This module gives an introduction to intelligent systems and robotics. It goes on to consider the essential hardware for sensing and manipulating the real world, and their properties and characteristics. The programming of intelligent systems and real-world robots are explored in the context of localisation, mapping, and fuzzy logic control.

Humans can often perform a task extremely well (e.g., telling cats from dogs) but are unable to understand and describe the decision process followed. Without this explicit knowledge, we cannot write computer programs that can be used by machines to perform the same task. “Machine learning” is the study and application of methods to learn such algorithms automatically from sets of examples, just like babies can learn to tell cats from dogs simply by being shown examples of dogs and cats by their parents. Machine learning has proven particularly suited to cases such as optical character recognition, dictation software, language translators, fraud detection in financial transactions, and many others.

We live in an era in which the amount of information available in textual form - whether of scientific or commercial interest - greatly exceeds the capability of any man to read or even skim. Text analytics is the area of artificial intelligence concerned with making such vast amounts of textual information manageable - by classifying documents as relevant or not, by extracting relevant information from document collections, and/or by summarizing the content of multiple documents. In this module we cover all three types of techniques.

This module covers a range of Artificial Intelligence techniques employed in games, and teaches how games are and can be used for research in Artificial Intelligence. The module explores algorithms for creating agents that play classical board games (such as chess or checkers) and real-time games (Mario or PacMan), including single agents able to play multiple games. The course also covers Procedural Content Generation, and explores the techniques used to simulate intelligence in the latest videogames.

Many of today’s best computer games rely on realistic physics at the core of their gameplay. In this course, students are taught how these physics engines work, and how to create physics-based games of their own. Students create a physics engine from scratch, and also learn how to use existing industry-standard open-source 2-D and 3-D physics engines. The necessary principles of physics and mathematics are taught, assuming very little prior knowledge. Vectors, matrices, and numerical integration are taught on a need-to-know basis, with code examples to illustrate the methods. Each lecture is followed by a lab session, where the new techniques are programmed by each student. Almost immediately, students will create scenarios where objects are moving and bouncing around the screen realistically. Each lab session ends in creating a small physics-based game. The course is assessed through tests, and a larger game-programming assignment.

This module considers the application of security to networked computers and systems. It will cover how to secure a network by applying methods to detect, mitigate and/or stop attacks. Based on the assumption that public networks will always be open to compromise, this course introduces techniques to secure transmitted data, including the management of encryption systems and communication.

Computer vision is the discipline that tries to understand the content of images and videos. It has an extraordinarily wide range of applications; well-known ones include inspection on production lines, reading number plates, mixing live and computer-generated action in movies, and recognising faces. However, researchers are working on applications such as driverless cars, building 3D models from photographs, robot navigation, gaming interfaces, and automated medical diagnosis -- in fact, whenever you as a human looks at the world and try to understand what you see is fair game for computer vision.This module introduces you to the principles of computer vision through a series of lectures and demonstrations. You have an opportunity to learn how to use these principles and algorithms on real-world vision problems in the associated laboratories using the industry-standard toolkit, OpenCV.

Mathematics is a tool used in many fields of research, and this module introduces students to techniques and ways of thinking designed to enable them to carry out their own mathematical investigations, or to apply mathematical ideas to an investigation of their own (typically for most students on this module, this will be their Dissertation project). We use the industry standard mathematical software Matlab, although the techniques introduced can also be applied using other software, and we study a range of techniques for numerical computation and processing of data.

As humans we are adept in understanding the meaning of texts and conversations. We can also perform tasks such as summarize a set of documents to focus on key information, answer questions based on a text, and when bilingual, translate a text from one language into fluent text in another language. Natural Language Engineering (NLE) aims to create computer programs that perform language tasks with similar proficiency. This course provides a strong foundation to understand the fundamental problems in NLE and also equips students with the practical skills to build small-scale NLE systems. Students are introduced to three core ideas of NLE: a) gaining an understanding the core elements of language--- the structure and grammar of words, sentences and full documents, and how NLE problems are related to defining and learning such structures, b) identify the computational complexity that naturally exists in language tasks and the unique problems that humans easily solve but are incredibly hard for computers to do, and c) gain expertise in developing intelligent computing techniques which can overcome these challenges.

The aim of this module is to familiarise students with the whole pipeline of processing, analysing, presenting and making decision using data. This module blends data analysis, decision making and visualisation with practical python programming. Students will need a reasonable programming background as they will be expected to develop a complete end-to-end data science application.

The aim of this module is to provide students with an understanding of the role of artificial neural networks (ANNs) in computer science and artificial intelligence. This will allow the student to build computers and intelligent machines which are able to have an artificial brain which will allow them to learn and adapt in a human like fashion.