Almost all of the research in this UoA is officially classified as world-leading or internationally excellent in terms of originality, significance and rigour.
The following academic unit forms the submission to UoA 11:
The School pursues several research themes which are cross-cutting and flexible, formed to address new challenges which do not fall neatly into the remit of a single research group:
asynchronous systems
cloud computing
complex systems
e-science
game technologies
security - information assurance and secure systems
integrative bioinformatics
mobile computing
pedagogy
Key research units
To support long term research engagements and outreach activities, the UoA hosts key research units that further stimulate and provide an output venue for research activities:
Research work on middleware for distributed computing at Newcastle has directly contributed to the growth of the worldwide middleware software market currently valued at $20bn. Specifically, the Web-service transaction standards used within the world’s prominent middleware products, including the market leading WebSphere product from IBM and the JBoss middleware product from Red Hat Inc, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, owe their origins to this research work. The transaction software used within the JBoss middleware is also derived from this work.
The work in the past led to the creation of the spin-off company Arjuna Technologies, which continues to have an economic impact today, and to the establishment of the Red Hat R&D Centre in 2010 at Newcastle University, which has strengthened investment from international sources in research on leading-edge enterprise technologies.
Research at Newcastle University on formal methods for the design of computing systems has had a major impact on the delivery of new high-dependability products by industry. The methods (VDM and Event-B), to which we have made significant contributions, have been embodied in tools (VDMTools, Overture, Rodin) and applied in industry. The reach of the work extends to industries in Europe (eg in the rail sector by Siemens, 2011) and Japan (eg in firmware design by Sony, 2008).
Significance is seen in reported improvements in defect detection rates of up to a factor of five over previous processes and the cost-effectiveness of design processes. The 'Mobile FeliCa' chip developed using VDMTools is now incorporated into over 200 million mobile phones worldwide.
Our approach to disseminating research has engendered lively international online end-user communities further developing and using the tools today.
New computational analysis methods have been developed to make drug discovery and toxicological analysis much more efficient. These methods have been patented (UK, EU, US) and are employed in e-Therapeutics Plc, a computational drug discovery spin-off company of the University. The company, introduced to the LSE AIM in 2007, is now the eighth largest company (by market capitalisation - £92.7m (26/6/2013)) in the pharma/biotech sector of that market.
The underlying technologies derive from network analysis and workflow research at the University from 2003. The company has an anti-cancer drug (ETS2101) in phase I clinical trials in the UK and the US; an anti-depression drug (ETS6103) planned to enter phase IIb clinical trial shortly; and an anti-microbial drug for treating C. difficile infections (ETX1153c) in the pre-clinical analysis phase. The beneficiaries of this research are e-Therapeutics directly, other drug companies, and ultimately patients.
Newcastle University’s fundamental research into the theory of concurrency and the automated construction and analysis of asynchronous systems has resulted in novel technologies that have been adopted and applied worldwide by industry. This case study describes impact over the last five years on the industrial development of asynchronous microprocessor chips, in particular, deployed by Intel for handling financial transactions on NYSE and NASDAQ (with combined daily volume of trade exceeding £80bn), and the improvements in business process analysis through the world-leading open-source ProM tools (downloaded over 65,000 times since 2008, and used by a number of major organisations, eg ING Bank and Deloitte).