Doctor of Philosophy in Artificial Intelligence

Program Introduction

  • Duration of Study

    The normal duration of this course is 3 year,and the maximum duration is 6 years.

  • Teaching Approach

    Face-to-face Teaching

  • Teaching Language

    Chinese/English

  • Academic Field

    Artificial Intelligence

  • Course Introduction

    The purpose of the doctoral degree program is to cultivate high-level talents with a broad and solid theoretical foundation, systematic and in-depth professional knowledge, rigorous work style and excellent professional ethics, and the ability to independently engage in scientific research work, to be competent for scientific research, teaching and technical management in this discipline and related fields.

    Students for this doctoral degree program are required to take 2 core courses, i.e., "Principles of Artificial Intelligence" and "Machine Learning", and 2 elective courses, as well as participate in at least 10 academic activities.

    The choice of research topic for a student should be decided by your supervisor according to their research direction and the students' research interests. After the research proposal is approved, the student can start writing your dissertation dissertation.

    Each student shall publish at least 2 academic papers (2 SCI, or 1 SCI with 1 top international conference paper) by the first author, before applying for your doctoral dissertation defense.

    Only those who have gained the required credits in the study plan and passed the doctoral dissertation defense can apply in accordance with the doctoral application procedure of Macau University of Science and Technology, and receive a doctorate degree.


Study Plan

I. Program Duration

The normal study period of the program is 3 years, a Direct-Admitted Ph.D. student could extent 1-2 years to the study period. The maximum study duration is 6 years.

II. Study Mode

Lectures

III. Medium of Instruction

Chinese and English

IV. Academic Field

Artificial Intelligence

V. Course Structure

Table 1: Core Courses (8 Credits)


Course Title

Type

Credit

Academic Activities

Compulsory

2

Artificial Intelligence Principles

Compulsory

3

Machine Learning

Compulsory

3



Table 2: Elective Courses (6 Credits)

Course Title

Type

Credit

Deep Learning

Elective

3

Computer Vision

Elective

3

Natural Language Processing

Elective

3

Algorithm and Computational Complexity

Elective

3

Digital Image Processing

Elective

3

Special Topics in Artificial Intelligence

Elective

3

*University has the ultimate right to cancel the course with insufficient number of students


Table 3: Other Core Courses (2 Credits)


Course Title

Type

Credit

Literature Survey and Thesis Planning

Compulsory

2



Table 4: Dissertation (18 Credits)


Course Title

Type

Credit

Dissertation

Compulsory

18



Table 5: Recommend Top International Conferences List

Full name of international conference

Short Name

Neural Information Processing Systems Conference

NIPS

International Conference on Machine Learning

ICML

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

IJCAI

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

AAAI

IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

CVPR

IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision

ICCV

International Conference on Learning Representation

ICLR

International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques

ACM SIGGRAPH

ACM International Conference on Multimedia

ACM MM


Course Description

Basic Core Courses

DIAZ12 Academic Activities (2 credits)

This course aims to expand students' horizons, let students communicate face-to-face through academic seminars and other means, to obtain more up-to-date knowledge of artificial intelligence and etc.

DIAZ01 Artificial Intelligence Principles (3 credits)

Artificial intelligence is the study of how to realize human intelligence by using computer software and hardware to perceive and act upon external environment. Based on the systematical discourse about artificial intelligence, this course aims to introduce the principles of artificial intelligence that is divided into four parts: problem solving, planning, learning and reasoning. Where the three parts as bellow will be taught mainly:

  • Problems solving approaches for search problem, optimization problem, game problem and constraint problem.

  • Automatic planning approaches including classical planning, motion planning, and decision theoretic planning.

  • Knowledge representation methods and their reasoning mechanisms.

And, the learning part will be taught in the course of Machine Learning.

DIAZ02 Machine Learning (3 credits)

Machine learning is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. This course systematically introduces its history and foundational disciplines, and discusses the key points with components to study machine learning, on those bases, detailed teach machine learning for the three perspectives of theoretical “frameworks”, algorithmic “paradigms”, abstract “tasks”. The main contents are as following:

  • The theoretical frameworks consisting of probabilistic, statistical, geometric, connectionist, symbolic and behaviorist frameworks.

  • The three major paradigms of supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. And in addition transfer learning, meta learning, etc.

  • The abstract tasks such as classification, clustering, dimensionality reduction, association, decision-making.

DIAZ11 Literature Survey and Thesis Planning (2 credits)

This course aims to let students learn the latest research development in Artificial intelligence, to help students to know the unsolved problems and possible solutions in this field through literature survey, to lead students to choose suitable research directions so as to complete the selection of PhD research topics.

