modelling, and text classification. The programming language used is Python.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered may include:

• Text classification algorithms such as logistic regression
• Vector space models for natural language semantics
• Structured prediction, Hidden Markov models
• N-gram language modelling, including statistical estimation
• Alignment of parallel corpora
• Term indexing, term weighting for information retrieval
• Query expansion and relevance feedback

AIMS

The subject will explore foundational knowledge in the area of cryptography and information security. The overall aim is to gain an understanding of fundamental cryptographic concepts like encryption and signatures and use it to build and analyse security in computers, communications and networks. This subject covers fundamental concepts in information security on the basis of methods of modern cryptography, including encryption, signatures and hash functions.

This subject is an elective subject in the Master of Engineering (Software). It can also be taken as an advanced elective in Master of Information Technology.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

The subject will be made up of three parts:

• Cryptography: the essentials of public and private key cryptography, stream ciphers, digital signatures and cryptographic hash functions
• Access Control: the essential elements of authentication and authorization; and
• Secure Protocols; which are obtained through cryptographic techniques.

A particular emphasis will be placed on real-life protocols such as Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Kerberos.

Topics drawn from:

• Symmetric key crypto systems
• Public key cryptosystems
• Hash functions
• Authentication
• Secret sharing
• Protocols
• Key Management.

AIMS

Good craftsmen know their tools, and compilers are amongst the most important tools that programmers use. There are many ways in which familiarity with compilers helps programmers.

For example, knowledge of semantic analysis helps programmers understand error messages, and knowledge of code generation techniques helps programmers debug problems at assembly language level. The technologies used in compiler development are also useful when implementing other kinds of programs. The concepts and tools used in the analysis phases of a compiler are useful for any program whose input has a structure that is non-trivial to recognize, while those used in the synthesis phases are useful for any program that generates commands for another system. This subject provides an understanding of the main principles of programming language implementation, as well as first hand experience of the application of those principles.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

The subject describes how compilers analyse source programs, how they translate them to target programs, and what tools are available to support these tasks. Topics covered include compiler structures; lexical analysis; syntax analysis; semantic analysis; intermediate representations of programs; code generation; and optimisation.

AIMS

Declarative programming languages provide elegant and powerful programming paradigms which every programmer should know. This subject presents declarative programming languages and techniques.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• The dangers of destructive update
• Functional programming
• Recursion
• Strong type systems
• Parametric polymorphism
• Algebraic types
• Type classes
• Defensive programming practice
• Higher order programming
• Currying and partial application
• Lazy evaluation
• Monads
• Logic programming
• Unification and resolution
• Nondeterminism, search, and backtracking

AIMS

Much of the world's knowledge is stored in the form of unstructured data (e.g. text) or implicitly in structured data (e.g. databases). In this subject students will learn algorithms and data structures for extracting, retrieving and analysing explicit knowledge from various data sources, with a focus on the web. Topics include: data encoding and markup, web crawling, regular expressions, document indexing, text retrieval, clustering, classification and prediction, pattern mining, and approaches to evaluation of knowledge technologies.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Introduction to Knowledge Technologies; String search; Genomics; Text processing and search; Web search and retrieval; Introduction to Data Mining; Introduction to basic Probability; Classification; Association Rules; Clustering; Evaluation measures.

Examples of projects that students may completed are:

• A method for automatically predicting the geo-location of a Twitter user on the basis of their posts
• An automatic method for tagging multilingual Wikipedia documents with Wikipedia categories
• A search engine for Twitter data, which takes into account the time stamp of the query and documents
• A search engine for web user forum data
• A search engine servicing mixed monolingual queries (as in monolingual queries from a range of languages) over a large-scale document collection
• Classification and prediction of some real world problems using machine learning techniques.

AIMS

Many applications require access to very large amounts of data. These applications often require reliability (data must not be lost even in the presence of hardware failures), and the ability to retrieve and process the data very efficiently.

The subject will cover the technologies used in advanced database systems. Topics covered will include: transactions, including concurrency, reliability (the ACID properties) and performance; and indexing of both structured and unstructured data. The subject will also cover additional topics such as: uncertain data; Xquery; the Semantic Web and the Resource Description Framework; dataspaces and data provenance; datacentres; and data archiving.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics include:

• Introduction to High Performance Database Systems
• Issues of Performance and Reliability
• Transaction Processing
• Recovery from Failures
• Map Reduce Models.

AIMS

With exponential increases in the amount of data becoming available in fields such as finance and biology, and on the web, there is an ever-greater need for methods to detect interesting patterns in that data, and classify novel data points based on curated data sets. Learning techniques provide the means to perform this analysis automatically, and in doing so to enhance understanding of general processes or to predict future events.

Topics covered will include: supervised learning, semi-supervised and active learning, unsupervised learning, kernel methods, probabilistic graphical models, classifier combination, neural networks.

This subject is intended to introduce graduate students to machine learning though a mixture of theoretical methods and hands-on practical experience in applying those methods to real-world problems.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered will include: linear models, support vector machines, random forests, AdaBoost, stacking, query-by-committee, multiview learning, deep neural networks, un/directed probabilistic graphical models (Bayes nets and Markov random fields), hidden Markov models, principal components analysis, kernel methods.

AIMS

This subject asks the question ‘what makes a successful entrepreneur?’ It’s a complex topic and the subject of heated debate in the business, education and the economics communities, and also in discussions of international development, sustainability and social philanthropy. The way we will approach this subject is by looking at the behaviours, attitudes, values and skills that entrepreneurs need to create the climate for successful innovation - whether they are entrepreneurs starting new ventures or ‘Entrepreneurs’ in large organisations. What you will discover in this subject is that innovation isn’t just about having great ideas, and that entrepreneurs aren’t who you think they are. The subject will do this by looking at topics such as how innovation works and how it can be managed, different modes of entrepreneurialism, how entrepreneurs think and how to create, build and sustain an entrepreneurial business.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

The subject comprises 5 themes:

• ’Making New Things’, a survey of current thinking about innovation and entrepreneurship
• ’The Customers’ Point of View’, looking at techniques for understanding customers and consumer-led innovation
• ’Everything is Negotiable’, including work done at the Harvard negotiation project on win/win negotiation and emotional negotiation
• ’Everyone Needs Help’, exploring the ways entrepreneurs create support networks to help them be successful innovation and mentoring
• ’Inspire People’ - an examination of the importance of vision and commitment in innovation and entrepreneurship.

The subject involves advanced learning activities including case-based, experiential, and team-based approaches.

AIMS

The aim of this subject is to introduce students to the software engineering principles, processes, tools and techniques for analysing and managing complex software projects.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: software engineering processes; project management; planning and scheduling; estimation and metrics; quality assurance; risk; configuration management; individuals and teams; ethics; change management; and project management tools.

This subject involves in-depth investigation of a significant problem related to distributed computing. The subject also provides students with skills and knowledge for analysing and solving problems, and enhanced written and oral communication skills.

The subject is fundamentally a research-based project, giving a capstone experience and piece of scholarship to students.

AIMS

This subject involves an in-depth innovation investigation under the supervision of a member of the academic staff and in the context of the University's engagement initiatives. Students working in groups will be required to perform research, customer and problem discovery, ideation, concept creation and validation, and technical implementation for a real-world challenge. The subject also provides students with skills and knowledge for improving written and oral communication.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Indicative content includes innovation methodology, customer & problem discovery, customer & problem validation, innovation experiments, and innovation presentations.

AIMS

Mobile devices are ubiquitous nowadays. Mobile computing encompasses technologies, devices and software that enable (wireless) access to services anyplace, anytime, and anywhere. This subject will cover fundamental mobile computing techniques and technologies, and explain challenges that are unique to mobile computing. In particular, the development of software for mobile devices requires hands-on experience that cannot be captured using simulation environments or emulators. Mobile device have limited computing power and restrictions on the communication bandwidth, latency and network availability. Equally important, mobile device are also confined by their input mechanisms and their output capabilities such as screen size and resolution. This subject will enable students to develop mobile phone applications and provide them with hands-on experience.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• A survey of mobile operating systems and development environments; including a discussion of Android and iOS
• Development of interfaces for mobile devices and dealing with different input modalities
• Wireless messaging fundamentals such as push and pull, as well as messaging services such as SMS and MMS and their implementation
• Wireless personal area network standards such as Bluetooth, UWB (ultra-wide band) and ZigBee
• Fundamentals of wireless wide area networks (WWAN) and 4G standards such as LTE and WiMAX enabling wireless broadband access, and the underlying code-, frequency- and time-based multiplexing techniques
• Architectures for thin clients
• Routing in mobile ad-hoc networks and vehicular ad-hoc networks
• RFID (radio frequency identification), in particular how to interrogate RFID tags and anti-collision, and how to maintain security and privacy
• In- and outdoor positioning techniques (GPS) for mobile devices, as location-based services are seen to be one of the key emerging application areas in mobile computing
• Location privacy in mobile computing applications
• Mobile agents, i.e., software programs that can migrate between different hosts.

