MSc in Computer Science, Department of Computer Sciences, Quaid-e-Azam University

MSc (CS)

MSc (Computer Science)

The overall aim of M.Sc. Computer Science is to develop in the students the ability to construct reliable software products by applying sound scientific, management and engineering principles. During the M.Sc. students will be exposed to current and future issues affecting the development of computer-based systems. The requirement of the degree programme is completion of 60 credits in at least four semesters. Each course is of 3 credits except the project (6 credits). The remaining 15 credits could be earned by taking 3 optional courses and project for specialization. Students having acquired 60 credits of study will be awarded the M.Sc. degree along with a transcript which identifies the courses studied

First Semester

CS-301: Computer Systems
Functions and components of computers; Symbol Representation: data, Instruction sets, and Addresses. Symbol storage and retrieval into the processor, Fetch execute cycle. Stored Program Concept. Secondary storage and input/output devices; Introduction to Operating systems; Introduction to UNIX Operating System (UNIX commands and filters, file management); Introduction to networks; emerging technology; the Internet
CS-302: Introdcution to Computing Theory
Formal Logic, Propositional and predicate calculus, Methods of proof, Induction and Recursion, Loop invariants, Relations and Functions, Languages and grammars, Deterministic and nondeterministic finite state automata Regular grammars and regular expressions, Languages generated by regular expressions, Equivalence of regular expressions and finite automata, Context-free grammars, Languages generated by context-free grammars, Parse trees, Simplification of context-free grammars, Push-down automata, Properties of context-free languages, Pumping Lemma.
CS-303: Rapid Application Development
RAD Principles; RAD in the software development process; RAD and Prototyping. Horizontal vs Vertical Prototyping. Rapid Prototyping. The Visual Programming Paradigm; Objects; Events; Event Handling; Object Reuse. Introduction to commonly used visual tools for Rapid application development. Case Studies using visual tools.
CS-304: Human Aspects of Computing
Concept of usability, acceptability and job satisfaction. Human aspects: users and stakeholders; affordance and mental models. Basic cognitive psychology; concepts and models of task and activities. Workstation ergonomics. Technological aspects: processor speed, memory, networks. Different media and interface styles. Context of use; Guidelines and heuristic evaluation.
CS-305: Problem solving and Programming
Introduction to Problem solving. Identification of common problem-solving approaches. Writing simple programs using assignment and sequence. Variables, Simple types, Operators and expressions. Conditional and repetitive statements. Development of solutions using the notions of procedural and data abstraction. Introduction to programming: syntactic constructs, data abstraction, Input and output. Simple functions. Program structure and organization. Program testing and debugging.

Second Semester

CS-351: Computer Architecture Pre-Req:CS-301
Classification schemes. Functional units. Storage systems: Hierarchy of memories, RAM and disks. Processor structure, Data and Instructions. Instruction sets. Microprogramming. Bussing systems and input/output structures, I/O organization, I/O devices and their diversity, their interconnection to CPU and Memory. Instruction Set Processor (ISP) level view of computer hardware, assembly language level use. Survey of different kinds of computer architectures.
CS-352: Data structures and Algorithms Pre-Req:CS-305
Arrays: Linear Lists: Stacks. Queues and De-queues. Sequential and Linked Allocation. Static and Dynamic Allocation. Algorithms for implementation of different data structures. Tree Structures. Searching. Sorting Techniques. Hashing Techniques. Introduction to files, there structures and access methods. Memory Management, Garbage Collection/Compaction.
CS-353: Database Design Pre-Req:CS-303
Data models (relational, hierarchical, and network). Database design, detailed study of the relational model. Database Languages and Application Programming. Introduction to DBMS facilities and architectures. Data Modelling and Database Design; Data dependencies, decomposition algorithms. Concurrency, integrity, security and reliability issues. Query decomposition, optimization and evaluation strategies. Introduction to Object Oriented databases. Introduction to distributed databases.
CS-354: Introduction to Software Engineering
Introduction and Overview; Software Engineering; Software Process/lifecycle Models Requirements Process: Requirements Elicitation; Requirements Verification; Requirements Documentation Software Design Process: Modeling Architectures; Architecture Evaluation and Refinement; Documenting Software Architectures; Architecture Design Review; Designing Modules: Software Design Principles; Software Design Methods; Object-Oriented Design; Structured Design; Design Documentation; Software Construction: Programming Standards and Procedures; Programming Guidelines; Program Documentation; The Programming Process; Software Testing: Software Faults and Failures; Testing Issues; Program Testing: Unit Testing; Integration Testing; Testing Object-Oriented Systems; Test Planning;: Principles of System Testing; Function Testing; Performance Testing; Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability; Acceptance Testing; Installation Testing Software Deployment and Maintenance Measurement; Evaluation: Evaluating Processes; Evaluating Resources.
CS-355: Object Oriented Programming Pre-Req:CS-305
Object-oriented Technology: Design Programming concepts, Data Abstraction, Inheritance, Polymorphism. Defining and Deriving Classes, Constructors and destructors, memory management, exception handling, Overloading operators, Copy and conversion constructors, Difference between DOS and Windows environment programming, Programming for Windows, Object oriented programming for Windows. Practical experience by writing large programs in a windows based OO language.

