City University London has launched a masters degree in computer resilience, hoping to increase the number of professionals capable of preventing, combating or repairing large scale IT failure.
The MSc in Resilience, Assurance and Risk Management for Computer-Based Systems, which will begin in the 2009/10 academic year, will be taught at the University’s Centre for Software Reliability (CSR).
It is hoped that graduates will be able to better identify, understand and manage the increasing risks and threats being faced by IT and engineering systems, threats such as physical failures, malicious attack, design faults or user error.
The university says that dealing with these threats requires a unified, system-level understanding of both the technical and the human components of resilience.
“This MSc aims to teach not only specific safety, reliability or security techniques but also a broader knowledge of risk required in advanced technical or management roles within system development, procurement, operation or licensing,” said Professor Robin Bloomfield, head of the Centre for Software Reliability at City University London.
Modules on the course include: introduction to dependability and resilience; fault tolerance, redundancy and diversity: design and analysis techniques for resilience; information security assurance and digital forensics; socio-technical systems, risk and resilience; probabilistic modelling of dependability for computer-based systems; assurance cases for security, safety, dependability; software dependability and software risk management; and techniques for software correctness.