AIMS

The Internet, World Wide Web, bank networks, mobile phone networks and many others are examples for Distributed Systems. Distributed Systems rely on a key set of algorithms and data structures to run efficiently and effectively. In this subject, we learn these key algorithms that professionals work with while dealing with various systems. Clock synchronization, leader election, mutual exclusion, and replication are just a few areas were multiple well known algorithms were developed during the evolution of the Distributed Computing paradigm.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include:

• Synchronous and asynchronous network algorithms that address resource allocation, communication
• Consensus among distributed processes
• Distributed data structures
• Data consistency
• Deadlock detection
• Lader election, and
• Global snapshots issues.

AIMS

The growing popularity of the Internet along with the availability of powerful computers and high-speed networks as low-cost commodity components are changing the way we do parallel and distributed computing (PDC). Cluster and Cloud Computing are two approaches for PDC. Clusters employ cost-effective commodity components for building powerful computers within local-area networks. Recently, “cloud computing” has emerged as the new paradigm for delivery of computing as services in a pay-as-you-go-model via the Internet. These approaches are used to tackle may research problems with particular focus on "big data" challenges that arise across a variety of domains.

Some examples of scientific and industrial applications that use these computing platforms are: system simulations, weather forecasting, climate prediction, automobile modelling and design, high-energy physics, movie rendering, business intelligence, big data computing, and delivering various business and consumer applications on a pay-as-you-go basis.

This subject will enable students to understand these technologies, their goals, characteristics, and limitations, and develop both middleware supporting them and scalable applications supported by these platforms.

This subject is an elective subject in the Master of Information Technology.   It can also be taken as an Advanced Elective subject in the Master of Engineering (Software).

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• Cluster computing: elements of parallel and distributed computing, cluster systems architecture, resource management and scheduling, single system image, parallel programming paradigms, cluster programming with MPI
• Utility computing: foundations and grid computing technologies
• Cloud computing: cloud platforms, Virtualization, Cloud Application Programming Models (Task, Thread, and MapReduce), Cloud applications, and future directions in utility and cloud computing
• "Big data" processing and analytics in distributed environments.

AIMS

The subject aims to introduce students to parallel algorithms and their analysis. Fundamental principles of parallel computing are discussed. Various parallel architectures and programming platforms are introduced. Parallel algorithms for different architectures, as well as parallel algorithms addressing specific scientific problems are critically analysed.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics include: principles of parallel computing, PRAM model, PRAM algorithms, parallel architectures, OpenMP, shared memory algorithms, systolic algorithms, parallel communication patterns, PVM/MPI, scientific applications, hypercube, graph embeddings and extended parallel computing models.

AIMS

Much of the world's knowledge is stored in the form of unstructured data (e.g. text) or implicitly in structured data (e.g. databases). In this subject students will learn algorithms and data structures for extracting, retrieving and analysing explicit knowledge from various data sources, with a focus on the web. Topics include: data encoding and markup, web crawling, regular expressions, document indexing, text retrieval, clustering, classification and prediction, pattern mining, and approaches to evaluation of knowledge technologies.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Introduction to Knowledge Technologies; String search; Genomics; Text processing and search; Web search and retrieval; Introduction to Data Mining; Introduction to basic Probability; Classification; Association Rules; Clustering; Evaluation measures.

Examples of projects that students may completed are:

• A method for automatically predicting the geo-location of a Twitter user on the basis of their posts
• An automatic method for tagging multilingual Wikipedia documents with Wikipedia categories
• A search engine for Twitter data, which takes into account the time stamp of the query and documents
• A search engine for web user forum data
• A search engine servicing mixed monolingual queries (as in monolingual queries from a range of languages) over a large-scale document collection
• Classification and prediction of some real world problems using machine learning techniques.

AIMS

Many applications require access to very large amounts of data. These applications often require reliability (data must not be lost even in the presence of hardware failures), and the ability to retrieve and process the data very efficiently.

The subject will cover the technologies used in advanced database systems. Topics covered will include: transactions, including concurrency, reliability (the ACID properties) and performance; and indexing of both structured and unstructured data. The subject will also cover additional topics such as: uncertain data; Xquery; the Semantic Web and the Resource Description Framework; dataspaces and data provenance; datacentres; and data archiving.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics include:

• Introduction to High Performance Database Systems
• Issues of Performance and Reliability
• Transaction Processing
• Recovery from Failures
• Map Reduce Models.

AIMS

The key focus of this subject is the foundations of automated planning and reasoning and their real-world applications. Automated planning is the AI approach to developing agents that make their own decisions and is becoming increasingly popular. Autonomous agents are active entities that perceive their environment, reason, plan and execute appropriate actions to achieve their goals, in service of their users (the real world, human beings, or other agents). This subject shows how this work is relevant for many applications beyond the traditional area of artificial intelligence, such as resource scheduling, logistics, process management, service composition, intelligent sensing and robotics. The subject focuses on the foundations that enable agents to reason autonomously about goals, perception, actions and the knowledge of other agents during collaborative task execution.

This subject is an elective subject in the Master of Science (Computer Science) and Master of Information Technology, in particular for the Distributed Computing and the Computing Specialisations. It can also be taken as an Advanced Elective subject in the Master of Engineering (Software).

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics are drawn from the field of advanced artificial intelligence including:

• Search algorithms and heuristic functions
• Classical (AI) planning
• Probabilistic planning
• Non-deterministic planning
• Reinforcement learning
• Multi-agent and epistemic planning
• Game theory
• Ethics in AI planning

AIM

With exponential growth in data generated from sensor data streams, search engines, spam filters, medical services, online analysis of financial data streams, and so forth, there is demand for fast monitoring and storage of huge amounts of data in real-time. Traditional technologies were not aimed to such fast streams of data. Usually they required data to be stored and indexed before it could be processed.

Stream computing was created to tackle those problems that require processing and classification of continuous, high volume of data streams. It is highly used on applications such as Twitter, Facebook, High Frequency Trading and so forth.

This subject will focus on the algorithms and data structures behind the analysis and management of streams. Theoretical underpinnings are emphasized, with implementation of some fundamental algorithms.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• Why stream processing is important
• Hash functions, probability, and fundamental data structures
• Data stream model
• Data stream algorithms: Sampling, sketching, distinct items, frequent items, frequency moments, etc.
• Data stream mining: clustering, histograms, query tracking
• Graph streams: connectivity, matchings, covers.
  

AIMS

At the heart of theoretical computer science are questions of both philosophical and practical importance. What does it mean for a problem to be solvable by computer? What are the limits of computability? Which types of problems can be solved efficiently? What are our options in the face of intractability? This subject covers such questions in the content of a wide-ranging exploration of the nexus between logic, complexity and algorithms, and examines many important (and sometimes surprising) results about the nature of computing.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• Turing machines
• The Church-Turing Thesis
• Decidable languages
• Reducability
• Time Complexity: The classes P and NP, NP-complete problems
• Space complexity: including sub-linear space
• Circuit complexity
• Approximation algorithms
• Probabilistic complexity classes
• Additional topics may include descriptive complexity, interactive proofs, communication complexity, complexity as applied to cryptography
• Space complexity, including sub-linear space
• Finite state automata, pushdown automata, regular languages, context-free languages to the Recommended Background Knowledge.

Example of assignment

• Proving the equivalence of a variant of a standard machine to the original version
• Describing an NP-hardness reduction
• Designing an approximation algorithm for an NP-hard problem.

AIMS

This subject involves students undertaking professional work experience at a Host Organisation’s premises. Students will work under the supervision of both a member of academic staff and an external supervisor at the Host Organisation.