Third Semester

CS-401: Computer Communications and Networks Pre-Req:CS-351
Communication system and devices. Serial data communication. Computer Networks: goals, classification and topologies. Network Architecture: Introduction to physical, datalink, network, and transport layers of ISO/OSI model. Protocols at different layers. TCP/IP. Local Area Networks. Internetworking. Internet/Intranet. Interconnection of networks using bridges and gateways. Packet switching circuits. Network security and management.
CS-402: Operating Systems Pre-Req:CS-352
Operating Systems: An Overview and functionality. Storage Management: Non/Contiguous Storage allocation, Paging, Segmentation. Virtual storage implementation: Demand Paging/Segmentation. Process/Processor Management: Processor scheduling, Process coordination/synchronization. Classical Synchronization Problems, Inter Process communication, Deadlocks problems and solutions. Information Management: I/O Management, Disk space allocation methods, Disk scheduling, File Management, File Organization and Access Methods, File Sharing and Protection. Case Studies: UNIX/Linux, Windows NT
CS-434: Software Engineering Practicum
Importance of project documentation; Requirement collection; Prototyping; System design; Testing; Delivery; Maintenance; A specific template (focused towards V-shaped development methodology) would be executed in the following way: Requirement collection / analysis: Requirement specification document; System design: Design document Architectural / detailed / component level design: architectural design document; Interface design: Interface design document; Module design; Program design: Pseudo code, program description; Coding: Source code.
CS-449: Wireless and Mobile Networks
CS-452: Analysis and Design of Algorithms Pre-Req:CS-352
Empirical and theoretical measures of the efficiency of algorithms. Best, worst and average case behavior of algorithms; Simple recurrence relations and their solution; Data and Algorithm Design; Dynamic data structures; A study of good algorithms related to sorting, Text manipulation, matrix multiplication, integer and polynomial arithmetic, and graph theory. A survey of hard problems, NP- completeness, and intractable problems.
CS-455: Computer Graphics Pre-Req:CS-305
Graphics hardware: Logical input devices. Calligraphic versus raster systems, Graphics Software: Clipping and scan conversion algorithms, hidden surface 2-d/3-d modelling, graphics packages. Interactive graphics: Graphics applications

Fourth Semester

CS-499: Project Pre-Req:CS-404
Students will work on a computer science project under the supervision of a faculty member or an expert in the field and submit a suitable written report (Project Report) on the work carried out. The project will be evaluated by an external examiner in the presence of the supervisor and the chairman through a public seminar and software demonstration.
+ Any three courses from list of optional courses being offered

