Computer Science

We are entering the “Age of Big Data” – an extremely large amount of information is created every day, which is revolutionizing science and technology, governments, economy, and international development. A variety of sources contribute to the Big Data, including the Internet, Wikipedia, social networks (e.g. Facebook), micro blogs, mobile phones, and cameras. This era of “information burst” has brought convenience to our daily lives. More recently, the emergence of foundation models (e.g., GPT) is also an outcome of big data, massive high-quality is the fuel to the success training of these large machine learning models. However, the availability of such a vast amount of information has also created many problems. For example, reported incidents of leakage of private data, due to the use of the Foxy software, and the loss of USB drives that contain thousands of patients’ records, have raised serious legal and social concerns. The goal of this course is to engage students in examining the critical issues that they could encounter in the Age of Big Data. They will examine how Big Data is affecting our society and daily lives and how Big Data is used in our daily life. They will study the security and credibility issues of Big Data. They will also address the issues of organizing and exploring Big Data. Solutions proposed in legal, technological, and education domains will be explored and discussed.

The course gives a thorough understanding of digital integrated circuit design. Increasing complexity and high requirements on performance in the form of throughput and low power consumption increase the expectations from the hardware designer. Understanding both the possibilities and the limitations is important for both full custom designers and high-level designers. The course focuses on CMOS design.

This course focuses on introducing students to the core concepts of the Unix operating system and how to program this system. Today, Unix and Unix-like operating systems are ubiquitous; they are widely used in servers, embedded devices and have a growing desktop and mobile market (Linux, Mac OS X, Android etc.). This course teaches students how to develop applications for such systems, assuming no other software layer but OS. Students improve their existing C programming language skills and learn some key POSIX APIs to support designing and writing programs in a portable, maintainable fashion. They learn how to write multithreaded and multi-process applications as well as some basics of Unix networking. This is done through the Unix command line, and students learn basic tools and how to write shell scripts to automate common tasks. Students need a version of Unix installed on their own laptop (ideally Linux), help with this is provided in the first lab.

This course introduces different techniques of designing and analyzing algorithms. The course covers the framework for algorithm analysis, such as lower bound arguments, average case analysis, and the theory of NP-completeness. In addition, various algorithm design paradigms are studied. The course serves two purposes: to improve ability to design algorithms in different areas, and to prepare for the study of more advanced algorithms. The course covers lower and upper bounds, recurrences, basic algorithm paradigms (such as prune-and-search, dynamic programming, branch-and-bound, graph traversal, and randomized approaches), amortized analysis, NP-completeness, and some selected advanced topics.

This course provides an introduction to medical robotics and its applications. It covers recent developments in robotics for medical applications, position and orientation (POSE) of a robotic system, the kinematics of arm-type and vehicle-type robots, the trajectory of an arm-type robot end effector, and the different biomedical system controls.

Operating systems (OSes) such as Linux and Windows abstract bare-metal hardware and provide a more manageable virtual computer. The history of OS is old, and the modern, commercial OS consists of many fundamental concepts and implementation technologies. This course aims to educate on the basic concepts and implementation technologies of conventional OSes and deepen an understanding of their internal structure, particularly the internal structure of Linux and Windows. If time permits, cutting-edge operating systems and techniques will also be introduced. Along with the constant change in computer usage, the functions required in the OS constantly change, thus the study of OS provides hot research topics. 

This course covers the fundamentals of game development in a multi-platform (consoles, PC, Web, and mobile devices) environment. The course focuses on development of 3D games, covering all aspects of game development: the game loop, math, physics, audio, graphics, input, animations, particle systems, and artificial intelligence. This course has a strong programming content, required for laboratories and assignments. The practical aspects are taught using a popular game development platform. 

This course provides individual research training for students in the Junior Year Engineering Program through the experience of belonging to a specific laboratory at Tohoku University. Students are assigned to a laboratory with the consent of the faculty member in charge. They participate in various group activities, including seminars, for the purposes of training in research methods and developing teamwork skills. The specific topic studied depends on the instructor in charge of the laboratory to which each student is assigned. The methods of assessment vary with the student's project and laboratory instructor. Students submit an abstract concerning the results of their individual research each semester and present the results near the end of this program.

This course offers an introduction to cryptography. Topics include: mathematical foundations of cryptography; classic cryptography; symmetric encryption; key distribution and asymmetric encryption; hash functions, MAC, and authenticated encryption; digital signatures schemes; public key infrastructure; user authentication.

This course is an introduction to blockchain systems and distributed ledgers, the relevant cryptographic tools and smart contracts programming.