During the period of work experience, students will be introduced to workplace culture and be offered the opportunity to strengthen their employability. Students will undertake seminars covering topics that will include professional standards of behaviour and ethical conduct, working in teams, time management and workplace networking.

AIMS

Spatial Visualisation is about using and designing effective mechanisms for presenting and exploring the patterns embedded in large and complex data sets. Spatial Visualisation is especially important to spatial decision making, since geographic data sets are both voluminous and rich in structure. By addressing the presentation and interaction with spatial information, this subject complements other topics that deal with the storage and querying of spatial information (e.g. GEOM90018 Spatial Databases), and the processing of spatial information (e.g. GEOM90006 Spatial Analysis). This subject is vital for anyone wishing to work with geographic information systems or spatial databases, or in the area of geographic information science. It will also be of relevance to those with an interest in design, especially graphical and interaction design.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Fundamentals of information visualisation and data graphics; human perception; foundations of user interface design; cartographic design; geovisualisation; exploratory spatial data analysis; evaluation of visualisation interfaces.

AIMS

This is an introductory subject to Geograhpic Information Systems (GIS) and Geographic Information Science, both practically and theoretically, at postgraduate level. Spatial information is ubiquitous in decision making. Be it in urban planning, in traffic or disaster management, in way-finding, in issues of the environment, public health and sustainability, or in economic contexts: the question of 'where' is a fundamental one. Spatial information is also special in many respects, such as its dimensionality and autocorrelation, its volume, its links to the Internet of Things (things are always located somewhere), to social networks (which exist in space and time), to streaming data from sensors everywhere, or to intelligent (location-aware) systems. The subject provides the foundations for more specialized subjects on spatial data management, spatial data analysis and spatial data visualization, and is of particular relevance to people wishing to establish a career in the spatial information industry, the environmental or planning industry. It is also suited for every postgraduate student who is looking for solid GIS skills.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

We will discuss representations and analysis of this information in spatial information technologies, from location-based services to geographic information systems. Topics addressed are observing the environment; spatial and spatiotemporal data representations, spatial analysis and spatial communication. The practical part will introduce to GIS in a hands-on manner, starting in individual software training and then applying new skills in a team-designed GIS project.

AIMS

With the ever increasing power of modern computers, the use of computer simulation is becoming more common in engineering practice. This course will introduce topics in high performance computing through a number of applications in science and engineering, including problems in linear algebra, partial differential equations (e.g. computational fluid dynamics), molecular dynamics, and agent based modelling. These applications will necessitate the inclusion of some theory regarding numerical methods for ordinary and partial differential equations (e.g. finite difference and finite element methods), but the key focus of the course will be on how large scale problems can be decomposed onto supercomputing architectures and introducing aspects of large scale visualization.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

This course will include study of various numerical methods used in engineering practice and how these applied to solving computational problems and hence programmed for execution on a supercomputer. The course will include both the higher level mathematics as well as practical issues associated with using a supercomputer.

AIMS

The subject will introduce the basics of computer networks to students through a study of layered models of computer networks and applications. The first half of the subject deals with data communication protocols in the lower layers of OSI and TCP/IP reference models. The students will be exposed to the working of various fundamental networking technologies such as wireless, LAN, RFID and sensor networks. The second half of the subject deals with the upper layers of the TCP/IP reference model through a study of several Internet applications.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: Introduction to Internet, OSI reference model layers, protocols and services, data transmission basics, interface standards, network topologies, data link protocols, message routing, LANs, WANs, TCP/IP suite, detailed study of common network applications (e.g., email, news, FTP, Web), network management, current and future developments in network hardware and protocols.

AIMS

The aim of this subject is for students to develop familiarity and competence in assessing and designing computer programs for computational efficiency. Although computers manipulate data very quickly, to solve large-scale problems, we must design strategies so that the calculations combine effectively. Over the latter half of the 20th century, an elegant theory of computational efficiency developed. This subject introduces students to the fundamentals of this theory and to many of the classical algorithms and data structures that solve key computational questions. These questions include distance computations in networks, searching items in large collections, and sorting them in order.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include complexity classes and asymptotic notation; empirical analysis of algorithms; abstract data types including queues, trees, priority queues and graphs; algorithmic techniques including brute force, divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming and greedy approaches; space and time trade-offs; and the theoretical limits of algorithm power.

AIMS

The aims for this subject is for students to develop an understanding of approaches to solving moderately complex problems with computers, and to be able to demonstrate proficiency in designing and writing programs. The programming language used is Java.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered will include:

• Java basics
• Console input/output
• Control flow
• Defining classes
• Using object references
• Programming with arrays
• Inheritance
• Polymorphism and abstract classes
• Exception handling
• UML basics
• Interfaces
• Generics.

AIMS

The subject introduces key topics in modern information organization, particularly with regard to structured databases. The well-founded relational theory behind modern structured query language (SQL) engines, has given them as much a place behind the web site of an organization and on the desktop, as they traditionally enjoyed on corporate mainframes. Topics covered may include: the managerial view of data, information and knowledge; conceptual, logical and physical data modelling; normalization and de-normalization; the SQL language; data integrity; transaction processing, data warehousing, web services and organizational memory technologies. This is a core foundation subject for both the Master of Information Systems and Master of Information Technology.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

This subject serves as an introduction to databases and data modelling from a data management perspective. Database design, from conceptual design through to physical implementation will be covered. This will include Entity Relationship modelling, normalisation and de-normalisation and SQL. Additionally the use of databases in various contexts will be explored (web based databases, connecting programs to databases, data warehousing, health contexts, geospatial databases).

New interaction technologies continuously expand the range of input and output methods available in human-computer interaction. Interaction is no longer limited to desktop computers, windows-based interfaces, or keyboards and mice. Interfaces now include tangible communication, mobile and ubiquitous devices, ambient displays and sensing in public spaces. Novel interactions require specific methods to enable their conception, design, evaluation and use in creating interactive systems. This subject will introduce a selection of different interaction media and examine the specific methods used to create interactive systems with them. Underlying these specific methods are general conceptual approaches to design that are focussed on innovative or disruptive interactions between users and technology. Case studies will cover both fundamental research and industrial design practice. An emphasis is placed on developing the skills to critique and adapt different interface technologies and paradigms, to develop prototype systems, and evaluate new interactions to ensure that they meet their intended goals.

User Experience (UX) means the way we respond to technology, including our practical, intellectual, emotional and affective responses. UX is widely recognised as a major determinant of successful technology outcomes, and it provides the design inspiration behind some of the most successful innovations in digital technologies that define the present era. This subject concerns the methods and techniques that are used to identify what characterises UX and how you can recognise, measure and evaluate it in a variety of contexts. This entails a deep understanding of the psychological and social theories underlying UX, combined with practical knowledge of the various industry methods and tools currently in use. In terms of practice, an emphasis is placed on learning the skills needed to design, justify and conduct appropriate evaluations, and the interpretation of findings. In terms of theory, special emphasis is placed on how to identify and evaluate the various facets of UX, across a range of social and work-based settings, and across a range of technologies.

This subject introduces students to the theories and methods used to understand people and settings for designing technical systems. The subject will equip students with the knowledge and skills needed to gather information about people and activities, to understand the intended users of the systems, and to use the insights gained from this process to identify design requirements. This subject is for students interested in a career in user experience (UX) design, interaction design, service design, usability engineering, and human-computer interaction research. It will be of value to students aiming to work in all areas of information technology development and implementation.

Aims

The Web has radically changed society, politics, science, business and the way people work. This subject introduces the concepts, technologies and standards underpinning the World Wide web and its applications. You will learn to apply tools and techniques required to model, design and develop applications for the web that can run on one or more platforms. Topics covered include the infrastructure of the web; the architecture of web applications; data representation and structure of the web; modeling and development processes for Web applications; security and social aspects of the Web. This subject assumes background programming skills and the basics of algorithmic thinking. These skills are combined with incremental and iterative development to develop functional and creative web applications that can support specific requirements or aspects of human work or social behaviour.

Indicative Content

Fundamental aspects of the Web: client server model, modelling of web applications (modelling data, content, functional aspects and navigation), incremental and iterative design and development of web applications, usability aspects and testing of web applications, and web application security.

