Computing Science Research
We carry out fundamental computing science research. We evaluate this research and apply it to industrial and interdisciplinary challenges.
Our computer science research constantly evolves to address the new challenges posed by a fast-changing environment. Computer systems are becoming ever more complex, critical and interconnected. They're often directly related to the public.
World-leading computing science research
The School of Computing received a fantastic result in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 exercise. We jumped from 22nd to 9th place in the UK by GPA. This places us in the top quartile for Computing Science. All of our impact case studies were judged to be world-leading.
Over the last 50 years, our research has had a significant impact on both the wider field of academic research and on the computer industry.
The impact of excellent research can be realised in many forms. It is the change, influence or benefit that occurs outside academia from research. It occurs when organisations, policymakers, communities or individuals use your research to:
- improve public policy and services
- benefit health and wellbeing
- improve quality of life
- impact the economy
- help the environment
Impact is of increasing importance to funders. Since 2007, UK research councils have required researchers to describe the potential impact of the research and what will be done to enhance the likelihood of it being realised.
Our current impact-focused projects include:
- advancing general methods of formal verification within railway signalling
- representing, analysing, and synthesising complex evolving system models
- cryptography and biometrics research resulting in new algorithms and technologies that can provide verifiability
- novel tools for data analysis
- technology to simulate brain and tissue development
- power conversion capabilities of electronic chips in mobile devices
One project looks at design and standardisation of a foundational and domain-agnostic data model for describing the provenance of any object, artefact, of dataset.
Another focuses on a specification called Synthetic Biology Open language (SBOL). This provides a formalised syntax that allows designs to be captured digitally, reproduced and shared.
Impact was introduced to REF2014. It was worth 20% of the assessment.
In REF2014, for Computer Science and Informatics (UoA 11), we were ranked as the best research unit in the UK for impact. All our computer science impact case studies received the highest possible grade. We presented the following case studies:
- expansion of the middleware software market
- improved processes for the development of dependable systems
- worldwide adoption of asynchronous circuits and improved business process modelling
- novel computational approaches to discover medicines
This case study is the continuation of one submitted in REF2014
Newcastle’s Arjuna transaction system software (ATSS) has contributed to international transaction processing standards and to the middleware products by Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source software products. Since REF 2014, ATSS (also known by its new name Narayana) has not only increased the scale of its impact but also increased the breadth by integration into a number of additional Red Hat middleware products. After IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat in 2019, a number of Red Hat products (with Narayana) are shipped in IBM’s Cloud Pak for Applications product, increasing the customer base. The impact presented above is on the growing global market for Application Infrastructure and Middleware (AIM) Software, estimated at US$30.6bn in 2020 and projected to reach US$45.7bn by 2027.
The underpinning research also continues to have an impact through economic benefit to the UK. Red Hat has continued to invest in its European Middleware HQ based in Newcastle.
Power Management Integrated Circuits (PMIC) are used in most electronic gadgets. Newcastle University research, implemented in the software framework Workcraft, was a key enabler of Dialog Semiconductor’s PMIC design, and has significantly boosted both, the design productivity and the quality of PMICs. In 2018 Apple Corporation, in their largest deal of its kind, bought Dialog’s PMIC business and 3-years supply of PMICs for $600,000,000.
With Workcraft, traditionally tricky and laborious analogue and mixed-signal (AMS) electronic designs can now be done efficiently and, due to formal verification, with a high confidence in their correctness. Your electronic gadgets may have already benefitted from this.
Workcraft is freely available to the public from workcraft.org.
You can read press releases from Dialog Semiconductor and Reuters
Development of station and network signalling for railway is a complex process that involves various steps, typically supported by the simulation tools. The processes rely a lot on the manual work, which make them prone to errors and expensive.
A new family of tools (SafeCap), which incorporates Newcastle University’s research on advancing general methods of formal verification and applying them for the railway domain, has been developed and deployed for assuring the safety and consistency of railway signalling. Researchers are currently work with Siemens Mobility, Network Rail and Systra to help improve safety of rail operations in the UK.
A new SME, The Formal Route, has been created to expand this work and to develop and deploy industry-strength tools for railway safety verification.
You can read press releases from the Rail Engineer and Systra
What is the source of this information?
Who collected this data?
Has it been modified?
Can I rely on this data?
Tracing the origins of data, its movement between databases and any changes it undergoes, is of absolute importance in any effort that uses electronic data stored on the internet. For example:
- Provenance helps build trust in information and news
- Reproducibility of science
Provenance is a key element in ensuring that the news and information that is published online is trustworthy, answering key questions: who contributed to information, where it comes from, what the original source is, and how it propagates.
Provenance helps scientists communicate by showing all the steps that were involved in the derivation of a result, so that it can be reproduced, and prior results can be safely re-used.
- Accountability, transparency, compliance in business applications
Provenance can be used to make sure that data is used in compliance with a prescribed process.
Provenance is a crucial piece of information that can help a consumer make a judgment as to whether something can be trusted. It provides a record that describes the people, institutions, entities, and activities involved in producing, influencing, or delivering a piece of data.
Dr Missier at Newcastle University worked with a team to create “W3C PROV”, the World Wide Web’s first official standard for data provenance. Many organisations who wish to ensure data integrity now use this standard.
The standard was made possible through years of academic research on provenance theory and practice, some of which originated at Newcastle.
You can read Dr Missier's blog post and an article by Impact Science
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