Optional Courses

CS-356: Theory of Automata Pre-Req:CS-302
Finite State Models: Language definitions preliminaries, Regular expressions/Regular languages, Finite automata (FAs), Transition graphs (TGs), NFAs, kleene's theorem, Transducers (automata with output), Pumping lemma and non regular language Grammars and PDA: Context free grammars, Derivations, derivation trees and ambiguity, Simplifying CFLs , Normal form grammars and parsing, Push-down Automata, Pumping lemma and non-context free languages, Decidability, Chomsky's hierarchy of grammars Turing Machines Theory: Turing machines, Post machine, Variations on TM, TM encoding, Universal Turing Machine, Context sensitive Grammars, Defining Computers by TMs
CS-357: Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence: Introduction, Intelligent Agents; Problem-solving: Solving Problems by Searching, Informed Search and Exploration, Constraint Satisfaction Problems, Adversarial Search. Knowledge and reasoning: Logical Agents, First-Order Logic, Inference in First-Order Logic, Knowledge Representation. Planning and Acting in the Real World. Uncertain knowledge and reasoning: Uncertainty, Probabilistic Reasoning, Probabilistic Reasoning over Time, Making Simple Decisions, Making Complex Decisions. Learning: Learning from Observations, Knowledge in Learning, Statistical Learning Methods, Reinforcement Learning. Communicating, perceiving, and acting: Communication, Probabilistic Language Processing, Perception and Robotics.
CS-359: Comparative Study of Programming Languages
CS-403: Information Systems Pre-Req:CS-353
Information Systems strategy: End-user Computing; office automation; groupware; applications and implications of networks; client-server architecture. Controls and Security; Procurement and Implementation; Information Systems Engineering: aspects of UML; form and report design; documentation; systems implementation. Database Technology: DBMS Facilities and architectures; Object Oriented DBMS. Implementation of OO information systems.
CS-455: Software Testing Techniques
Testing: Verification Validation: Testing concepts; Static and Dynamic approaches of Testing Testing Types: human computer interface, usability, reliability, security, conformance to specification Testing fundamentals: Test plan creation and test case generation; Testing principles; Inspections and Formal Technical Reviews; black-box and white-box testing techniques; Defect seeding; Unit, integration, validation, and system testing for Structured and Object-oriented systems Measurements and audits; process, design, program; Fault logging, fault tracking and technical support for such activities; Test Report generation; Regression testing
CS-462: Discrete System Simulation Pre-Req:CS-452
Discrete random variables and their distributions. A comparison of simulation techniques: discrete, continuous, and hybrid. Queuing models, analysis of data. Model building. Review of simulation languages. Application to business problems and operations research.
CS-463: Expert Systems Pre-Req:CS-453
Basic concepts and techniques. Knowledge representation and inferencing. Building a small expert system. Knowledge engineering and large system development. Survey of tools and expert systems. The expert system market. Assemblers, compilers, linkers, and loaders. System component interfaces. Fundamental abstractions; architecture and design of the kernel of a contemporary operating system; system programming interfaces; inter-process communications; concurrent and distributed programming; local and network resources; management of asynchronous events; kernel programming.
CS-464: Neural Networks Pre-Req:CS-453
Neural network concepts. Anatomy of a neural node. Types of neural network. Classification of learning algorithms. Single layer network model and multi-layer network and their limitations. Application of neural network.
CS-465: Compiling Techniques Pre-req: CS-352 CS-355
Compilers and interpreters. Compilation process. Organizations of a Compiler. Lexical Analysis. Symbol Tables. Syntax and Semantic analysis. Top down and Bottom up recognizers. Error detection and recovery. Storage allocation. Code generation and code optimization.
CS-471: Theory of Programming Pre-Req:CS-355
Prepositional calculus: Simple and compound Propositions, truth tables, Simplification of propositions, well-formed formulae. Arguments and proofs. Programs proving methods: Rules of Assignment, composition, iteration consequence. Proof of correctness of some simple programs, Program proving system.
CS-472: Information Theory Pre-Req:CS-401
Review of elementary probability theory. Basic concepts of information theory. Measures of information uncertainty, entropy, sources and channels. Kraft inequality, huffman code, error detection and correction, Hamming distance, Shannon's first and second theorems. Noiseless coding.
CS-473: Multimedia Applications and Design Pre-req: CS-404 & CS-454
Multimedia technology: basic elements of a multimedia system. Architecture of a typical multimedia computer system. Audio-visual data recording and playback devices and tools. Multimedia information storage devices and formats. Multimedia on networks and the World Wide Web. Applications of multimedia in different fields. Multimedia design principles; Multimedia design practice: Putting principles into practice using tools. Creation of multimedia objects (images, sounds, animations, etc.) and combining these objects into hypertext documents. Interactive presentations. Authoring multimedia materials for the World Wide Web. .
CS-474: Human Computer Interaction Pre-Req:CS-304
An overview of different types of computer-human interaction techniques. Human factors of Interactive Systems, Task analysis. Types of Media: input/output devices for interaction, Interface Styles; Principles of screen design. Use of Color. User models and dialog models. HCI Guidelines and standards. Interface prototyping. Web based Interfaces, Interface evaluation, Multimedia and multi-modal applications. User Interface Development Tools
CS-475: Electronic Documents Pre-Req:CS-353
