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.
Impact was introduced to REF 2014. It was worth 20% of the assessment. Research England has since confirmed that impact will be worth 25% of the assessment in REF 2021.
In REF 2014, 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
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
- design and standardisation of a foundational and domain-agnostic data model (an “upper ontology”) for describing the provenance of any object, artefact, of dataset (PROV)
- a specification called Synthetic Biology Open language (SBOL) which provides a formalised syntax that allows designs to be captured digitally, reproduced and shared
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