Examples of Web applications that students develop are:

• A location-aware application for finding recommended restaurants nearby
• A social app for hosting and developing HTML5 games
• An application that lets users upload photos of themselves to see what they’d look like with different hairstyles

Information architecture encompasses the processes for investigating and designing the interfaces for large-scale information systems. It involves planning and creating the search methods and browsing mechanisms that users will exploit to discover the information that they need. This subject will introduce a range of methods for discovering the ways in which users conceptualize the structure of the information that they are trying to navigate and discover, as well as theories on how information is organised. The subject explains how to analyse data about an information system’s use and from that analysis create concrete models of both cognitive and information behaviour. These models will be used to inform effective designs for discovery tools. Evaluation methods for testing the effectiveness of information discovery tools will also be taught. Good information architecture is the lynch-pin for modern information systems, from corporate websites to online libraries and public services. Throughout the subject, theory and practice will be closely interconnected, and design decisions will have to be justified with both empirical evidence and fundamental principles from information theory and science.

Social Computing is a field of study that investigates computing techniques and systems to support, mediate, and understand aspects of social behaviours. Understanding the principles and foundations of Social Computing is important because of the rapid proliferation of social systems, particularly those aimed at end-users (e.g., social networking websites, crowdsourcing platforms, knowledge sharing platforms, etc.). This subject will introduce you to key concepts and principles of Social Computing, and provide you with training to investigate how these systems influence human behaviours, how to improve current implementations, and how to identify ways to better support social activities and interactions.

This subject involves in-depth investigation of a significant problem related to Human-Computer Interaction or a related discipline. The subject also provides students with skills and knowledge for analysing and solving problems, and enhanced written and oral communication skills. Under the supervision and guidance of an academic researcher, students are required to design and conduct a research investigation. This would typically involve a literature review, experimentation and data collection, and data analysis. The results will be reported as a thesis and in a public presentation. In some instances, it is expected that the results will also be submitted for publication in a conference or journal.

AIMS

The aim of this subject is to introduce students to the software engineering principles, processes, tools and techniques for analysing and managing complex software projects.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: software engineering processes; project management; planning and scheduling; estimation and metrics; quality assurance; risk; configuration management; individuals and teams; ethics; change management; and project management tools.

AIMS

The subject aims to provide an understanding of the principles on which the Web, Email, DNS and other interesting distributed systems are based. Questions concerning distributed architecture, concepts and design; and how these meet the demands of contemporary distributed applications will be addressed.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: characterization of distributed systems, system models, interprocess communication, remote invocation, indirect communication, operating system support, distributed objects and components, web services, security, distributed file systems, and name services.

AIMS

Mobile devices are ubiquitous nowadays. Mobile computing encompasses technologies, devices and software that enable (wireless) access to services anyplace, anytime, and anywhere. This subject will cover fundamental mobile computing techniques and technologies, and explain challenges that are unique to mobile computing. In particular, the development of software for mobile devices requires hands-on experience that cannot be captured using simulation environments or emulators. Mobile device have limited computing power and restrictions on the communication bandwidth, latency and network availability. Equally important, mobile device are also confined by their input mechanisms and their output capabilities such as screen size and resolution. This subject will enable students to develop mobile phone applications and provide them with hands-on experience.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• A survey of mobile operating systems and development environments; including a discussion of Android and iOS
• Development of interfaces for mobile devices and dealing with different input modalities
• Wireless messaging fundamentals such as push and pull, as well as messaging services such as SMS and MMS and their implementation
• Wireless personal area network standards such as Bluetooth, UWB (ultra-wide band) and ZigBee
• Fundamentals of wireless wide area networks (WWAN) and 4G standards such as LTE and WiMAX enabling wireless broadband access, and the underlying code-, frequency- and time-based multiplexing techniques
• Architectures for thin clients
• Routing in mobile ad-hoc networks and vehicular ad-hoc networks
• RFID (radio frequency identification), in particular how to interrogate RFID tags and anti-collision, and how to maintain security and privacy
• In- and outdoor positioning techniques (GPS) for mobile devices, as location-based services are seen to be one of the key emerging application areas in mobile computing
• Location privacy in mobile computing applications
• Mobile agents, i.e., software programs that can migrate between different hosts.

AIMS

Much of the world's knowledge is stored in the form of unstructured data (e.g. text) or implicitly in structured data (e.g. databases). In this subject students will learn algorithms and data structures for extracting, retrieving and analysing explicit knowledge from various data sources, with a focus on the web. Topics include: data encoding and markup, web crawling, regular expressions, document indexing, text retrieval, clustering, classification and prediction, pattern mining, and approaches to evaluation of knowledge technologies.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Introduction to Knowledge Technologies; String search; Genomics; Text processing and search; Web search and retrieval; Introduction to Data Mining; Introduction to basic Probability; Classification; Association Rules; Clustering; Evaluation measures.

Examples of projects that students may completed are:

• A method for automatically predicting the geo-location of a Twitter user on the basis of their posts
• An automatic method for tagging multilingual Wikipedia documents with Wikipedia categories
• A search engine for Twitter data, which takes into account the time stamp of the query and documents
• A search engine for web user forum data
• A search engine servicing mixed monolingual queries (as in monolingual queries from a range of languages) over a large-scale document collection
• Classification and prediction of some real world problems using machine learning techniques.

AIMS

This subject involves students undertaking professional work experience at a Host Organisation’s premises. Students will work under the supervision of both a member of academic staff and an external supervisor at the Host Organisation.

During the period of work experience, students will be introduced to workplace culture and be offered the opportunity to strengthen their employability. Students will undertake seminars covering topics that will include professional standards of behaviour and ethical conduct, working in teams, time management and workplace networking.

AIMS

Spatial Visualisation is about using and designing effective mechanisms for presenting and exploring the patterns embedded in large and complex data sets. Spatial Visualisation is especially important to spatial decision making, since geographic data sets are both voluminous and rich in structure. By addressing the presentation and interaction with spatial information, this subject complements other topics that deal with the storage and querying of spatial information (e.g. GEOM90018 Spatial Databases), and the processing of spatial information (e.g. GEOM90006 Spatial Analysis). This subject is vital for anyone wishing to work with geographic information systems or spatial databases, or in the area of geographic information science. It will also be of relevance to those with an interest in design, especially graphical and interaction design.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Fundamentals of information visualisation and data graphics; human perception; foundations of user interface design; cartographic design; geovisualisation; exploratory spatial data analysis; evaluation of visualisation interfaces.

AIMS

This is an introductory subject to Geograhpic Information Systems (GIS) and Geographic Information Science, both practically and theoretically, at postgraduate level. Spatial information is ubiquitous in decision making. Be it in urban planning, in traffic or disaster management, in way-finding, in issues of the environment, public health and sustainability, or in economic contexts: the question of 'where' is a fundamental one. Spatial information is also special in many respects, such as its dimensionality and autocorrelation, its volume, its links to the Internet of Things (things are always located somewhere), to social networks (which exist in space and time), to streaming data from sensors everywhere, or to intelligent (location-aware) systems. The subject provides the foundations for more specialized subjects on spatial data management, spatial data analysis and spatial data visualization, and is of particular relevance to people wishing to establish a career in the spatial information industry, the environmental or planning industry. It is also suited for every postgraduate student who is looking for solid GIS skills.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

We will discuss representations and analysis of this information in spatial information technologies, from location-based services to geographic information systems. Topics addressed are observing the environment; spatial and spatiotemporal data representations, spatial analysis and spatial communication. The practical part will introduce to GIS in a hands-on manner, starting in individual software training and then applying new skills in a team-designed GIS project.

AIMS

This subject familiarises students with core informatics tools and methods used in eHealth, translational research, simulation and modelling, and biomedical knowledge management. It also provides students with insights into research trends in the field of biomedical informatics.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Five major topics will be covered in lectures, tutorials and hands-on computer labs:

1. How can we manage clinical data? Students will gain exposure to: informatics tools and methods for ehealth and broadband-enabled health, including shareable medical records, telehealth, mobile health; terminologies, coding and standards e.g. SNOMED-CT, HL7A and secure messaging, medical imaging (DICOM) and lab data (LOINC); and clinical decision support systems.

2. How can we integrate clinical data with molecular, population, environmental and other data sources? Students will gain exposure to: informatics tools and methods for translational research, including genomic data sources (microarray and next generation DNA sequencing); data integration and analysis platforms such as BioGrid, CaBIG. Gene ontology; and clinical research informatics (clinical trials).

