MSc Information Systems

Entry standards

The candidate should have a first degree in a relevant discipline from a UK university or the international equivalent. They should have obtained the degree at Lower Second level or higher. In exceptional circumstances work experience may also be considered if the candidate has achieved less than Lower Second in their first degree.

English language requirements

Non-native speakers of English will normally be required to have IELTS 6.5 or above, with a minimum of 6.0 in each component (or equivalent).

Please note that the University of Surrey offers English language programmes and is also an IELTS Test Centre.

MSc Information Systems - structure and modules

Module Titles

Compulsory modules

• Challenges for Computing Professionals
• Information Security Management
• Information Systems Development
• Databases and Knowledge Discovery
• Project Management and Business Strategy

Optional modules include:

• Introduction to Multimedia Security
• Agile Web Development
• Intelligent Information Systems
• -Interaction Design

Compulsory Modules

Challenges for Computing Professionals

IT professionals need to appreciate that technologies do not exist in isolation; they require a broad understanding of law and ethics that will enable them to assess the potential risks of, rather than to, a project, from a variety of perspectives in any technology-related undertaking.

Databases and Knowledge Discovery

A key benefit of information systems is their capability to store and organise large amounts of information. A database system is the core part which allows storage and retrieval of such data, and effective design and implementation of the database is often critical for the performance of the system. This module has two aims. Firstly, to develop the necessary skills and familiarity to use  state-of-the-art technologies to design, implement and manage database systems, and secondly to use data mining and information retrieval tools to discover data patterns and retrieve information from the database.

Information Security Management

Security is one of the greatest challenges for computer and information systems in the near future. Information security is a managerial problem as well as a technical one, and good security solutions depend on an ability to identify security requirements based on business needs and business processes. Thus, this module has a two-fold objective. It will look at how information systems can be managed and designed to fill actual business needs. It will also raise an awareness of the great range of security threats and how protection depends on a holistic view of the system.

Information Systems Development

This module provides an introduction to a set of practical techniques to aid the development of information systems and will provide you with a sense of the diversity of computing systems in today’s world. More importantly, it will give you an appreciation of the wide range of issues that are related to the development of information systems. Though the emphasis is on analysis and design skills, you will become familiar with the whole software life cycle, from user requirements through to implementation and testing.

Project Management and Business Strategy

Management is a pervasive, but frequently misunderstood, concept concerned with achieving satisfactory results in continually changing circumstances, particularly within organisations and involving people. Strategy is an important, but not always obvious, element in this activity. You will be better equipped for their life’s work, both in IT and beyond, if they have a basic understanding of the multi-dimensional nature of good management, together with the strengths and limitations of the strategic planning and implementation process.

Optional modules include:

Introduction to Multimedia Security

This module will provide an introductory background to various digital security technologies currently used in different applications for multimedia content and documents. The knowledge gained in this module will also serve as a prerequisite for you to attend the more advanced modules in security technologies and applications.

Agile Web Development

The development of interactive web applications is a rapidly growing area. In the highly dynamic environment of the World Wide Web, those who can rapidly develop and deploy innovative web applications provide themselves with a strong competitive advantage. Web application development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django are rapidly gaining support as highly productive development frameworks. This module focuses on Ruby on Rails, and provides hands-on experience of the rapid development of web applications using a method that guarantees strong engagement with customers’ needs.

MSc Information Systems - entry standards

Entry standards

The candidate should have a first degree in a relevant discipline from a UK university or the international equivalent. They should have obtained the degree at Lower Second level or higher. In exceptional circumstances work experience may also be considered if the candidate has achieved less than Lower Second in their first degree.

English language requirements

Non-native speakers of English will normally be required to have IELTS 6.5 or above, with a minimum of 6.0 in each component (or equivalent).

Please note that the University of Surrey offers English language programmes and is also an IELTS Test Centre.

Start date

September

Programme Director

• Dr Saeid Sanei

MSc Information Systems - fees and funding

Fees

Information Systems (full time):

UK/EU - £6,400 
Overseas - £14,440

www.surrey.ac.uk/pgfees/2012

Prizes

Industry Sponsors and Prizes

The Department benefits greatly from strong links with industry, and our industry partners support the programme in various ways; some with guest lectures and some with prizes for the best student performance (typically £150–200 per prize).

Scholarships

The Department pays a scholarship of £1000 to students with a First class honours degree or equivalent, who do not receive any other scholarship or bursary from the University. Please see the Department web pages for the full conditions.

