Artificial Intelligence with Industrial Placement

Programme Structure & Content

First Year
First year students focus on the foundations of Computing Science, including: how to design and implement programs (using Java); relevant mathematical concepts, and the grand challenges of Artificial Intelligence. They also study relevant Philosophy and/or Psychology topics.

Second Year
In the second year, students are introduced to core topics in Modern Computing, with courses in Algorithmic Problem Solving, Data Management, Human Computer Interaction, and Intelligent Hardware and Robotics. Students develop significant programming skills in Java and C, and also get hardware experience through building and programming small robots.

Third Year (Honours)
The third year includes a year-long Intelligent Systems Engineering project. Working in teams, students develop a major Artificial Intelligence system, from an initial analysis to the final delivery. The course emphasises inter-personal teamwork skills as strongly as technical topics. Taught courses focus more deeply on Artificial Intelligence topics including Robotics and Learning, Knowledge-Based Systems, Adaptive Interactive Systems and Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games, as well as further core computing subjects Distributed Systems and Security, and Languages and Computability.

Fourth Year (Honours)
The fourth year also involves a substantial project, but this time students work individually on a specific Artificial Intelligence topic of interest to them; most projects are research-related. Many of the taught courses are also related to our Artificial Intelligence research activities, including Semantic Web Engineering, Peer-to-Peer and Agent-Based Computing, eScience, Natural Language Processing and Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms.

The Industrial Placement happens between years 3 and 4, or after year 4.

Teaching & Assessment

All courses are supported by Web-based material, usually including full course notes. Lectures in the first two years commonly include live computer demonstrations. Assessment is by a mixture of course work and examination.