This is a twelve month multi-disciplinary course drawing on Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Philosophy and Psychology. It provides both a sound theoretical understanding of human knowledge acquisition, representation and deployment, and practical experience in interdisciplinary approachs to such topics as human computer interaction, natural language processing, machine vision, parallel distributed processing, and modelling of agent architectures. The course is organized around five themes taught over three trimesters. The five themes consist of foundation material introducing the relevant approaches of the component disciplines, core material providing examples of how these approaches are used in contemporary Cognitive Science, essential programming techniques, options allowing you to develop specific areas in more detail, and a substantial research project , allowing you to put your own ideas into practice. The first four themes are taught by lectures, seminars and workshops during the first two trimesters.
Teaching is based around modules which are described here .
A standard module is worth 10 credits and is equivalent to a total of 100 hours of student effort, including assessments. The third trimester is devoted to the research project, and some of the research interests of members of staff within the Cognitive Science Research Centre who are available to supervise MSc projects are described here . The taught courses are designed to appeal to applicants from varied backgrounds and circumstances, and thus to lead to an exciting mix of students. Cognitive Science has become increasingly computational in recent years as we try to go beyond the collection of experimental data to the construction of explanatory models which can be implemented on computers to demonstrate their feasibility and test their accuracy. For this reason computer programming plays an important role in the MSc degree course, including both an introduction to AI programming that takes up a third of every student's time in the first semester, and an additional programming course in the second semester.