Doctor of Engineering (EngD)

Course Description
Table of Content
COURSE PAGE

TECHNICAL FOUNDATION COURSES

IS702 Information Security 2
IS712 Machine Learning 2
IS713 Foundations of Data Analytics 2
IS714 Data Security 2
IS715 Systems Security 2
IS709 Network Analysis and Mining 2
IS703 Algorithms and Optimization 3
IS711 Learning and Planning in Intelligent Systems 3
IS706 Software Mining and Analysis 3
IS708 Mobile and Distributed Systems 3

TECHNOLOGY APPLICATION
Financial Technology (FINTECH) Course Area
ISFS603 Corporate Banking & Blockchain 4
ISFS610 Digital Payments & Innovations 4

Analytics (ANALYTICS) Course Area

ISSS602 Data Analytics Lab 4
ISSS603 Customer Analytics & Applications 4
ISSS604 Operations Analytics & Applications 4
3
ISSS612 Big Data: Tools & Techniques 5
ISSS608 Visual Analytics & Applications 3
5
ISSS609 Text Analytics & Applications 3
5
ISSS606 Social Analytics & Applications 4
5
ISSS611 Process Analytics using Simulation 5
ISSS615 Data Management 6

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Course Area

ISSS602 Introduction
CS601 Data Analytics
toLab
Artificial Intelligence 6
ISSS610 Applied Machine Learning 6
ISSS604 Algorithm
CS602 OperationsDesign
Analytics
& Implementation
& Applications 3
6
CS603 Multi-Agent Systems 6
ISSS608 Deep
CS604 VisualLearning
Analyticsfor
& Applications
Visual Recognition 3
7
CS605 Natural Language Processing for Smart Assistants 7
ISSS606 AI
CS606 Social
Planning
Analytics
and &Decision
Applications
Making 4
7
CS608 Recommender Systems 7

Information Technology Management (TECH) Course Area

IS613 Cybersecurity Technology & Applications 8
IS614 IoT: Technology & Applications 8

www.smu.edu.sg/EngD sis_engd@smu.edu.sg +(65) 6828 5307

TECHNICAL FOUNDATION COURSES

IS702 Information Security

This course studies the key facets of information security, from theory to applications in a networked environment. Topics to be covered include
symmetric key cryptosystems, number-theoretical foundations, public key cryptosystems, authentication, key exchange, access control, Internet
security architecture, and emerging security standards.

IS712 Machine Learning

This course covers the theory and practical algorithms for machine learning from a variety of perspectives. We will cover topics such as decision tree
learning, support vector machine and kernel methods, Bayesian learning, online learning, clustering and dimension reduction, etc. This course also
covers theoretical concepts such as inductive bias, the PAC learning framework, minimum description length principle, and Occam's Razor, etc. The
course is intended to prepare graduate students for research in machine learning and applications.

IS713 Foundations of Data Analytics

The overall objective of this course is to familiarize the master and PHD students with data analytics and its applicability in a real business
environment. Here, data analytics include the extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, exploratory and predictive models, and
fact-based simulation. The class mainly deals with empirical fundamentals for data analytics. Knowing how to effectively use them (method for data
analytics) to solve research problems will be very helpful in students’ future professional career.
We will study (1) how to systematically understand what you see and (2) how to make what you believe more persuasive. Data analytic tools will be
very useful in many situations you are confronted with.
The class will be built on applied economics, statistics, and applied econometrics.

IS714 Data Security

This course introduces graduate students to some advanced topics in data security, including RFID privacy notions and their relations, data
protection in EPCglobal network, RFID clone detection, RFID path authentication, data access in the Cloud, IBE and fuzzy IBE, KP-ABE, CP-ABE, and
inference control and auditing.

IS715 Systems Security

This course introduces graduate students to advanced topics in systems security, which includes:
1. Software vulnerability and exploitation
2. User authentication in modern operation systems
3. Denial of service attacks and defenses
4. Intrusion detection
5. Common networking protocol security and Internet routing security

IS709 Network Analysis and Mining

This course delves into research and survey papers in graph mining, social network mining and social information retrieval, with an emphasis on
system and application issues. Topics to be covered include graph and network databases, graph mining, social network analysis, link prediction,
community detection, and social behavior mining. The course is intended to prepare graduate students for research in data mining, information
retrieval or text mining.