3. How can we use computer models to simulate human biology and disease? Students will gain exposure to: informatics tools and methods for simulation and modelling; anatomical ontologies (FMA); VPH and Physiome platform; and infodemiology tools, systems medicine, virtual environments for clinical practice.

4. How can we manage health and biomedical knowledge? Students will gain exposure to: informatics tools and methods for biomedical informatics research, including bibliographic and web information; MeSH, and databases; biomedical text mining; social and semantic web for health and life sciences; technology assessment; and systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

5. How can we develop the next generation of health and bioinformatics tools and methods? Students will gain exposure to trends and advances, including extreme phenotyping, informatics for personalised, regenerative and nanomedicine.

Information architecture encompasses the processes for investigating and designing the interfaces for large-scale information systems. It involves planning and creating the search methods and browsing mechanisms that users will exploit to discover the information that they need. This subject will introduce a range of methods for discovering the ways in which users conceptualize the structure of the information that they are trying to navigate and discover, as well as theories on how information is organised. The subject explains how to analyse data about an information system’s use and from that analysis create concrete models of both cognitive and information behaviour. These models will be used to inform effective designs for discovery tools. Evaluation methods for testing the effectiveness of information discovery tools will also be taught. Good information architecture is the lynch-pin for modern information systems, from corporate websites to online libraries and public services. Throughout the subject, theory and practice will be closely interconnected, and design decisions will have to be justified with both empirical evidence and fundamental principles from information theory and science.

Social Computing is a field of study that investigates computing techniques and systems to support, mediate, and understand aspects of social behaviours. Understanding the principles and foundations of Social Computing is important because of the rapid proliferation of social systems, particularly those aimed at end-users (e.g., social networking websites, crowdsourcing platforms, knowledge sharing platforms, etc.). This subject will introduce you to key concepts and principles of Social Computing, and provide you with training to investigate how these systems influence human behaviours, how to improve current implementations, and how to identify ways to better support social activities and interactions.

This subject can only be taken following successful completion of INFO90008 Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Project with a score of 75 or above, and provides students the ability to conduct a substantial and in-depth capstone project. The subject involves in-depth investigation of a significant problem related to Human Computer Interaction or a related discipline. The subject also provides students with skills and knowledge for analysing and solving problems, and enhanced written and oral communication skills. Under the supervision and guidance of an academic researcher, students are required to design and conduct a substantial research investigation. This would typically involve an extensive literature review, meticulous experimentation and data collection, and thorough data analysis. The results will be reported as a thesis and in a public presentation. In some instances, it is expected that the results will also be submitted for publication in a conference or journal.

AIMS

This subject focuses on how Knowledge Management (KM) and a range of Information Technologies and analysis techniques are used to support KM initiatives in organisations. Technologies likely to be considered are: collaborative and social media tools; corporate knowledge directories; data warehouses and other repositories of organizational memory; business intelligence including data-mining; process automation; workflow and document management. The emphasis is on high-level decision-making and the rationale of technology-based initiatives and their impact on organizational knowledge and its use. This subject supports course-level objectives by allowing students to develop analytical skills to understand the complexity of real-world KM work in organisations. It promotes innovative thinking around the deployment of existing and emerging information technologies for KM. The subject contributes to the development of independent critical inquiry, analysis and reflection.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Techniques of analysis and design likely to be learned are: critical thinking, discourse analysis and design thinking. Real-world case studies in the form of fieldwork are conducted likely from the following domains: software industry; retail; creative/fashion industry; manufacturing; emergency management. Real case-study work will shape thinking about IT support for KM in these industries.

AIMS

This subject asks the question ‘what makes a successful entrepreneur?’ It’s a complex topic and the subject of heated debate in the business, education and the economics communities, and also in discussions of international development, sustainability and social philanthropy. The way we will approach this subject is by looking at the behaviours, attitudes, values and skills that entrepreneurs need to create the climate for successful innovation - whether they are entrepreneurs starting new ventures or ‘Entrepreneurs’ in large organisations. What you will discover in this subject is that innovation isn’t just about having great ideas, and that entrepreneurs aren’t who you think they are. The subject will do this by looking at topics such as how innovation works and how it can be managed, different modes of entrepreneurialism, how entrepreneurs think and how to create, build and sustain an entrepreneurial business.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

The subject comprises 5 themes:

• ’Making New Things’, a survey of current thinking about innovation and entrepreneurship
• ’The Customers’ Point of View’, looking at techniques for understanding customers and consumer-led innovation
• ’Everything is Negotiable’, including work done at the Harvard negotiation project on win/win negotiation and emotional negotiation
• ’Everyone Needs Help’, exploring the ways entrepreneurs create support networks to help them be successful innovation and mentoring
• ’Inspire People’ - an examination of the importance of vision and commitment in innovation and entrepreneurship.

The subject involves advanced learning activities including case-based, experiential, and team-based approaches.

AIMS

ICT is an important component to ensuring quality, safety, access and efficiency in healthcare. This subject introduces current approaches and future directions in eHealth and the use of ICT in healthcare generally as well as key concepts and tools from the underlying discipline of health informatics.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics include electronic health records (EHRs); hospital and primary care and public health information systems; supporting clinical decision-making for health professionals through ICT; eHealth in the community for preventive healthcare and for patient and carer support; regulatory influences on eHealth including management and governance, privacy, security, and confidentiality; the role of data standards, vocabularies, and nomenclatures in eHealth; research and development in eHealth.

AIMS

The subject will introduce the basics of computer networks to students through a study of layered models of computer networks and applications. The first half of the subject deals with data communication protocols in the lower layers of OSI and TCP/IP reference models. The students will be exposed to the working of various fundamental networking technologies such as wireless, LAN, RFID and sensor networks. The second half of the subject deals with the upper layers of the TCP/IP reference model through a study of several Internet applications.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: Introduction to Internet, OSI reference model layers, protocols and services, data transmission basics, interface standards, network topologies, data link protocols, message routing, LANs, WANs, TCP/IP suite, detailed study of common network applications (e.g., email, news, FTP, Web), network management, current and future developments in network hardware and protocols.

AIMS

The aim of this subject is for students to develop familiarity and competence in assessing and designing computer programs for computational efficiency. Although computers manipulate data very quickly, to solve large-scale problems, we must design strategies so that the calculations combine effectively. Over the latter half of the 20th century, an elegant theory of computational efficiency developed. This subject introduces students to the fundamentals of this theory and to many of the classical algorithms and data structures that solve key computational questions. These questions include distance computations in networks, searching items in large collections, and sorting them in order.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include complexity classes and asymptotic notation; empirical analysis of algorithms; abstract data types including queues, trees, priority queues and graphs; algorithmic techniques including brute force, divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming and greedy approaches; space and time trade-offs; and the theoretical limits of algorithm power.

AIMS

The aims for this subject is for students to develop an understanding of approaches to solving moderately complex problems with computers, and to be able to demonstrate proficiency in designing and writing programs. The programming language used is Java.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered will include:

• Java basics
• Console input/output
• Control flow
• Defining classes
• Using object references
• Programming with arrays
• Inheritance
• Polymorphism and abstract classes
• Exception handling
• UML basics
• Interfaces
• Generics.

AIMS

The subject introduces key topics in modern information organization, particularly with regard to structured databases. The well-founded relational theory behind modern structured query language (SQL) engines, has given them as much a place behind the web site of an organization and on the desktop, as they traditionally enjoyed on corporate mainframes. Topics covered may include: the managerial view of data, information and knowledge; conceptual, logical and physical data modelling; normalization and de-normalization; the SQL language; data integrity; transaction processing, data warehousing, web services and organizational memory technologies. This is a core foundation subject for both the Master of Information Systems and Master of Information Technology.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

This subject serves as an introduction to databases and data modelling from a data management perspective. Database design, from conceptual design through to physical implementation will be covered. This will include Entity Relationship modelling, normalisation and de-normalisation and SQL. Additionally the use of databases in various contexts will be explored (web based databases, connecting programs to databases, data warehousing, health contexts, geospatial databases).