MSc Information Systems - professional context

MSc Information Systems - teaching

Teaching

Taught Masters programmes in the Department of Computing utilise our research-active staff in conjunction with state-of-the-art facilities. We provide a range of learning experiences including lectures, tutorials, directed study, practical laboratories and project work that prepare graduates for their professional life.

We are particularly keen to develop, in all our students, a broad range of generic skills to complement the core technical or scientific competencies of their chosen subject area. Our modular programme format, coupled with the increasing use of innovative teaching and learning strategies such as e-learning and industrially focused short courses, provides a flexible study environment whilst maintaining academic rigour and quality.

Our record of graduate employment is outstanding, with Surrey graduates consistently being in high demand across all sectors.

Staff perspective

Dr Saeid Sanei

Information Systems spans business and applications, and the well-defined field of computer science, to evolve towards a new scientific discipline of information systems. This discipline is supported by theoretical foundations of information and computation such that graduates gain from unique opportunities relating to the principles of business models and application of algorithmic processes.

The MSc in Information Systems offers focuses on system implementation and management geared towards the business environment. In addition to a core of taught modules, a choices of optional modules allows for specialisation into areas of your own interest from related topics in computing and computer science.

Being able to learn from experts with technologies at the very forefront of the discipline provides you a unique opportunity to become a specialist in this discipline. A dissertation enables you to explore the extent to which your own understanding and ability have been enhanced by the taught programme, exploring the full system development lifecycle and giving you experiences with conducting scientific research and experimentation in a particular topic.

As Director of the MSc programme in Information Systems, and Chair the MSc Board of Examiners, I coordinate and guide the development of strategic plans for this course, have a key role in ensuring that the opportunities offered to you are the best possible, and I oversee the results that emerge because of these opportunities. I also supervise a number of dissertations each year. My contributions to these roles are grounded in some 20 years of experience in teaching, research, and administration in academia.  

MSc Information Systems - learning

Dissertation and Projects

Dissertation Project

The MSc dissertation project makes up one third of the degree programme, starting at the end of the first semester and completing at the end of the summer. During the project, you are supervised by a member of academic staff to advise and guide them to completion. At the end of the project you must submit your bound dissertation, which forms a complete record of the project, which is then held in the University Library.

The project focuses in depth on a subject at the leading edge of computing. For example, projects can undertake the development of a software system to solve a particular problem, possibly in collaboration with an industrial partner. Alternatively, projects can be research-based, in which case an aspect of computing is investigated, perhaps to evaluate particular techniques or propose a new algorithm. These projects are usually closely linked to the Department’s research strengths.

Whatever the topic, you are expected to develop a critical understanding of the methods and technologies needed, then implement and evaluate your chosen solution to a professional standard. Project planning and time management is an important part of the experience.

Project Examples

David Lundin – E-voting Project

Elections across the globe have become high profile events, not least because of their controversy, such as the American presidential election of 2000. One way in which elections can be made more reliable is through the use of electronic voting systems, which can provide security and verifiability.

Some electronic voting systems, such as Prêt à Voter and Punchscan, use a pre-printed paper ballot form, part of which is destroyed to create an encrypted receipt of the vote. The voter can use this receipt to check online that his or her vote has been included in the tally, but as the receipt is encrypted it cannot be used to prove which candidate the vote is for. The problem with these ballot forms is that anyone who can see them before they are used has sufficient knowledge to check the contents of an encrypted receipt without it having to be properly decrypted.

In David’s MSc project he developed a method based on visual encryption of the candidate list that hides the content of the ballot form until the moment when it is used by the voter in the voting booth. When the top layer, printed on the ballot form, is properly aligned over the bottom layer, displayed on a computer screen, the candidate list appears in plain text. When the form is removed from the screen the content of the form is once again hidden.

Ian Golledge – Identifying and Classifying Electronic Spam

The project presents a prototype model for implementing a self-organising map as a spam filter. A method is shown where emails are converted into feature vectors, where features represent keywords. Keywords are selected from an analysis of an email corpus with the results ranked based on word frequency measurements. The project describes phases of design which attempt to improve on feature selection and conclude on a prototype model for spam filtering using the self-organising maps.

This prototype model is evaluated over six datasets of fluctuating ratios of ham and spam, with testing designed to emulate the incremental re-training of a personalised spam filter. The results are compared to common techniques in spam filtering. Initial results show the model can outperform popular Naive Bayesian techniques. The feature vector representation is then further developed and the model shows results that compare strongly against other classifiers identified in research, demonstrating effective application of self-organising maps for spam filtering.

 The work was published at an international IEEE-sponsored conference in Italy: Vrusias, B. & Golledge, I. (2008). Adaptable text filters and unsupervised neural classifiers for spam detection. Advances in Soft Computing, 53, 195–202.

