Year
2019
Units
4.5
Contact
2 x 60-minute lectures weekly
1 x 120-minute practical weekly
Enrolment not permitted
1 of COMP1001, COMP1002, COMP8802 has been successfully completed
Topic description
Introduction to computers and associated operating and network systems. Data and languages; Boolean logic; sets and relations; data structures and algorithms; declarative and imperative programming; file and database systems; concurrency; networks and distributed systems; history of machine computation; computability and complexity measures; human-machine interaction and computer graphics; object-orientation; high-performance computing, system architectures; hardware, firmware, software and virtual. Testing, evaluation and benchmarking. Data centre design.
Educational aims
This topic aims to introduce students to the fundamentals of computation so that they will have the requisite background and context to appreciate the material in subsequent ICT topics.
Expected learning outcomes
At the completion of this topic, students are expected to be able to:

  1. Understand the fundamentals, nature and limitations of computation
  2. Understand standard representations of data and the translation to and from standard forms
  3. Understand the structure of information systems and their use
  4. Understand the social and ethical implications of the application of information systems
  5. Construct simple imperative programs
  6. Survey and evaluate a selection of emerging computer science technologies