AIMS

This is an introductory subject to Geograhpic Information Systems (GIS) and Geographic Information Science, both practically and theoretically, at postgraduate level. Spatial information is ubiquitous in decision making. Be it in urban planning, in traffic or disaster management, in way-finding, in issues of the environment, public health and sustainability, or in economic contexts: the question of 'where' is a fundamental one. Spatial information is also special in many respects, such as its dimensionality and autocorrelation, its volume, its links to the Internet of Things (things are always located somewhere), to social networks (which exist in space and time), to streaming data from sensors everywhere, or to intelligent (location-aware) systems. The subject provides the foundations for more specialized subjects on spatial data management, spatial data analysis and spatial data visualization, and is of particular relevance to people wishing to establish a career in the spatial information industry, the environmental or planning industry. It is also suited for every postgraduate student who is looking for solid GIS skills.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

We will discuss representations and analysis of this information in spatial information technologies, from location-based services to geographic information systems. Topics addressed are observing the environment; spatial and spatiotemporal data representations, spatial analysis and spatial communication. The practical part will introduce to GIS in a hands-on manner, starting in individual software training and then applying new skills in a team-designed GIS project.

AIMS

In this subject, students will learn about the principles, concepts and design strategies used in the development of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) as an enabling platform to facilitate multi-sourced data and service discovery, access, integration and use. An example of SDI is the land titles system and the tools used to maintain and interrogate it. Emphasis will be placed on both technological and institutional factors that facilitate the development of SDIs. Students will examine related disciplines such as land and marine administration as well as technical areas such as interoperability, web-mapping and web-delivery to better meet sustainable development objectives. This subject is of particular relevance to students who want to pursue a career in spatial data management, land administration, but is also relevant to a range of geomatic engineering disciplines that use and produce large spatial datasets for decision-making in support of sustainable development.

The subject partners with other subjects on spatial data management, spatial data analysis and spatial data visualization, and is of particular relevance to people wishing to establish a career in the spatial information industry, the environmental or planning industry.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

SDI concepts and theory, current SDI initiatives, SDI development strategies and development models; SDI as an enabling platform, SDI and Spatially Enabled Government and Society, SDI and partnership approaches, financing and capacity building, challenges for developed and developing countries, capacity building, marine SDI and seamless SDI, policy and privacy Issues, SDI and land administration, metadata, standards and clearinghouses, SDI application areas, and SDI implementation and benchmarking.

AIMS

Spatial databases are fundamental to any geographical information system. Efficient and effective representation and retrieval of spatial information is a non-trivial task. This subject will cover the concepts, methods, and approaches that allow for efficient representation, querying, and retrieval of spatial data.

This subject builds on a student’s knowledge of computer programming, databases, and spatial information. Students who successfully complete this subject may find professional employment in designing, implementing, customising and maintaining databases for the increasingly wide range of spatial software applications.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Fundamentals of spatial databases; spatial data modelling in relational databases, including vector, raster, and network data; spatial operations, including geometric, topological, set-oriented, and network operations; spatial indexes and access methods, including quadtrees and R-trees.

AIMS

Many application problems in spatial information cannot be solved with standard tools but require programming for fast and effective solutions. Using case studies, this subject will enable students to develop software programs that address specific spatial information problems, beginning with learning the syntax, program structure and data types of an object oriented programming language such as Python. Course projects involve many aspects of the software development life cycle, from algorithm design to software implementation. This subject assumes students are familiar with spatial information data and the varied ways it is used by various stakeholders. Students who successfully complete this subject may find work in specialist consulting practices, spatial information research organisations or as software developers for the spatial information industry.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• Variables and data types (including dictionaries)
• Input and output
• Selection and iteration
• Scripting and geo-processing (customise a GIS)
• Store and process spatial data
• Manipulate spatial data
• Visualise spatial data
• Access dynamically changing data from the Web.

AIMS

The subject aims to provide an understanding of the principles on which the Web, Email, DNS and other interesting distributed systems are based. Questions concerning distributed architecture, concepts and design; and how these meet the demands of contemporary distributed applications will be addressed.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: characterization of distributed systems, system models, interprocess communication, remote invocation, indirect communication, operating system support, distributed objects and components, web services, security, distributed file systems, and name services.

AIMS

Much of the world's knowledge is stored in the form of unstructured data (e.g. text) or implicitly in structured data (e.g. databases). In this subject students will learn algorithms and data structures for extracting, retrieving and analysing explicit knowledge from various data sources, with a focus on the web. Topics include: data encoding and markup, web crawling, regular expressions, document indexing, text retrieval, clustering, classification and prediction, pattern mining, and approaches to evaluation of knowledge technologies.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Introduction to Knowledge Technologies; String search; Genomics; Text processing and search; Web search and retrieval; Introduction to Data Mining; Introduction to basic Probability; Classification; Association Rules; Clustering; Evaluation measures.

Examples of projects that students may completed are:

• A method for automatically predicting the geo-location of a Twitter user on the basis of their posts
• An automatic method for tagging multilingual Wikipedia documents with Wikipedia categories
• A search engine for Twitter data, which takes into account the time stamp of the query and documents
• A search engine for web user forum data
• A search engine servicing mixed monolingual queries (as in monolingual queries from a range of languages) over a large-scale document collection
• Classification and prediction of some real world problems using machine learning techniques.

AIMS

Many applications require access to very large amounts of data. These applications often require reliability (data must not be lost even in the presence of hardware failures), and the ability to retrieve and process the data very efficiently.

The subject will cover the technologies used in advanced database systems. Topics covered will include: transactions, including concurrency, reliability (the ACID properties) and performance; and indexing of both structured and unstructured data. The subject will also cover additional topics such as: uncertain data; Xquery; the Semantic Web and the Resource Description Framework; dataspaces and data provenance; datacentres; and data archiving.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics include:

• Introduction to High Performance Database Systems
• Issues of Performance and Reliability
• Transaction Processing
• Recovery from Failures
• Map Reduce Models.

This subject provides an overview of a wide range of issues relating to infrastructure engineering, with a particular focus on the environmental, economic, and equity of projects. Students will gain an understanding of the complexities of decision-making, including the role of government and regulation, considerations of intergenerational and intragenerational equity, and assessment of economic and environmental impacts. Students will learn about the influential role that infrastructure plays in shaping a society, and the effects both short-term and long-term. Students will also learn to apply various analytical methods to evaluate infrastructure projects from a sustainability perspective. Lectures and workshops will be structured around case studies of infrastructure projects. Workshops will also provide students with opportunities to enhance oral and written communication skills.

This subject is part of a trio of subjects that consider different aspects of infrastructure projects. Engineering Site Characterisation studies how to determine the character of a site for an infrastructure project. Sustainable Infrastructure Engineering examines how a project relates to the broader social, economic, and environmental context. Engineering Project Implementation concentrates on the operational aspects of implementing a project.

AIMS

The aim of this course is to provide students with an introduction to urban traffic engineering and transport planning principles. General theory as well as analytical techniques for solving common transport engineering problems is presented.

The key theme in this course is how to improve the sustainability of transport systems. This includes understanding and predicting travel demand. This course emphasizes techniques for modelling and evaluating schemes based on environmental, health and social outcomes. Behavioural choice modelling methods are used to predict demand for public transport and non-motorised transport modes.

CVEN90048 Transport Systems provides a transport-specific learning experience that relates to, builds-on, and extends from the skills and competencies developed via the following Civil Engineering subjects: CVEN90043 Sustainable Infrastructure Engineering and CVEN90045 Engineering Project Implementation.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include:

• Introduction to Transport Systems
• Traffic Flow Theory
• Traffic Control Devices
• Unsignalised Intersection Capacity Analysis
• Travel Surveys
• Sustainability
• Traffic Survey Methods
• Public Transport
• Transport Network Models
• Road Safety
• Signalised Intersection Capacity and Timing
• Freeway Management
• Geometric Design of Roads

This subject has been integrated with the Skills Towards Employment Program (STEP) and contains activities that can assist in the completion of the Engineering Practice Hurdle (EPH).

In the past few years, the Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry has observed the evolution of simple 2D drafting programs into integrated Building Information Modelling (BIM) based on 3D spatial technologies. In this subject, students will learn how BIM is used to model, store and visualise architectural, structural, and facilities components of an infrastructure in 3D. Students will also learn how adding time and cost information to BIM allows AEC to foster collaboration in designing infrastructures, minimize the risk of construction errors and optimise the maintenance of them.

The subject is of particular relevance to students wishing to establish a career in civil engineering, property management, surveying, spatial information and urban planning but is also relevant to a range of disciplines where 3D building information should be considered.

AIMS

The subject has a strong practical component with a five-day field camp during the week before the mid-semester break involving student-led environmental monitoring. There is also a semester long project to design and implement an environmental monitoring program supported by weekly practice classes.