DIAZ13 Dissertation (18 credits)

This course provides students one-to-one guidance of writing an academic thesis from the instructor, with the contents including basic steps of writing thesis, exploring research topics, literature review, research design, conclusions and future works. With the help of the instructor, students can select one topic from applied mathematics, data mining, machine learning and other related research directions and finally complete a professional thesis, confirmed by the instructor.


Elective Courses

DIAE01 Deep Learning (3 credits)

This course provides a comprehensive coverage on theoretical foundations of deep learning. Graduate students will get a systematic and in-depth understanding on the theory of deep learning from this course. The major contents of this course include: mathematical foundations of deep learning, feed-forward neural networks, convolutional neural networks, regularization and optimization of deep models, recurrent neural networks, auto encoders, representational learning, structural probability models, generative models, as well as some typical application scenarios.

DIAE02 Computer Vision (3 credits)

This course describes the theoretical basis and framework in computer vision from both classical part and deep learning-based content. The part of classical computer vision includes hand-crafted feature learning method, the projection transformation from 3D physical world to 2D image plane, etc.; while deep learning-related part will introduce the most cutting-edge technologies and models based on deep neural networks for computer vision. The common computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, behavior recognition, etc. are also described. Students are supposed to read related papers and write reports.

DIAE03 Natural Language Processing (3 credits)

The main contents of this course include: 1) Mathematical foundation of natural language processing, n-gram model, generative/discriminative model, word vectors, etc. 2) Linguistic basis of natural language processing, word spelling, word meaning and part of speech, semantic disambiguation, and probability syntactic analysis, etc. 3) Applications of natural language processing, such as text classification and clustering, sentiment analysis, information extraction, machine translation, dialogue system, etc.

DIAE04 Algorithm and Computational Complexity (3 credits)

This course aims to introduce the analysis and the design principles of algorithms Topics includes: analysis of algorithms, divide-and-conquer strategy, dynamic programming, greedy algorithms, graph algorithms, maximum flow problem, probabilistic analysis and randomized algorithms, etc.

DIAE05 Digital Image Processing (3 credits)

This course aims to introduce the basic principles, methods, and applications of digital image processing. The content includes basic methods such as preprocessing of digital images, transformation between spatial and temporal domains and the filtering upon them, data encoding and compression, and feature descriptor design and extraction. At the same time, the traditional statistical pattern recognition and structural pattern recognition methods are introduced, and their applications in different fields are expounded with practical cases. Students are supposed to read related papers and write reports.

DIAE06 Selected Topics in Artificial Intelligence (3 credits)

The course aims to extend the horizon of students, enable students to learn the latest developments, applications and developing trend of related industry in AI field.

Degree Requirements

1. Students are required to complete “Artificial Intelligence Principles” and “Machine Learning” from Table 1 and the “Literature Survey and Thesis Planning” from Table 3 during the first 3 semesters. In 1-4th semesters, students must participate at least 10 “Academic Activities” to gain 10 credits. Students should pass the assessment. 2. During the period of study, each student is required to complete 2 courses out of the 6 elective courses listed in Table 2 (completed in the 1st and 2nd semester) according to the research direction and majors. Students should gain 6 credits and pass the assessment. 3. Upon completion of thesis proposal defense, students can begin to write the PhD dissertation to gain 18 credits. 4. Students should publish at least 2 academic papers in English before they can apply for a doctoral dissertation defense:2 SCI journal papers, or 1 SCI journal paper and 1 top international conference paper. Recommend (but not limited to) top international conferences in Table 5. 5. After gaining all the credits required in the study plan and passing the doctoral dissertation defense,students can apply and receive a doctoral degree in accordance with the doctoral application procedure of the Macau University of Science and Technology.

Learning Time

The duration for taking all courses is 12 -24 months. The duration for dissertation composition is 24 months. The writing time should not be less than 12 months. In general, classes will be arranged in evening from Monday to Friday.

Qualifications of Graduation

Upon approval from the Senate of the University, the Doctor of Philosophy in Artificial Intelligence Degree will be conferred on a student when he or she has: Completed and met the requirements prescribed in the study plan of his or her program within the specific study period, and achieved a cumulative GPA of 2.50 or above (excluding dissertation) Abided by the regulations of the University Cleared all fees and charges and returned all University’s property and equipment borrowed Note: All curriculums and study plans are based on the newest announcement of the Boletim Oficial da Região Administrativa Especial de Macau. ※ In case of any discrepancy, the Chinese version shall prevail.