Master of Science - Applied Data Science and Cyber Security

MSc Applied Data Science and Cyber Security is a new masters designed for those wanting to learn the skills required to gain insights from data and an understanding of cyber security.

The conversion course enables students with little prior exposure of programming, machine learning or cyber security to develop expertise and valuable skills that will prepare students for a career in the growing data science and information security industry where there is significant demand for skilled personnel, both in the UK and internationally. The importance of data science and cyber security grows year on year, with sectors including healthcare, manufacturing, retail, finance and others reliant on the insights that accurate data capture and analysis can provide; at the same time there is an ever-growing need to engage with related cyber security and privacy issues.

The course will introduce student to a variety of languages essential to Data Science, including Python, and how to use different software packages such as scikit-learn. Student will develop  understanding of how a wide variety of data science methods work, including clustering, regression, decision trees, and neural networks, learning how to apply them through hands-on examples.  Student will also build a sound knowledge of cyber security and data privacy, including the particular privacy challenges faced by many data science applications as well as ongoing issues such as detection of security events.

The Department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway has a rich history in the development of machine learning with members of the Centre for Reliable Machine Learning (set up in 1998 as the Computer Learning Research Centre) making key contributions to the development of support vector machines, conformal predictors, reinforcement learning and other important machine learning and artificial intelligence methods. The Information Security Group at Royal Holloway is a UK Academic Centre of Excellence for cyber security research and holds a gold award as a Centre for Academic Excellence in cyber security education from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

Student will graduate with capable skills to tackle complex problems, extract insights from data, uncover otherwise-hidden information, and use it to make informed decisions, with an awareness of cyber security with its applications, giving student a competitive edge to pursue a successful career.