Component skills taught in this subject:

• Conceptualising environmental responses
• Selecting and using environmental measurement techniques (considering scale issues)
• Analysis of environmental monitoring data.

This subject is a critical foundation for a career for environmental engineering but is also relevant to civil and other engineering disciplines where environmental impacts of engineering projects must be addressed to ensure sustainable engineering solutions.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Selection of measurement techniques and consideration of measurement scale, conceptualising environmental responses to human activities, environmental sampling and monitoring design, systematic review of causal evidence, statistical analysis of environmental effects, risk assessments for occupational health and safety during environmental field programs.

AIMS

Environmental problems are highly complex and challenging to analyse and are often addressed through modelling. Being skilled at environmental modelling is a core professional requirement for an Environmental Engineer. This subject focuses on environmental modelling methodology including the steps of model conceptualisation, model construction, model evaluation and model application using a range of energy, water and waste models in Matlab. The subject complements ENEN90032 Environmental Analysis Tools and ENEN90028 Monitoring Environmental Impacts which provide other core environmental engineering skills. It provides modelling skills for a wide range of discipline based subjects such as ENEN90006 Solid Wastes, ENEN90034 Environmental Applied Hydrology and ENEN90027 Energy for Sustainable Development. The subject is of particular relevance to all Environmental Engineers but is also of relevance to a range of engineering and environmental analysis disciplines that require advanced modelling skills.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

The relationship between theoretical and empirical understanding and their use in model conceptualisation and construction will be explored. This subject introduces a range of environmental modelling techniques applicable to different environmental problems. In this subject students will conceptualise and construct, evaluate and utilise their own model to undertake a technical evaluation of a specified range of potential solutions to an environmental problem. Students will also develop professional judgement skills to critically evaluate models and model results.

Specific topic areas:

• System conceptualisation
• Model construction and validation (computational accuracy)
• Model evaluation
• Calibration and optimisation
• Model uncertainty assessment techniques
• Issues of appropriate model complexity
• Students will have an opportunity to review a modelling topic of their choice.

Students will use MatLab to undertake modelling tasks and will be required to learn some MatLab programming skills in the subject.

AIMS

The aim of this subject is to help students develop capability to effectively summarise environmental variables met in the course of research and design, to select appropriate statistical models describing the data structure, and to conduct statistical inference on underlying processes. Students will apply a variety of models from a conventional or Bayesian approach to solve the problems at hand and derive deterministic or stochastic inferences from them.

The subject is composed of four wide-ranging topics from exploratory data analysis to spatial modelling. At the beginning of each topic, students are provided with a set of data from environmental research, and a number of analysis tools are conveyed in the lectures. The mathematical aspects of the subject build on concepts developed in fundamental engineering mathematics and statistics courses from undergraduate courses. It supports student learning in the capstone design and research projects where data analysis skills are assumed.

The subject provides a fundamental skill for a career in environmental engineering where the ability to analyse and communicate the meaning of time series and spatial data sets are expected.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Specific topics include:

1. Exploratory Data Analysis

• Summary statistics and probability models
• Analysis of variability and hypothesis test
• Linear regression and verification/validation.

2. Time Series Analysis

• Introduction to multivariate analysis
• Principle component analysis
• Stochastic forecast and verification.

3. Methods for Multivariate Data

• Multivariate linear regression
• Principle component analysis.

4. Analysis of Spatial Data

• Simple spatial interpolations
• Analysis of spatial variability
• Spatial models and Kriging.

AIMS

Information Technology now impacts on people and processes within and beyond organisational boundaries. The discipline of Information Systems is concerned with the effective use of IT by people and organisations. This subject provides context on Information Systems practice and use viewed through a range of roles that interact with these systems, including those of system developers, users, business managers, IT managers, and vendors. It provides students with a foundation that is further built on in other information systems subjects.

The subject supports course-level objectives by allowing students to understand the complexity of real-world applications of information systems within a range of industries. It challenges students to integrate concepts, theories and frameworks with case studies and examples drawn from industry. The emphasis is on gaining a tool kit for a rich understanding of the practical problem solving rather than learning the theory per se. The subject contributes to the development of independent critical inquiry, case study analysis and problem solving.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Klings’s Social Informatics, Prahalad and Hamel’s Core Competencies, Porter’s Competitive Advantage, Chan and Luftman’s Concepts of Business – IT Alignment, Cullen and Seddon’s Outsourcing Management, Willcock’s Offshoring Challenges, Agarwal and Sambamurthy’s IT Governance issues and various Change Management Models.

Aims

As with many other forms of technology, information technologies have lifecycles ranging from initial conception, to possible adoption, and widespread use, to eventual obsolescence.

This subject will examine emerging information technologies and the issues that relate to them, including: how they evolve and, enter usage, and their likely future effects on people and social structures.

Indicative Content

The subject provides an understanding of both technical and managerial issues, as well as strategic implications of emerging technologies and issues. Upon completion of the subject, students should be able to (a) understand key enabling technologies and become an effective participant in technology-enabled business endeavours and initiatives; (b) recognize ways of leveraging the technology to improve intra and inter-organizational processes and enhance a firm’s competitive position; (c) gain skills for building careers and taking advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities through emerging technologies, and (d) understand the factors that influence how relevant an emerging technology will be in the long run.

AIMS

This subject focuses on how Knowledge Management (KM) and a range of Information Technologies and analysis techniques are used to support KM initiatives in organisations. Technologies likely to be considered are: collaborative and social media tools; corporate knowledge directories; data warehouses and other repositories of organizational memory; business intelligence including data-mining; process automation; workflow and document management. The emphasis is on high-level decision-making and the rationale of technology-based initiatives and their impact on organizational knowledge and its use. This subject supports course-level objectives by allowing students to develop analytical skills to understand the complexity of real-world KM work in organisations. It promotes innovative thinking around the deployment of existing and emerging information technologies for KM. The subject contributes to the development of independent critical inquiry, analysis and reflection.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Techniques of analysis and design likely to be learned are: critical thinking, discourse analysis and design thinking. Real-world case studies in the form of fieldwork are conducted likely from the following domains: software industry; retail; creative/fashion industry; manufacturing; emergency management. Real case-study work will shape thinking about IT support for KM in these industries.

AIMS

This subject asks the question ‘what makes a successful entrepreneur?’ It’s a complex topic and the subject of heated debate in the business, education and the economics communities, and also in discussions of international development, sustainability and social philanthropy. The way we will approach this subject is by looking at the behaviours, attitudes, values and skills that entrepreneurs need to create the climate for successful innovation - whether they are entrepreneurs starting new ventures or ‘Entrepreneurs’ in large organisations. What you will discover in this subject is that innovation isn’t just about having great ideas, and that entrepreneurs aren’t who you think they are. The subject will do this by looking at topics such as how innovation works and how it can be managed, different modes of entrepreneurialism, how entrepreneurs think and how to create, build and sustain an entrepreneurial business.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

The subject comprises 5 themes:

• ’Making New Things’, a survey of current thinking about innovation and entrepreneurship
• ’The Customers’ Point of View’, looking at techniques for understanding customers and consumer-led innovation
• ’Everything is Negotiable’, including work done at the Harvard negotiation project on win/win negotiation and emotional negotiation
• ’Everyone Needs Help’, exploring the ways entrepreneurs create support networks to help them be successful innovation and mentoring
• ’Inspire People’ - an examination of the importance of vision and commitment in innovation and entrepreneurship.

The subject involves advanced learning activities including case-based, experiential, and team-based approaches.

AIMS

Data warehouses are designed to provide organizations with an integrated set of high quality data to support decision-makers. They should support flexible and multi-dimensional retrieval and analysis of data. Topics covered include data warehousing and decision-making, data warehouse design, data warehouse implementation, data sourcing and data quality, on-line analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining, customer relationship management systems, and case studies of data warehousing practice. This subject is part of the Business Analytics stream within the Master of Information Systems.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

This subject introduces the compelling need for data warehousing, data warehouse architectures, decision making, data warehouse design, data warehouse modelling, data quality, data warehouse implementation - including the Extract Transform Load (ETL) process, and data warehouse use in supporting decision making – including decision making tools and OLAP. Readings are provided for all topics that introduce real world cases on data warehousing and related areas and include the use of data warehousing for competitive advantage, success and failure stories in Data Warehousing.