Aaron Randall – Authentication and Self-Restoration of Watermarked Images

In an age where digital media use is prolific, accessible and cost-effective, the requirement for digital images to be used in such situations as evidence in court, medical imaging, traffic enforcement and forensics is increasingly important. However, along with digital media use, many different techniques to alter media files digitally have been developed – some with very realistic results. The ramifications of using potentially tampered digital media as evidence in court, for example, could cause the difference between an innocent or guilty verdict. This is an issue that digital watermark authentication and restoration attempts to answer.

Aaron’s MSc project was to develop an image authentication and restoration system capable of localising manipulated regions of an image. Through iterative restoration techniques and the extraction of hidden data from the image itself, he would then attempt to restore damaged regions. The first step of authentication highlighted any regions of the image that the application believed to have been tampered with in some way (such as cropping, blurring or other image manipulation techniques). The restoration stage then looked at fixing the regions highlighted as tampered.  

This step extracted hidden data from the image and inserted it back into the relevant damaged regions. 

MSc Information Systems - graduate profile

Student Profile: Athanasios Pavlou

MSc Information Systems

From an early age I was bitten by the bug of computer science in all its forms. I always saw the variety of the field as a gateway that allowed me to constantly uncover new ideas and challenge myself to understand them. 

I studied for a four-year Bachelors course in informatics at the Technological Educational Institution of Athens, Greece, where I learnt that in most cases we face challenges we do not choose. 

I learnt how to deal with these challenges more efficiently during my MSc in Information Systems at the University of Surrey. It was an experience that cultivated my professionalism and deeper understanding of the field. I chose Surrey because of its excellent reputation for academic quality and high employment rates. Also, living in the vibrant student town of Guildford (being just a breath away from London) played its role. 

For the last three years I have been studying for a PhD in the Department of Computing at Surrey, where I am exploring computational simulations of brain structures for the mutual benefit of neuroscience and computing. After I complete my current studies I plan to stay in the UK and work within a field that will make the best use of my expertise.

MSc Information Systems - more

Our Department

The Department of Computing is an active department within the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences. There are 17 full-time academic staff and around 400 students at all levels - from undergraduate through to PhD. The Department is proud of its friendly reputation and aims to provide a supportive environment for students.

The Computing degree programmes at the University of Surrey and the all-round student experience is highly rated in the National Student Survey and league table results. The undergraduate and MSc degree programmes are stimulating and challenging with a high level of practical content. The Department is constantly exploring the use of new technology in teaching - such as podcasts and voting handsets - to support greater interactivity, accessibility and enjoyment of lectures. They also organise extra-curricular activity for those who want to explore other aspects of computing in more depth, while supporting local schools and colleges to bring some of the exciting aspects of computing to school pupils.

The Department's research interests are many and varied - ranging across the research groups of Digital Ecosystems; Formal Methods and Security; Multimedia Security and Forensics; and Nature Inspired Computing and Engineering. With a strong research culture and a growing research profile, the Department of Computing have won several prizes - including the University Voting Systems Competition System Design award in 2007 and the prestigious Institution of Engineering and Technology Innovation in Engineering Security award in 2006.

Our Degree Programmes

The Department offers four MSc programmes. Each with its own distinct focus, all of them offer a taste of the Department’s specialisms.

Internet Computing, Security Technologies and Applications, and Computational Intelligence and Computational Biology, are technical degrees requiring a solid background in computing or a cognate discipline.

The MSc in Information Systems is more of a generalist degree, accepting students from a wider range of backgrounds. It takes a more high-level, overall view on information technologies, and prepares students for managerial roles rather than technical roles in their future careers. It covers business and management topics as well as technical computing subjects.

The MSc in Security Technologies and Applications is specialized towards the Department’s multiple activities in relation to the technologies and principles that underlie a variety of information security techniques and technologies.

The MSc in Internet Computing is concerned with distributed information and computing resources, and builds from the Department’s activities relating to the Web and the Cloud.

The programme also has a strong element of more general, technical computer science and software development skills.

The MSc in Computational Intelligence and Computational Biology is the latest addition to the portfolio of programmes following the appointment of a Professor of Computational Intelligence and subsequent growth of a nature-inspired computing theme in the Department.

All of the programmes benefit from the strong research community and the industrial partnerships of the Department. In particular, the dissertation project allows students to work on a topic in one of the key research areas. Even though the programmes share many modules, each has its own focus and direction.

Regardless of which programme you choose, we are committed to making your year at Surrey a valuable and enjoyable experience.

MSc Information Systems - apply

• MSc Information Systems - Full-time - starting Sep 2012