Advanced Computer Science PGCert

Semester 1

Core module

• Personal and Group Skills - this can be taken in either Semester

Option modules

Choose three option modules (or choose four if you are going to take Personal and Group Skills in Semester 2) from:

• Communication and Concurrency

• Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering

• Software Measurement and Quality Assurance

• Mobile and Web Applications

• Advanced C++ Programming

• Advanced Web Technologies

• Agile Cloud Automation

• Internet and Cloud Computing

• Interaction Design (ID) and User Experience (UX)

• Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing

• Financial Mathematics 1

• Operational Research

Semester 2

Core module

• Personal and Group Skills - this can be taken in either Semester

Option modules

Choose three option modules (or choose four if you took Personal and Group Skills in Semester 1) from:

• Analysis of Algorithms

• Big Data and Predictive Analytics

• Foundations of Cybersecurity

• Algorithms for Bioinformatics

• Generative Development

• Service-Oriented Architectures

• Financial Services Information Systems

• Service Design

Industry Placement (optional)

Studying a 'with industry' masters degree is the perfect way for you to enhance your career prospects and deepen your understanding of your specific area of expertise. By experiencing real-world scenarios and applying your skills and knowledge to business challenges, you will gain a unique insight into how your studies can be utilised in industry. This will not only showcase your abilities to future employers, but will also enhance your studies when you return to University to complete your programme.

• Find out more about industrial placements

Individual Project

• Your course will conclude with an Individual Project (after your industry placement, if you have taken one). Using the experience gained during your course/placement, you will choose a challenging problem to work on and explore it by privately studying under the supervision of a member of the academic staff. (Students studying for a PGDip don't complete a project.)

A Selection of Recent MSc Projects

Robust and Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks

• Wireless sensor networks are a new technology with a wide range of applications (from environment monitoring to surveillance) but subject to a number of energy constraints, many-to-one flows, and redundant low-rate data. Many routing protocols have been proposed for sensor networks that aim at achieving energy efficiency, but with little or no attention to robustness and fault-tolerance. This project addressed fault tolerance in ad-hoc sensor network routing, namely the design and development of a robust and energy efficient routing protocol that distinguishes between local and large-scale traffic. A new multipath routing protocol was proposed and simulated which follows the 'number of hops' metric and employs a waiting time before transmitting messages to sink.

WSDL/BPEL to SRML Language Transformation

• SRML is the Reference Modelling Language of the European project SENSORIA. It provides primitives for modelling and reasoning about business processes in a way that is independent of the languages used for executing them. This project developed a tool for generating SRML models from two specific industry standards: The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which is used for specifying business process based on Web Services, and the Web Services Description Languages (WSDL) – an XML format for describing network services. The encoding provides the means to create high-level declarative descriptions of BPEL/WSDL specifications that can be used for building more complex business process models that can include components specified in other languages.

XML Database for Bibliographic Information

• Many people in industry and academia use a document typesetting system called LaTeX. Documents may be published in various formats including reports, journal articles, conference proceedings, authored books, and so on. BibTeX is the tool used by LaTeX for formatting lists of references that are to be incorporated within these documents. Although it is very effective, BibTeX has raised a practical concern due to its low level of abstraction, making it difficult to share bibliographic information among tools or people executing different activities (for instance, between the technical and the marketing staff within a company). In order to address this concern, this project developed an XML-based framework for managing bibliographies.