AIMS

In this subject students will learn about the foundations of spatial data and their analysis. Emphasis will be placed on learning how to investigate the patterns that arise as a result of processes that may be operating in space. For example, students will learn to identify geographic clusters of disease cases, or hotspots of crime. A variety of scientific tools including probability theory, combinatorics, descriptive statistics, distributions and matrix algebra will be taught. Students will learn essential skills that are fundamental for all applications of geographic information.

The subject partners with other subjects on spatial data management and visualization, and is of particular relevance to people wishing to establish a career in the spatial information industry, the environmental or planning industry. Spatial Analysis builds on the fundamental knowledge of probability and statistics, mathematics, as well as computer literacy to write simple algorithms, and the preparation and management of data for sophisticated analysis software.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Spatial autocorrelation, spatial data structures and algorithms, point patterns, measures of dispersion, measures of arrangements, line and network analysis, patterns of areas and in fields, and the role of spatial scale and spatial aggregation problems.

AIMS

Spatial Visualisation is about using and designing effective mechanisms for presenting and exploring the patterns embedded in large and complex data sets. Spatial Visualisation is especially important to spatial decision making, since geographic data sets are both voluminous and rich in structure. By addressing the presentation and interaction with spatial information, this subject complements other topics that deal with the storage and querying of spatial information (e.g. GEOM90018 Spatial Databases), and the processing of spatial information (e.g. GEOM90006 Spatial Analysis). This subject is vital for anyone wishing to work with geographic information systems or spatial databases, or in the area of geographic information science. It will also be of relevance to those with an interest in design, especially graphical and interaction design.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Fundamentals of information visualisation and data graphics; human perception; foundations of user interface design; cartographic design; geovisualisation; exploratory spatial data analysis; evaluation of visualisation interfaces.

AIM

This subject involves the in-depth investigation of a significant problem related to Spatial IT. The subject also provides students with skills and knowledge for analysing and solving problems, and enhanced written and oral communication skills. The subject is fundamentally a research-based project, giving a capstone experience and piece of scholarship to students.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

The student will develop a research question in spatial information technology and an appropriate research methodology for investigating the question. After approval by the supervisor(s) the student will apply this methodology, analyse results, and report in a thesis.

AIMS

The aim of this subject is to introduce students to the software engineering principles, processes, tools and techniques for analysing and managing complex software projects.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Topics covered include: software engineering processes; project management; planning and scheduling; estimation and metrics; quality assurance; risk; configuration management; individuals and teams; ethics; change management; and project management tools.

AIM

Research is a process of acquiring new knowledge by systematically and rigorously applying methods to address well-formulated questions. To be valuable, new knowledge must address a significant theoretical question, it must be supported by evidence and be able to stand up to critical scrutiny, and its presentation to other researchers and/or to the public must be persuasive. This subject is an introduction to research thinking, skills and methodologies as they apply to computing and related disciplines. The subject will foster the development of critical thinking, a skeptical and rigorous approach, and awareness of research ethics. This subject will be particularly useful for students contemplating undertaking a research degree, or for students currently enrolled in a research degree (MPhil or PhD) or a course-work degree with a research project (MIT, MIS).

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Research skills covered will include: surveying relevant literature, developing productive research questions, selecting and designing appropriate methods, analysing data and reasoning about their theoretical implications, communicating research both in writing and through oral presentation, and understanding the ethics of research. Qualitative methods covered include: ethnography, field data collection techniques (interviews, focus groups), thematic analysis, case studies and design-based research. Quantitative methods covered include: statistical thinking and techniques, hypothesis testing, experiment design, survey design, simulation studies.

AIMS

At the heart of theoretical computer science are questions of both philosophical and practical importance. What does it mean for a problem to be solvable by computer? What are the limits of computability? Which types of problems can be solved efficiently? What are our options in the face of intractability? This subject covers such questions in the content of a wide-ranging exploration of the nexus between logic, complexity and algorithms, and examines many important (and sometimes surprising) results about the nature of computing.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

• Turing machines
• The Church-Turing Thesis
• Decidable languages
• Reducability
• Time Complexity: The classes P and NP, NP-complete problems
• Space complexity: including sub-linear space
• Circuit complexity
• Approximation algorithms
• Probabilistic complexity classes
• Additional topics may include descriptive complexity, interactive proofs, communication complexity, complexity as applied to cryptography
• Space complexity, including sub-linear space
• Finite state automata, pushdown automata, regular languages, context-free languages to the Recommended Background Knowledge.

Example of assignment

• Proving the equivalence of a variant of a standard machine to the original version
• Describing an NP-hardness reduction
• Designing an approximation algorithm for an NP-hard problem.

AIMS

There is a need for civil engineers to increase their knowledge and skills in freight systems since they are actively involved in the planning, design, construction, maintenance and management of a range of freight infrastructure such as roads, bridges and ports. Civil engineers require expertise in freight systems to reduce the social and environmental costs from freight including safety, noise and emissions. Training in freight systems also provides opportunities for freight networks to become more productive and efficient increasing economic benefits for society.

Freight infrastructure allows the freight system to operate, facilitating vital components of our economy, including production, distribution and trade.

The purpose of the freight system relates to its role in providing a service for the economy. Freight transport is a derived demand; it does not exist for its own sake. The primary demand is for the consumption of goods where there is spatial separation. Goods are generally stored, processed and consumed at different locations. There is a need for goods to move to increase their value for producers, manufacturers and consumers. Freight can be considered as the economy in motion. Goods are transported as part of the economic activities of production, manufacturing and consumption.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Freight networks provide a service for producers and manufacturers allowing access to markets for the consumption of goods. The benefit of goods being transported relates to their increased value at their trip destination. Reduced transport operation costs leads to lower production and distribution costs that creates opportunities for lower priced goods.

AIMS

This subject involves students undertaking professional work experience at a Host Organisation’s premises. Students will work under the supervision of both a member of academic staff and an external supervisor at the Host Organisation.

During the period of work experience, students will be introduced to workplace culture and be offered the opportunity to strengthen their employability. Students will undertake seminars covering topics that will include professional standards of behaviour and ethical conduct, working in teams, time management and workplace networking.

AIMS

To introduce students to the techniques and technology of remote sensing: the extraction of information from satellite and airborne image data. This subject assumes prior knowledge of image processing techniques such as that acquired in subjects such as GEOM30009 Imaging the Environment. Students passing this subject will have the skills to work under supervision in a spatial information or remote sensing agency of consultancy providing services, for example, to natural resource managers.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Use of image processing systems. High level digital image processing, correction and classification; applications of remote sensing in the geosciences, engineering, and resource assessment and inventory; image data in geographic information systems. Detailed application studies in emergency/disaster management, environmental assessment and geological mapping.

AIMS

In this subject students will learn the theory and applications of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as the Global Positioning Systems (GPS). The subject focuses on high precision GNSS, their design and fundamental operational characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, error sources and mitigation, measurement and data processing techniques. It is a pre requisite for the subject GEOM90039 Advanced Surveying and Mapping. The subject is of broad relevance to students with an interest in technology or to those specifically wishing to establish a career in engineering, mining or cadastral surveying, but is also relevant to a range of mapping, spatial, land surveying and civil engineering disciplines where the capture and processing of spatial or survey measurements to meet a specific performance specification should be considered.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

High precision GPS surveying, Global Navigation Satellite Systems, GPS measurements, Differential GPS, GPS reference station networks, GPS errors, ellipsoidal heights, geodetic datum, geoid, GPS data processing.

NOTE: An intensive learning period of approximately 3-4 days will be conducted as part of this subject. The exact dates and venue will be confirmed at the start of the subject.

AIMS

In this subject students will learn about the range of computational techniques applicable to problems commonly arising in surveying and spatial information. This subject applies the mathematical and computational knowledge acquired in COMP20005 Engineering Computation; MAST10007 Linear Algebra (or its equivalent). The content of this subject is relevant to GEOM90033 Satellite Positioning Systems, and GEOM90039 Advanced Surveying and Mapping. The subject is of particular relevance to students wishing to establish a career in surveying engineering, mining, mapping, or spatial information in general, and is also relevant to a range of civil engineering disciplines where the capture and processing of spatial or survey measurements to meet a specific performance specification should be considered.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Least squares adjustment, survey measurement errors, survey network design and adjustment, coordinate systems, geodetic datum, datum transformations.