The program consists of core elements and electives. The core elements provide fundamental knowledge and practical experience. The electives allow students to specialize in chosen areas of interest. Throughout the final year the student work on the master thesis and develop independent problem solving and creative skills.
Courses
A summary of the course structure including the organisation of the core and electivetopics.
Sem.
7.5 Sp
7.5 Sp
7.5 Sp
7.5 Sp
4
TDT4900 Master's Thesis
3
TDT4520 Program and Information Systems, Specialization Project
The students shall have theoretical insights into differentlanguages and techniques for making analysis and requirements models forinformation systems, as well as practical skills in making good models,evaluating the quality of models, and selecting a suitable modeling languagebased on the project context.
Students will investigate the role of modeling ininformation systems development and various perspectives for modeling languages(information, function, object, rule, agent, behavior, speech act), withexamples of languages of different perspectives and a discussion of usage,strengths, and weaknesses. Quality evaluations of models and languages, andtechniques (e.g., possible tool support) to achieve various types of quality.Methods related to modeling and quality assurance of models: interviews, writtensources, technical reviews.
Collaboration Technology
The course will provide an introduction to cooperation technology, looking attheir design, usage, and evaluation. Topics that will be addressed during thecourse include: introduction to computer supported cooperative work,coordination, shared workspaces, shared information spaces, cooperation amongmobile users, cooperation technology in system development, groupwaretechnology, design and evaluation of cooperation technology.
Knowledge in Document Collections
The students will understand how textual document collections are used inorganizations and what role they are given in the management of organizationalknowledge. They should know the techniques and models for document retrieval inlarge document collections. There is an overview of how documents may beanalyzed semantically with respect to categorization, concept extraction, andknowledge management. Some specific problems associated with documents andservices on the web will also be discussed.
The course concerns information retrieval in textual document collections.Topics include search engines, linguistic techniques for document analysis, textcategorization on the basis of semantic content, concept extraction, ontologiesin knowledge management, and web service management.
Multidisciplinary Team Project
This is a compulsory project undertaken in large groups (called "villages")with students fromdifferent faculties. Each village has a unifying theme, but students form smallgroups to work on specific projects within the theme. Village members thereforework at various levels of co-operation, and benefit from regular interactionsfrom students in very different disciplines. Topics can change each year, butthey are chosen to foster creativity and deep insight.
Customer Driven Project
Students work in small groups of six or seven members to implement solutions to proposed projects.Selection changes each year. Each year we chose projects for real customers, andstudents are expected to go through all the development phases including theearly stages of prestudy and requirements specification, coding, acceptancetesting, and product presentation and demonstration.
List 1 of Elective Topics
Health Informatics
This course provides an understanding of the particular challenges one runsinto when designing and using health care IT-systems.Starting off with the electronic patient journal one discusses the journal'sarchitecture and content (codes, journal standards, plans, documentationrequirements) and its use (health care workers' and patients' need forcommunication, analysis and decision support). Future journal systems'functionality, user adoption and use is presented with knowledge technology andcollaboration technology as a starting point. Architecture, security issues andservice infra structure will be discussed in depth.
ICT and Organizations
This course focusses on the organisational aspects of ICT in general and information systems in particular. Organisational challenges as well as potentials of ICT and information systems are addressed.
Advanced Information Retrieval
Elaborates on the issues cover in Information Retrieval.
List 2 of Elective Topics
Performance Evaluation
An introduction to quantitative methods for the design,sizing and analysis of computer systems. This will include: performance metrics;measurement techniques; workload characterisation; static and dynamic models;elementary queuing networks and discrete-event simulation. Applications willaddress performance requirements during both system development and operation.
Software Architectures
This course considers architectural styles and patterns,methods for constructing and evaluating architectures, and component-baseddevelopment. Design patterns and object-oriented frameworks.
Intelligent Agents
The main principles of distributed AI and the use of AI techniquesin distributed environments. To understand the notion of intelligentagents, their features and interactions with other agents. To learn thedifferent types of intelligent agent architectures and their 'components' (i.e.,reactive, deliberative, social components), and the relations between thesecomponents. To get an insight into the existing agent languages (e.g., KQML, andFIPA's ACL), and being able to use these in an agent interaction situation.
An overview of the main aspects of distributedartificial intelligence, as for instance knowledge sharing, models ofcommunication and cooperation in multi-agent systems, architecture formulti-agent systems. Central to the course is the term "intelligent agents" -its features and various possible architectures. A practical part of the courseis assignments/projects involving implementation of various aspects ofmulti-agent systems.
Information Retrieval
This elective has partial overlap with "Content Management". However, itdiffers in its focus on the management of multimedia collections.
Digital Libraries
An introduction to the are of digital libraries. Includes discussion onmetadata, hypermedia, semantic web, and legal issues. This course also includesa project in which students construct their own digital library.
