ONLINE MASTER’S IN COMPUTER SCIENCE (MSCS)

This course will provide focus on more complex data structures, and algorithm design and analysis, using one or more modern imperative language(s). Topics include advanced and/or balanced search trees; hashing; further asymptotic complexity analysis; standard algorithm design techniques; graph algorithms; complex sort algorithms; and other “classic” algorithms that serve as examples of design techniques.

The objective of this course is to give students a basic grounding in designing and implementing distributed and cloud systems, including issues in the implementation of backend services in the cloud itself. What are global consensus and Paxos, and what is their application in building cloud systems? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using distributed NoSQL stores such as Cassandra instead of relational stores such as MySQL? What are strong and weak consistency, what are the “CAP Theorem” and the “CALM Theorem,” and what are their implications for building highly available services? What is a blockchain, such as the Bitcoin blockchain, and how does it relate to issues in coordinating distributed systems? What are the roles of REST, Websockets, and stream processing in cloud applications? This course will combine hands-on experience in developing cloud services, with a firm grounding in the tools and principles for building distributed and cloud applications, including advanced architectures such as peer-to-peer and publish-subscribe. Besides cloud services, we will also be looking at cloud support for batch processing, such as the Hadoop framework, and its use with NoSQL data stores, such as Cassandra.

This course will provide an intensive introduction to material on computer organization and assembly language programming. Topics include structure of stored program computers; linking and loading; assembly language programming, with an emphasis on translation of high-level language constructs; data representation and arithmetic algorithms; basics of logic design; processor design: data path, hardwired control and microprogrammed control. Students will be given assembly language programming assignments on a regular basis.

This course will provide an introduction to the design and querying of relational databases. Topics include relational schemas; keys and foreign key references; relational algebra (as an introduction to SQL); SQL in depth; Entity-Relationship (ER) database design; translating from ER models to relational schemas and from relational schemas to ER models; functional dependencies; and normalization.

This course will provide focus on the use and internals of modern operating systems. Primary topics include the process concept; concurrency and how to program with threads; memory management techniques, including virtual memory and shared libraries; file system data structures; and input/output (I/O).

This course will provide students with a first strong approach of internet programming. It will give the basic knowledge on how the Internet works and how to create advanced web sites by the use of script languages, after learning the basics of HTML. In this course, the student will learn how to create a complex global site through the creation of individual working modules, providing them the interpersonal skills required in business settings such as team building and cooperation.

Personal computing is now mobile and cloud-based. Disconnected mobile computing challenges many of the assumptions underlying much of today’s distributed systems. “Cloud computing” provides a powerful background computing facility for mobile devices, but also raises important issues of trust and privacy. Many of these issues arise in critical yet sensitive domains such as electronic healthcare delivery. Mobile computing applications are location-aware or context-aware; the privacy implications of these applications are profound. Mobile, and increasingly location aware, gaming systems are now one of the largest sectors of the world entertainment industry. The purpose of this course is to review the fundamentals of mobile systems and applications, and how they relate to services in the cloud. The course will review material from wireless communication, distributed systems, and security and privacy, as they pertain to the systems being studied. The course will involve programming mobile apps using a popular mobile computing platform, such as Android or iPhone, to get hands-on experience with the concepts being discussed in the class.

An introductory course for machine learning theory, algorithms, and applications. Content aims to provide students with the knowledge to understand key elements of how to design algorithms/systems that automatically learn, improve, and accumulate knowledge with experience. Topics covered in this course include decision tree learning, neural networks, Bayesian learning, reinforcement learning, ensembling multiple learning algorithms, and various application problems. Students will be provided opportunities to simulate their algorithms in a programming language and apply them to solve real-world problems. Cross-listed with: EE 695.