Program Characteristics
Importance of the Topic
One point of significant strength of the program concerns the blending of topics of great engineering and societal importance for the regional growth of students and researchers in the area of CIS. One of the main goals is in fact to promote awareness of the environmental problem, sustainability and energy-efficiency issues, security and safety aspects. Due to the anticipated attraction of a diverse pool of students enrolling from the region, the human resource capacity of Cyprus will be significantly expanded allowing a new generation of human resources skilled in CIS monitoring, control, and security that will have a multiplicative effect on the economic growth of Cyprus.
Novelty and Uniqueness
The existing programs in CIS (most of these found in the USA) cover topics closer to the computer science or civil engineering areas or to the social sciences. Instead, the program considers an integrated engineering approach taking into account also the control and management aspect of critical infrastructures using modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This represents a point of novelty and uniqueness for the program, especially in the European arena.
Multidisciplinarity
The program is designed to be multidisciplinary in nature, including concepts from Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics and Management Science, with an integrated vision of all the aspects of the monitoring, control, management, and security problems from a CIS’ perspective. The exposure to this holistic view of CIS allows students to acquire a wide background and perspective. As a result, they are able to deal with different issues associated with critical infrastructure solutions/services and to cooperate with the different specialists of the specific fields, both during the design phases of CIS as well as the monitoring, control, management, and security activities (namely the operational phase of CISs).
Strong relevance to UCY’s research activities
Monitoring, control, management, and security of intelligent CIS is a significant area of research and investment in the University of Cyprus, as evidenced by various activities at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence, the largest currently research center at UCY whose purpose is to instigate interdisciplinary interaction and promote collaboration between industry, academia, and research organizations in the area of Information and Communication Technologies, specializing in Monitoring, Control, Management, and Security of CIS. Hence, the MSc program offers prospective students access to a significant body of knowledge and expertise in research and innovation activities related to their studies.
Synergetic collaboration between UCY and Imperial College
The program is a collaboration between the University of Cyprus and Imperial College London, through a long-term collaboration between the two institutions under the EU’s strategic programme “Spreading Excellence and Widening Participation – Teaming”. Courses are designed and delivered by world-class expert academic faculty from both institutions, with significant international research reputation on the topic of Intelligent CIS. UCY is an approved Partnering Research Institution of Imperial, enabling Imperial faculty members to teach specific MSc courses at UCY and jointly supervise MSc projects.
Strong relevance to the industry
The application module of the program is focused on real problems, many provided by industrial partners collaborating with the academic faculty and entities involved in the delivery of the program. More specifically, it is important to highlight the close relationship between the designed program and the industry or the application fields, since many courses are directly related to the applications or refer to specific use cases to explain the techniques and how to implement them in the real infrastructures, thus enhancing the impact of the MSc program. Moreover, the MSc Thesis provides the opportunity to perform applied research in collaboration with industrial partners.