www.smu.edu.sg/EngD sis_engd@smu.edu.sg +(65) 6828 5307

IS703 Algorithms and Optimization
This course provides basic theory and foundations for algorithms and optimization.
It covers the following topics:
1. Computational Complexity and Algorithm Analysis
2. Data Structures: Heaps, Trees, Graphs and Networks
3. Algorithm design paradigms – Divide & Conquer, Greedy, Dynamic Programming
4. Graphs Algorithms and Network Flows
5. Theory of NP-Completeness / Hardness / Approximation
6. Mathematical Programming
7. Combinatorial Optimization, Branch & Bound
8. Local Search and Meta-Heuristics
9. Planning and Scheduling Models and Algorithms

IS711 Learning and Planning in Intelligent Systems

This course covers advanced topics in building these intelligent systems that make decisions or provide support to humans in making decisions.
Furthermore, the topics explored are at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Operations Research (Management Science).
More specifically, we will provide real world applications and the theoretical underpinnings for the following topics:
1. Reasoning with Uncertainty
2. Reasoning with Multiple Agents (MAS)

IS706 Software Mining and Analysis

This course introduces participants to advanced techniques and tools for mining and analyzing software data, which includes but not limited to
source code, executable code, code repository records, code specifications, test cases, bug reports, execution profiles, and documentations. Major
topics include static program analysis, dynamic program analysis, software repository mining, and specification mining. While not sidestepping
mining and analysis theories, the course aims to equip participants with knowledge and skills that can be applied to resolve software issues in their
own research and development projects.

IS708 Mobile and Distributed Systems

This course studies the key challenges, design choices and core technologies for building some of the most widely-used mobile and Internet-scale
distributed applications and services. The focus will be on understanding the key performance bottlenecks and challenges (e.g., energy overheads,
workload spikes) that these systems face, and on analyzing and critiquing the various techniques to tackle these challenges. The course will also
briefly touch on techniques for prototyping and evaluating user interaction with such systems.

www.smu.edu.sg/EngD sis_engd@smu.edu.sg +(65) 6828 5307

TECHNOLOGY APPLICATION

Financial Technology (FINTECH) Course Area

ISFS603 Corporate Banking & Blockchain
This module deals with specific corporate banking areas and the emerging area of blockchain and smart contracts which facilitate and enforce
agreements between organisations through the use of decentralised technology. You will learn about:
1. Cash management & payments, the product areas of corporate lending, trade finance, and corporate treasury.
2. The application of blockchain and smart contracts through the case study analysis of real-world situations.
3. Hands-on experience of banking systems.
4. Smart contract development using Ethereum.

ISFS610 Digital Payments & Innovations

Blockchain, cryptocurrency and other forms of innovation are fast surfacing to the forefront of digital payment. Through this module, you will learn
about:

1. How blockchain impacts the design of payment design, its possibilities and limits to change.
2. The key components in the payment domain, as well as various 'domestic' and cross border payments.

Analytics (ANALYTICS) Course Area

ISSS602 Data Analytics Lab
Business decision-making is an art and a science. In this Information Age, the ability to uncover actionable insights from business data is an
increasingly sought after skill-set. Through this module, you will learn about:
1. Data analytics techniques and data-driven business knowledge discovery anchored by principles, concepts, methods and best practices from
both statistics and data mining.
2. Making data-driven decisions in an intelligent and informed manner.

ISSS603 Customer Analytics & Applications

Businesses are constantly on a lookout to bridge the gap between what customers want and how they can improve their product/service offering.
To do so, they turn to data from and about their customers gathered through various means. Through this module, you will learn about:
1. Concepts and techniques of customer focused and data driven analytics, and supporting systems.
2. Creating cutting-edge business analytics applications and IT solutions for service industry companies to gain customer insights, including
customer attitudes, behaviour, profitability and risk.
3. Emerging "next-practices" of real time, adaptive data analytics in the context of customers.
4. Customer focused analytical reasoning, methods and applications to support analytic tasks and challenges in specific industry contexts.
5. Evaluating and improving the usefulness and usability of data analytics applications.
Note: The pre-requisite course for this is “Data Analytics Lab”.

ISSS604 Operations Analytics & Applications

Service sector businesses are typically faced with operations-management issues ranging from demand forecasting, inventory management,
distribution management, capacity planning, resource allocation, work scheduling, and queue & cycle time management. Through this module, you
will learn about:
1. The Data and Decision Analytics Framework, which aids in the identification of the actual cause of business operation problems by collecting,
preparing, and exploring data to gain business insights.
2. Capitalising on data analytics to exploit the linkages across processes, data, operations, analytics and technology, so as to offer businesses
alternative solutions to operations problems.

www.smu.edu.sg/EngD sis_engd@smu.edu.sg +(65) 6828 5307

ISSS612 Big Data: Tools & Techniques
Big Data has become a key asset when organisations develop their strategic understanding of consumer and market trends. Through this module,
you will learn about:

1. The storage, management and analysis of Big Data streams along with traditional data sets arising from their customer relationship
management and enterprise resource planning platforms.
2. Using Big Data insights to design products, services and differentiated and richer customer experiences at low cost by optimising operations
and processes.
3. Key Big Data architectures.
4. The Hadoop framework (HDFS, MapReduce) along with Hadoop ecosystem components (Pig, Hive, Spark and Kafka).

