The aims of this module are to:

• enhance awareness and critical appreciation of high-quality research-based publications;
• develop ability to communicate research-findings to others in an independent minded manner;
• develop skills in research methods.

The aim of this module is to provide an up-to-date introduction to state-of-art artificial intelligence with a particular focus on the developments of the last five to ten years. The module will introduce specific methods within the scientific contexts in which AI has seen considerable progress. The module will also prepare students for the in-depth analysis of the various methods presented in the following modules in the programme.

The aims of this module are to provide students with the relevant concepts of robotics from the AI perspective and the skills for developing planning and learning systems that apply to robotics.

The aims of the module are to:

• Introduce the relationships between: abstract mathematics; abstract cryptographic algorithms, schemes and protocols; concrete realisation of cryptographic algorithms, schemes and protocols; day to day cryptographic usage.
• Establish the significance of cryptographic hashes, symmetric encryption, public key encryption and hybrid schemes.
• Develop the concepts of 'difficulty' and 'cryptographic strength' and their resilience to the passage of time.
• Identify good patterns, and bad anti-patterns of cryptography and their consequences for current standards, implementations and patterns of use.
• Emphasise the significance of the cryptographic key lifecycle.
• Provide opportunities to experiment with cryptographic implementations.

The main aim of this module is to introduce students to computer-based understanding, analysis and processing of images taken with a digital camera. The module introduces various methods and algorithms that allow computers to store images, process images (e.g. enhance images), extract useful information from images, classify images, and organise image collections. The module also aims to specify and discuss the problems of image understanding and of various computer vision applications.

The aims of the module are to:

• Establish the relationship between abstract layered protocols and the dominant Ethernet plus Internet Protocol network stacks.
• Develop skill in the capture and analysis of network traffic.
• Provide opportunities to configure network components and endpoints.
• Acknowledge that although cryptography is an important aspect of network security, network cryptography is covered in a separate module.

The aim of this module is to introduce the student to distributed AI systems through the notion of an agent, how it can be constructed, and how multiple agents can be made to cooperate effectively with one another to solve complex AI problems.

The aims of this module are to:

• Introduce the facets of research from broad research philosophy to detailed data collection.
• Develop critical analysis skills across a range of different sources.
• Introduce ethical thinking into the development of an appropriate research methodology.

The aim of this module is to allow students to demonstrate their analysis, design and programming skills, acquired in previous modules of their MSc, by applying what they have learned to a substantial problem in related areas. The project must be related to their MSc studies and the student should be able to show they can apply the latest research and developments in their project.