Applied Data Analysis for Civil and Natural Systems

COSC131

EMTH210

Course Coordinator

Alberto Ardid

Lecturers

Derek Li and Dave Bracken

Assessment

Students may apply for special consideration if their performance in an assessment is affected by extenuating circumstances beyond their control. The applicability and academic remedy/action associated with the special consideration process is listed for each assessment item below. Applications for special consideration should be submitted via the Examinations Office website http://www. canter bury.ac.nz/exams/ within 5 days of the assessment.

Surveying Outputs
Special consideration is not applicable as the individual activity are worth <10%. Students will have until the end of week 3 to complete all lab output submissions. Beyond this, students will need to demonstrate significant impairment supported by medical evidence to have late submissions considered. Late submissions may be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Lab Outputs
Special consideration is not applicable as the individual labs are worth <10%. Students will have until the end of week 5 to complete all lab output submissions. No alternative arrangements will be offered for any labs that are missed regardless of the circumstances. Reasonable extensions may be granted by communicating with corresponding lecturers.

Assignment
The assignment instructions will be posted on Learn, and students will be expected to commence work on the assignment then. Students will need to demonstrate significant impairment supported by medical evidence to have late submissions considered. Late submissions may be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Mid-term test and Final exam
Students will be offered an equivalent alternative exam that will replace their original exam mark.
Note on equivalent alternative assessments: The academic remedy for a special consideration assessed at a moderate level or higher is an equivalent exam. The alternative exam will be held on campus during the week of November 24th. The mark on the alternative exam will replace the original exam mark in the course grade calculation unless a student declines or does not respond to the offer of the alternative exam, in which case the original mark will be used. Students will not be advised of their original mark as part of this process. All communication associated with special considerations will be conducted using official UC email accounts. The offer to sit an alternative assessment will come with a date and time. Students will have a clearly specified amount of time to respond to the offer. Failure to respond in the specified time frame will be interpreted as a
declined offer. If a student has applied for special consideration but the application has not yet been approved, they may be permitted to sit the alternative exam, but the mark will not be applied until the special consideration application has been approved.

Textbooks / Resources

All course materials will be made available through Learn. This course does not have a required text and instead provides notes and other resources on LEARN. Furthermore, a number of articles will be posted on the class LEARN site as recommended reading. Please note that all lecture recordings, made available through LEARN, are copyright and are not for public dissemination.

Notes

ENCN205 Applied Data Analysis for Civil and Natural Systems provides key concepts and skills to support the reminder of the degree programme. The course is delivered in two parts: 1) Field Surveying and Applications in Geographic Information Systems; and 2) Statistics and Optimisation.

Part 1: Field Surveying and Geospatial Data Analysis (GIS)

Field Surveying and Geospatial Data Analysis (GIS) develops foundational skills in field data collection and in geospatial thinking for civil and environmental engineering. Students learn how real-world phenomena are represented as spatial data (vector and raster), why coordinate reference systems and projections matter, and how to perform common spatial operations (e.g. buffering, spatial joins, aggregation, zonal statistics) and communicate results clearly. The GIS component is taught primarily through Python/Jupyter workflows (with limited QGIS exposure for map layout and communication), emphasising concepts, interpretation, data quality, and engineering decision-making rather than step-by-step software procedures. It assumes no previous GIS experience, but expects basic competency with file management and spreadsheets. By the end of Part 1, students will be able to acquire and manage spatial datasets, analyse them using reproducible methods, and produce maps/figures suitable for reports and later-year engineering courses.

Part 2: Statistics and Optimisation

Statistics and Optimisation builds directly on the numerical methods in EMTH171 and on probability and statistical material taught in EMTH210 and EMTH118/119. The section starts with exploratory data analysis and data visualisation which provide you tool to browse your data file preliminarily, and followed by random sampling and Monte Carlo methods for numerical simulations, as well as hypothesis testing extended from EMTH210. Linear regression, Bootstrapping and data diagnosis are included to discover knowledge from data and to make statistical inferences. This is followed by basic principles of optimisation methods and their applications in engineering and data analysis. You will learn skills such as linear programming to solve a range of optimisation problems in engineering. The concepts and techniques developed will appear in a number of fourth year courses, in particular all those that require the data manipulation or statistical characterisation of experimental or observational data, and the use of optimisation methods. In all sections the emphasis is on the application of statistics and optimisation methods to civil and natural resources engineering.

Indicative Fees

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.