ISSS608 Visual Analytics & Applications

A “must-have” in the business practitioner’s toolkit is the ability to interact with the visual representation of business data and to detect meaningful
patterns, trends and exceptions. With visual analytics, the unexpected can be discovered without having to deal with complex statistical formulas
and programming. Through this module, you will learn about:
1. Principles, techniques and best practices of data visualisation and various real world applications of visual analytics.
2. Building and improving cutting-edge visual analytics tools, systems and applications using real world data and visually-enabled analytical
reasoning.

ISSS609 Text Analytics & Applications

Textual data streaming especially on social media account for a huge proportion of information that businesses can draw customer insights from to
improve products and services, and guide targeted advertising, amongst others. Through this module, you will learn about:
1. Fundamental principles behind text analytics algorithms and some of the latest emerging technologies for solving real-world text analytics
problems.
2. How you can extract value from unstructured and noisy textual data.

ISSS606 Social Analytics & Applications

The methods for the analysis of social networks originate from graph mining techniques. Through this module, you will learn about:
1. Python programming and build crawlers to get data from social networks. Such data include both social media data and social network data.
2. Processing and analysing data from various social networks. This includes abstracting social networks into graph models, and extending
graph algorithms to applications on social networks. We will familiarise you with graph theory before introducing graph mining techniques.
3. Social influence, social links, ego networks and community detection catered for modern social networks analytics. You will apply both text
mining and graph mining algorithms on social media and social network data.

ISSS611 Process Analytics using Simulation

Simulation modelling allows organisations to peek into the future, predict what can or will happen, and maximise decision making effectiveness after
examining alternative outcomes and scenarios. It is typically used to model systems that are too expensive or dangerous to build or experiment with
in practice. Through this module, you will learn:
1. Modelling and simulation of the structure and behaviour of real-world systems using discrete-event simulation techniques. Examples may
include processes from manufacturing, logistics and health services.
2. Theoretical topics like random variable generation, queueing theory, model verification and validation, design of experiments and statistical
analysis of input and output data.
3. Configuration of a simulation software for modelling complex business processes

www.smu.edu.sg/EngD sis_engd@smu.edu.sg +(65) 6828 5307

ISSS615 Data Management
The proper design, implementation and management of data is critical in business processes. Through this module, you will learn about:

1. The fundamentals of relational database theory which include data management concepts such as data modelling, database design, and
database implementation in current business information systems.
2. Applying data management knowledge to solve real-life business scenarios.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Course Area

CS601 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
AI aims to augment or substitute human intelligence in solving complex real world decision making problems. This course explores the breadth of
the topic that will equip students with core concepts and practical know‐how to build basic AI applications that impact business and society.
Through this module, you will learn about:
1. Cover searching (for e.g., scheduling meetings between different people with different preferences),
2. Probabilistic graphical models (e.g. building an AI bot that evaluates whether a credit card fraud has taken place based on transactions),
3. Planning and learning under uncertainty (e.g., building AI systems that guide doctors in recommending medicines for patients or taxi drivers
to optimise their routes),
4. Multi‐agent systems (e.g., building next generation patrolling systems for critical infrastructure security),
5. Image processing (e.g. building systems that track and/or recognise suspicious people),
6. Natural language processing (e.g., building chat bots that can automatically and intelligently interact with customers across different service
industries).
Note: The pre-requisite course for this is “Algorithm Design & Implementation”.

ISSS610 Applied Machine Learning

Machine learning forms the backbone of a great deal of personalised technology, including speech recognition and product recommendations.
Through this module, you will learn about:
1. Principles, concepts, techniques and algorithms in the fields of machine learning.
2. Creating applications using existing machine learning algorithms to solve business problems.

Note: The pre-requisite for this course is “Python for Data Science”. However, students from Jan 2019 or older intakes are allowed to replace the
pre-requisite course with “Data Analytics Lab”.

CS602 Algorithm Design & Implementation

Many AI solutions require data scientists to have deep knowledge in algorithm design and implementation. Through this module, you will learn
about:
1. Algorithmic analysis in various applications and appreciate the efficiency achieved by well‐designed data structures and algorithms.
2. Building AI solutions and implement them.

