Course outline

The two year master degree program in Computer Science and Networking (LM-CSN) has been designed to meet the growing demand for an emerging kind of professionals with expertise in both the information and the networking technologies in a strongly integrated manner. These expertise is needed in the design and implementation of both innovative hardware-software distributed infrastructures and service-based distributed applications in several areas of industry, e-business, research, social and citizen services, public administration. A professional with strong expertise in both information and networking sciences and technologies is without precedence in the current scenario of national master programs, and few are the examples at the international level. In the last twenty years Internet has radically transformed the approach to realizing many activities in the industrial, social and scientific world, as well as in everyday life.

Recently, the ICT scientific and industrial community has shown how further drastic evolutions and changes in infrastructures will be needed in the next 10-15 years to meet new and pressing requirements by the applications. Among them: industrial automation, e-business, real-time and mission-critical systems, emergency and disaster management, ubiquitous health care, intelligent urban sensors, remote presence and remote control, energy source management, vehicular networks, and many others. The foreseen, and partially current, evolutions and changes (Future Internet) must allow new applications to be developed in few months, instead of several years as traditionally, thus granting a much more efficient and secure utilization of networks and distributed systems by the industry and society in a world-wide scale. This professional in CSN will be able to perform activities requiring advanced methodologies in design , development, direction, evaluation, testing and management of distributed infrastructures and networked applications.

With this goal in mind, they will possess a deep knowledge of Computer Science and Networking fundamentals and specialized knowledge in ICT aspects:

  • distributed systems and enabling platforms, service oriented architectures, high-performance computing, pervasive & mobile computing,
  • access networks at various scale levels, transmission and optical technologies, traffic engineering models and techniques
  • paradigms, programming models and tools for QoS-driven design methods and techniques in analysis, design, implementation, evaluation and verification.

Such expertise will be developed also through Excellence Courses for students of Sant’Anna Superior School and of University of Pisa. The professional in Computer Science and Networking has a strong capability to designing, prototyping, experimenting, optimizing and evaluation. To achieve this goal, some courses will be supported by advanced laboratories in architecture, programming and communication in complex centralized, parallel and distributed configurations. The master degree program in Computer Science and Networking will have an international character, based on courses in English language, in order to attract students from various parts of the world. This is feasible owing to the prestige of the partner institutions and to their high quality of research well recognized at the international level.

The Department of Information Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, of the University of Pisa will contribute to the LM-CSN, with professors in the area of Networking and Communications. The partners are willing to verify, after the activation of the course, the transformation of this collaboration into an inter-faculty course.