Topics Courses (49/69/89)

Topics courses with these numbers are usually aligned with the faculty member's research interest. These courses range from "seminar courses" involving reading/critiquing state-of-the-art scientific papers, to new courses being floated by faculty members in their area of expertise. The 49/69/89 distinguish these courses across the three pillars. There are multiple courses with numbers of the form 49.XX (theory pillar), 69.XX (systems pillar), and 89.XX (applications pillar).

For example, COSC 89.11, "Cognitive Computing with Watson" is a course in the "application pillar", and COSC 89.17, "Health Informatics" is a different course in the same pillar. Students can take both 89.11 and 89.17 and they count as two different courses.

When declaring the major, if a student plans to take such a course, then they should clearly mark the two .XX's following the point.