Course summary

Our year in industry programme with a specialism in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will give you a strong foundation of knowledge, skills and practical experience to kickstart your computing career. Your work placement will give you skills and awareness that can only be acquired in a real work environment, and will help to set you apart from other candidates when you apply for a job. AI is one of the most exciting and rapidly evolving aspects of 21st century technology. It already pervades our everyday lives, in image and voice recognition software, data security, intelligent web searching, drones, driverless vehicles, computer games, space exploration and cutting-edge medical advances, and its potential is vast. This four-year programme will prepare you for a successful career at the cutting edge of AI. In years 1, 2 and 4 we cover the essentials of application development, from programming to software engineering, databases to web development, computer graphics to robotics, and the latest in information security, whilst focusing on web and AI related topics such as machine learning, intelligent agents, bioinformatics, information security and computational finance. The modular structure of the programme gives you the flexibility to choose between optional modules in years 2 and 4. You will also benefit from access to our internationally renowned Computer Learning Research Centre. From the outset you be experimenting with programming games, robots, Gadgeteer kits, Subversion, JUnit testing, Scrum-based Agile software and more, in our well-equipped laboratories. Your year in industry will start at the end of year 2. We are ideally located in the famous M4 corridor, known as 'England's Silicon Valley', and we enjoy close links with many of its leading technology companies. If you are unable to go ahead with your placement for any reason, you will have the option of transferring onto our equivalent three-year BSc programme. We are a highly respected, research-focused department with a friendly approach and award-winning teaching. You will have a dedicated personal adviser to guide you through your studies. You will also be welcome to join our Computing Society, a thriving community of more than 400 computer enthusiasts from across the College. We are one of only seven departments in the UK to hold the Athena SWAN bronze award for our commitment to increasing female participation in computer science. You will graduate with a wide range of technical skills as well as valuable transferrable skills such as team working, communication, time management and self-motivation. A state-of-the-art Big Data cluster comprising 32 processors, 32 Terabytes of disk storage, GPU and RDMA networking allows you to work on real case studies. We develop both fundamental theory and practical algorithms that feed into the analytics methods and techniques that are in use today. Our research involves cognitive and autonomous agents, automated planning, scheduling and domain-independent search control, and applications in surveillance operations, disaster response missions, and space operations. We collaborate with Microsoft Research, IBM Research, NEC Labs Europe, Facebook, Google, and NASA, which informs our teaching.