Simple devices such as thermostats turn heaters on or off as the environmental temperature changes. Recently, more complex devices such as automatic speech recognition systems, which specifically attempt to mimic the behaviour of humans, have appeared on the market. Courses in Machine Perception and Neurocomputing bring together relevant knowledge from diverse fields such as biology, psychology, mathematics and computer science to enable students to understand the methods used by natural systems of perception, and to apply this knowledge to the development of artificial systems which will be employed in the machines of the twenty-first century. Such courses take students with degrees in engineering, physics or any of the above subjects and teach them the relevant topics from the other subjects. Successful completion leads to the award of an MSc degree.
Practical experience is gained by undertaking a research project on which a dissertation is written.
A wide range of projects can be envisaged. For example, in screening for breast cancer, a large number of mammograms are produced. Each of these must be classified as normal or abnormal. Once this has been done, however, the mammograms can be scanned into a computer and used to train a neural network to classify further examples. Another project involved the construction of a robot that had ultrasonic sensors connected to its motors via a neural network.