>> Professor Michael Blumenstein The degree is a four-year degree with an honours component, and it contains the sort of foundations and fundamentals required to get students started in the computing area – things like coding, programming and everything from databases and other type areas.
But the really exciting part is the fact that there is an opportunity for students to take different majors, such as internetworking applications, enterprise systems development, and areas where there’s a really huge need for their skills.
Computing science is an area that really demands technical skills, and those are the skills that are required in the future of our industries, and the future of innovation in Australia and also around the world.
It basically provides the foundation for things such as programming, coding, understanding the future of artificial intelligence research, data science. These are areas that really need technical skills – it needs people to be able to understand where they can learn the ability to actually get a computer to do very sophisticated processes, and this computing sciences area is actually exactly where they can get those skills, and where they can get the foundations for being relevant to industry and research. The types of students that we relish in undertaking a course like the Bachelor of Computing Science would be those that have a tremendous fundamental already within maths and a love for mathematic1 and computing in general, such as in the areas of coding and programming.
We’re looking for students who have a high technical ability, who love problem solving and who can undertake the really big problems and challenges that the digital era faces in areas such as artificial intelligence, social robotics and quantum computing. In technology departments, or in technology-based organisations, we actually are increasingly embracing students that come from a very, very diverse set of degrees, because that diversity brings strength to our areas, and also reflects the great variety of work that we’ve got.
And then the counter to that is actually students coming through from computing science can go in so many different places, so computing science and technology is not the domain or the exclusive domain of technology groups anymore – it’s embedding right through organisations, and so I think a degree that gives you those technical skills combined with the ability to learn and adapt and grow over time, you can take that starting point anywhere these days I think.