History and structure of electronic documents. Problems in creation, manipulation and publishing of high quality computer based documents. Formatting Techniques for multi-font documents. Integration of text and graphics. Documents design. Online documentation: Hypertext, Hypermedia based document design, storage, and implementation Use of HTML, SGML and XML standards for electronic and other structured documents.
CS-478: Web Technologies
Basic concepts of Web; XML data model; Different XML parsing techniques; XML transformation using XSLT (XSL FO, XSL FT), XPATH, XQUERY; Web application development and deployment architectures, Web servers; Software design patterns for Web development; MVC (Model View Controller architecture), case study on MVC; Overview of web services
CS-481: Mobile Computing Systems
Mobile applications: examples, service requirements, technical challenges. Wireless media (IR, RW, MW): frequencies, range, bandwidth, cellular systems, terrestrial and satellite MW etc. Protocol architectures (OSI layer 2): 2G/3G Bluetooth, 802.11.Network layer issues and protocols - Mobile IP, addressing & routing for mobile systems.Transport and application layer protocols: WAP and beyond.Mobile agents, architectures and configurations. OS for mobile devices, APIs for mobile devices, J2ME, .NET, midlets. APIs for mobile communications. HCI issues for software design on mobile devices. Software architectures and middleware for mobile enabled distributed systems. Security and maintenance of mobile computing systems.
CS-482: Web Engineering
Overview of Protocols: TCP/IP, HTTP, Overview of 3-tier Architecture, Web Based Applications Architecture. Developing Front End Applications: Front End Development Tools, HTML, DHTML, Scripting (Java Script, Jscript, Vbscript), Java Applets, ActiveX.
CS-485: Introduction to Semantic Web
Overview of the case study to be followed; Overview of KR formalisms such as FOL, Predicate Calculus, Description Logic; RDF (Resource Description Framework); RDFS (RDF Schema); OWL (Web Ontology Language); OWL Rules; Introduction to Protégé (an ontology editor); SPARQL (Ontology query language); Ontology development methodology; Open source APIs for ontology management such as by Protégé and Jena
CS-486: Emerging Trends in Software Development
Software Development Trends; Philosophy of open source; Variants of open source (free/libre software, open software, free and open source software); Licensing of FOSS; Legal and social issues; Comparison of open source and closed source software; Source code control systems; Bug tracking and quality control; Methodologies, frameworks, and tools, with an emphasis on modular web development such as Spring, Hibernate, WebWork, Maven and Eclipse
CS-487: Enterprise Information Infrastructure
Data centers and its relevance in today's IT environment; Data center architecture and design; Data center servers; Data storage technologies; Network design, implementation and security; Business continuity and disaster recovery; Data center standards and classification
CS-488: Software Entrepreneurship
Creativity and innovation; market factors; need analysis; value addition; raising finances; value based software engineering; software business models; product v/s project; products strategy; software ecosystems; different types of software businesses such as products, services and contents; product sustainability in the market; different software deployment platforms for possible exploitation such as desktop, Web based, mobile, other small devices and gadgets; Seminars by people from industry: a number of seminars covering different aspects such as opportunities and issues related with local / overseas / internet based software markets.
CS-490: Software Project Management
Introduction to nature of software project management. Management of Software Development Schemes. Software estimation, planning, monitoring and controlling, metrics and measurement, process maturity, quality assurance, Software quality standards. Management, leadership and team building.
CS-491: Real Time Systems Pre-req:CS-402
Real time programming; The difference between soft and hard real time; Computer Interfaces for monitoring and control; Interrupts and hardware support for real time programs; Software support for real time programs; Direct Digital Control Algorithms and their Implementation; Fault tolerant programs; Case studies from a representative sample of existing real time systems.
CS-493: Concurrent Programming Pre-Req:CS-402
concurrent programs and operating systems: Synchronization concepts, sharing resources and determinacy. Distributed processing synchronous and a synchronous parallel process and their functionality, Optimal utilization of resources. Software and hardware parallelism. Data flow machines and programs, parallelizing compilers.
CS-498: Social Issues in Information Technology
Characteristics of information technology; end-user computing; cyberspace applications for individuals and social groups: life, work, leisure, and interactions. Social impact, implications and effects of computers on society, and the responsibilities of computer professionals. Social issues, including differences between software engineering and other engineering disciplines. Security, privacy and accountability. Moral, ethical, and legal issues in the computing profession, and the legal and ethical responsibilities of professionals. lessons from history.
CS-497: Computing Case Studies Pre-req: CS-404
This course will reinforce through the use of case studies and small projects, the material introduced in other courses (Database design, Software Design Methodologies, Software Engineering, Information Systems etc.) Lectures will be held to introduce each case study and provide any background information, explanation or reinforcement needed. There will be a considerable element of self-study both individually and in groups when undertaking practical project assignments. The case studies will be chosen from among the following topics: Software Engineering using PC applications software, Systems Procurement and Administration, Emerging Technologies, Larger-scale Programming.
CS-494: Selected topics in Programming Languages Pre-req: CS-305
CS-495: Selected topics in Object-Oriented Technology Pre-req: CS-355
CS-496: Selected topics in Computer Science Pre-req: CS-352

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