MASTER OF SCIENCE IN COMPUTER SCIENCE

Philosophy of the Programme

The philosophy of the Master of Science in Computer Science is to inspire learners to utilize the requisite knowledge, skills and attitudes acquired through quality teaching, research and innovation, in order to design and implement the next generation of computing/ICT solutions and infrastructure to stimulate Kenya’s digital economy by embracing innovation and utilizing state of the art technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IOT), cloud computing and block chain. This will be done while taking into consideration the development challenges associated with Kenyas and the regional context.

Rationale

The need for the review of the MSc (Computer Science) was necessitated by many factors that include lessons learnt in offering the various Master of Computer Science related courses for the last sixteen years; feedback from key stakeholders, including students in the programme and employers; the Department’s research strategy; fast-changing computing and information technology developments; International trends; national and industry needs and trends including the requirements in Vision 2030; and requirements of performance contracting, the quality management system and the University’s reform agenda.

Goal

The goal of the programme is to ensure that students acquire deeper and specialized conceptual knowledge and practical skills in developing computing-based solutions to problems of interest to industries and to society. They will be able to identify situations in which computational techniques can be applied to create a better solution than would have been obtained otherwise or to improve the performance of existing solutions. 

Remarkable progress has been made in applying computing technologies to real-world problems. However, there exist several classes of problems and applications for which traditional computational methods and approaches are limited. These include:

1. knowledge discovery and learning-based problems - these require computational intelligence and learning from various types of data. In addition, many of these problems require solutions that mimic human intelligence.
2. problems that require disparate systems, in different environments working in sync to deliver a service or product. - these would benefit from new advances and opportunities in distributed technologies such as the cloud, blockchain technologies amongst others.
3. problems of a developmental nature addressing a societal urgent and emerging need - these would require an understanding of developmental issues, innovation and application of Computing technologies.

Given the explosion of digital information and knowledge that permeates all sectors today, there is a great need for expertise in processing existing information and knowledge banks for the betterment of society. Advances in technology have also brought about growing security concerns as well as adapting these technologies.

This programme has three specialization areas namely: Computational Intelligence (CI), Distributed Communication Technologies (DCT) and Computing for Development (C4D). In the computational intelligence specialization area, this programme seeks to expose the learner to the tools, techniques, algorithms and problem-solving methods that apply to real-world problems whose solution requires approaches that mimic human intelligence. In the distributed communication technologies specialization the programme will seek to expose the learner to new distributed technologies as well as address data security concerns. In the C4D specialization, the program will focus on addressing developmental challenges and explore opportunities with an innovation lens and require knowledge from either computational intelligence and/or distributed computing. Some current active examples of these include Artificial Intelligence (AI) in health and agriculture type of problems.

This programme will endeavour to work closely with industry to address real-world needs by linking the three specialization areas to real-world applications and projects in areas such as business, finance, data science and analytics, natural language engineering, control systems, internet of things, embedded systems amongst many others The C4D specialization applications and projects have the potential to address challenges and impact in various sectors - health, education, agriculture, finance, etc.

Contacts of support persons

dept-computing@uonbi.ac.ke