CS603 Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is employed as an approach in this module to study complex business and social phenomena, particularly when there is
a need to describe a system that is populated by many independent and heterogeneous decision makers. MAS can also be used to perform policy
evaluations and generate decision supports by computing parameter changes at different levels to observe its effects on various performance
indicators. Through this module, you will learn about:
1. Both the theoretical and application frameworks of MAS.
2. NetLogo, an intuitive yet powerful modeling language for building MAS.
3. Utilising MAS in policy/strategy evaluations.
4. The importance of considering uncertainty and opponent modeling when designing strategic, tactical, and operational policies.
Note: The pre-requisite course for this is “Algorithm Design & Implementation”.

www.smu.edu.sg/EngD sis_engd@smu.edu.sg +(65) 6828 5307

CS604 Deep Learning for Visual Recognition
Recent advances in Deep Learning approaches have significantly expanded the frontiers of visual recognition systems. Visual recognition tasks, such
as image classification, localisation, detection and segmentation, are at the core of various real-world computer vision applications in areas that
include autonomous vehicles, face recognition and medical imaging, amongst others. Through this module, you will learn about:
1. Deep learning architectures with an emphasis on end-to-end models for image recognition and other tasks.
2. Implementing and training your own deep learning models for visual recognition tasks.
3. Cutting-edge techniques in computer vision.

Note: The pre-requisite course for this is “Python for Data Science” OR “Applied Machine Learning”.

CS605 Natural Language Processing for Smart Assistants

Natural language processing helps machines understand and communicate with us in human language. It comprises applications such as
conversational agents, machine translation, text summarisation and question answering. Through this module, you will learn about:

1. Key technologies behind a number of natural language processing applications with deep learning that have big impact in our daily lives.
2. Implementing and applying such systems.

Note: The pre-requisite course for this is “Python for Data Science” OR “Applied Machine Learning”.

CS606 AI Planning and Decision Making

Building upon the pre-requisite algorithmic design and implementation module, this module deepens the framework for inner working and
application of AI models and algorithms embedded in enterprise systems that provide optimised planning and decision support. Through this
module, you will learn about:
1. Skills for thinking about, understanding, modeling and solving problems pertaining to enterprise systems.
2. Heuristics and advanced search techniques, graph algorithms, AI planning and scheduling, and optimisation under uncertainty and big
data.
3. Numerous real‐world applications drawn from a diverse domain in transportation, logistics, travel, healthcare, safety and security.
Note: The pre-requisite course for this is “Algorithm Design & Implementation”.

CS608 Recommender Systems

With pervasive digitisation of our everyday lives, we face an increasing number of options, be it in which product to purchase, which movie to watch,
which article to read, and which applicant to interview, etc. As it is nigh impossible to investigate every possible option driven by necessity, product
and service providers rely on recommender systems to help narrow down the options that are most likely of interest to a target user.
This course teaches the various aspects of recommender systems. By the end of the course, students would be expected to have developed the
following abilities:
1. Understand the application of recommender systems to businesses;
2. Formulate a recommendation problem appropriately for a particular scenario;
3. Understand various forms of recommendation algorithms;
4. Apply these methods or algorithms on various datasets;
5. Identify issues that may affect the effectiveness of a recommender system.
Note: There are two pre-requisite courses for this course unit: "Python for Data Science" AND “Algorithm Design and Implementation”.

www.smu.edu.sg/EngD sis_engd@smu.edu.sg +(65) 6828 5307

Information Technology Management (TECH) Course Area
IS613 Cybersecurity Technology & Applications
Cybersecurity has become a fundamental area of focus of private entities and governments alike. Through this module, you will learn about:

1. Fundamental concepts of cybersecurity, system design principles, basic cryptographic techniques, protocols, access control models, firewalls
and intrusion detection systems.
2. Applying these concepts to protect existing and emerging applications, such as secure electronic transactions, secure e-banking, and data
confidentiality and privacy in cloud computing.

IS614 IoT: Technology & Applications

While IT projects typically tend not to stick to schedule, managers need to exercise good judgment and effective management skill to ensure the
success of their projects. Through this module, you will learn about:
1. Decisions and tradeoffs faced by project managers in managing schedules, team dynamics, resource scheduling, quality issues, schedule
delays, cost overruns, conflict management, negotiation and vendor management, amongst others.
2. Best practices promoted by the Project Management Institute (PMI) and documented in "A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowl-
edge" (PMBOK® Guide).

www.smu.edu.sg/EngD sis_engd@smu.edu.sg +(65) 6828 5307