Prerequisites and Educational Goals for a Masters Course in e-Science

After completion of the Masters course, students will have a high-level understanding of applications in e-Science and will also have skills in data management, programming and trans-domain communication.

It was agreed that the Masters course should not be linked to the undergraduate levels. Prerequisites would include:

• Maths and science competencies (calculus and statistics, numerical, analytical and technical understandings).
• A substantial part of Stage 2 competencies would be required, but not necessarily through taking courses associated with Stage 2.
• Simple programming
• Competence in English should be recommended, but the strength of the recommendation is at issue (it should not be a full-blown requirement).

COURSE CONTENT:

Understanding e-Science

• collaborative working environments
  • ethics
  • tools
  • interpersonal protocols (communication in remote communication tools)
• solving larger problems beyond local resources
  • scale of problems
  • broad examples from different disciplines
• distributed computing for e-Science
  • infrastructures
  • case studies in e-Science
  • things you can do with e-Science, types of problems and how they map to different infrastructures, etc.
  • network comms and implications thereof

Data Management

• storage
• movement
• provenance
• life-cycle
• validation
• security
• schemas / data formats
• documentation
• curation

Examples can be domain specific

Programming for e-Science

• loosely-coupled programming (includes communications, networks issues, workflows...)
• programming to APIs
• Code re-use & component publishing, API production
• code maintenance, versioning, etc.
• technical documentation for re-use
• standards
• programming environments
• security
• introduction to existing CS methods & concepts

Presentation & Communications skills

• Trans-domain communication skills
  • simple guidelines: e.g. don't use jargon or acronyms, etc.
• case-studies of failures
• prepare presentation, for someone outside of your domain
• give various presentations, individual and group presentations.
• user documentation
• shared reports, shared documentation, etc.
• wikis, blogs, etiquette, etc.
• requirements gathering

Final project

• must demonstrate key learning goals of the course
• domain-specific
• appropriate supervisor who suggests topic
• individual project
• tangible product at the end of it
• assessment via
  • project introduction presentation
  • demonstration of application
  • project report
  • possibly some interim reports, etc.
  • diary/blog of progress
• possibly produce a research paper from the dissertation
• trans-domain aspect whereby the student must explain their work so that it can be understood by someone from a different background
• literature review
• basic project management
• research methods introduction lecture before they begin the project

Ideally the following should also be incorporated into the project

• showing composition of existing tools as well as writing their own code
• with some collaborative aspect, have to talk to or work with someone if possible
• requirements gathering should be included (if appropriate)