Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester Information

The Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester is the longest established department of Computer Science in the United Kingdom and one of the largest. It is located in the Kilburn building (and the attached IT Building) on the Oxford Road and currently has over 800 students taking a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses and 60 full-time academic staff.

The School current offers a wide range of undergraduate courses from Bachelor of Science (BSc), Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) and Master of Engineering (MEng). These are available as single honours or as joint honours degrees within the themes of Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Computer systems engineering, Software engineering, Mathematics, Internet Computing, Business applications and Management. Industrial placements are offered with all undergraduate courses.

At postgraduate level the department offers taught Master of Science (MSc) degrees, at an advanced level and also through a foundation route. Research degrees, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) and Master of Philosophy (MPhil) are available as three and four year programmes through the Doctoral Training Centre in Computer Science, the first of its kind in the UK.

Notable academic staff include:

The School is organised into nine different research groups which received funding from a wide range of sources including the European Union, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

The Advanced Processor Technologies (APT) group researches advanced and novel approaches to processing and computation and is led by Professor Steve Furber. New projects include SpiNNaker, Transactional Memory, and TERAFLUX. Academic staff in the group include Dr Nick Filer, Dr Jim Garside, Dr David Lester, Dr Mikel Luján, Dr John V Woods, Dr Javier Navaridas, Dr Vasilis Pavlidis, Dr Eva M. Navarro-López, Dr Dirk Koch, Dr Antoniu Pop and Emeritus Professor Ian Watson, visiting Professor Alasdair Rawsthorne and Fellow Barry Cheetham. Past research projects include Jamaica, AMULET microprocessor, Network On Chip, Asynchronous Digital signal processors and System on a chip.

The Bio-Health Informatics Group (BHIG) conducts research in Bioinformatics and Health informatics ranging from the applications in molecular biology through to clinical e-science and healthcare applications. Academic staff in the group include Emeritus Professor Alan Rector, Professor Andy Brass and Robert Stevens.

The Formal Methods group has a very broad span of interests, ranging from developing the new mathematics of computational behaviour, to the study and development of system design and verification methods. There is a large group dedicated to the automation of logic including world-champion Vampire. The group is led by Professor Allan Ramsay and includes Professor Peter Aczel, Professor Andrei Voronkov, Professor Howard Barringer amongst more than a dozen staff and a large number of research students.

The Information Management Group (IMG) conducts basic and applied into the design, development and use of data and knowledge management systems. Such research activities are broad in nature as well as scope, including basic research on models and languages that underpins activities on algorithms, technologies and architectures. Challenging applications motivate and validate this research, in particular the Semantic Web and e-Science. Examples of recent research include Protégé, Utopia Documents, myGrid, Taverna workbench, myExperiment, Open PHACTS. Academic staff in group include Professor Carole Goble CBE, Professor Norman Paton, Professor Ulrike Sattler, Professor Robert Stevens, Sean Bechhofer, Andy Carpenter, Suzanne Embury, Alvaro A. A. Fernandes, Simon Harper, Bijan Parsia, Rizos Sakelloirou, Sandra Sampaio and Ning Zhang.

The Machine learning and Optimisation (MLO) group conduct world-leading research into a wide range of techniques and applications of machine learning, optimization, data mining, probabilistic modelling, pattern recognition and machine perception. Academic staff include Jon Shapiro (group leader), Professor Ross King, creator of Robot Scientist, Gavin Brown, Ke Chen, Richard Neville and Xiaojun Zeng.

The Nano Engineering and Storage Technologies (NEST) group has research interests in nano fabrication for data storage and advanced sensors applications and the investigation of data storage systems in general. The NEST group is housed in an integrated suite of staff offices, general-purpose laboratory space and class 100/1000 cleanrooms and is a founder member of the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology where the ground-breaking, Nobel Prize–winning work on Graphene by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov was undertaken. The group is led by Professor Thomas Thomson, academic staff members include Professor Jim Miles, Ernie W Hill, Milan Mihajlovic and Paul W Nutter.

The Software Systems group is concerned with the design, modelling, simulation and construction of mission-critical systems that challenge the states-of-the-art in both software engineering and performance engineering. Such systems are fundamentally composed of physically distributed component sub-systems, and are characterised by large data spaces and high compute needs, with associated complex interactions between the components. The group is led by Professor John Gurd, academic staff members include Professor John Keane, Len Freeman, Kung-Kiu Lau, Liping Zhao, Rupert Ford and Graham Riley.

The Text Mining group performs research to extract useful information and knowledge from unstructured text, particularly in the field of bioinformatics. The group also performs research into Natural Language Processing (NLP) and hosts the National Centre for Text Mining. The group is led by Professor Sophia Ananiadou and includes academic members Professor Junichi Tsujii, John McNaught and Goran Nenadic.

The Advanced Interfaces Group (AIG) researches virtual environments, collaborative visualization systems, and computer vision. The group is led by Steve Pettifer and includes academic staff Professor Terri Attwood, jointly with the Faculty of Life Sciences, Aphrodite Galata, Toby Howard, Tim Morris, and Emeritus Professor Roger Hubbold. Current projects include UTOPIA software.

The Imaging sciences is part of the Centre for Imaging Sciences, a world-class research department focusing on imaging physics, image processing, computer vision, and the development and application of imaging biomarkers in healthcare. The group is run by Professor Chris Taylor jointly with the School of Medicine. The group includes Dr Carole Twining and Professor Tim Cootes.

The school (and department) has been led by ten different Heads of School since its inception in 1964.

The School has been run by

Prior to merger with UMIST the School of Computer Science was the Department of Computer Science.

The school has its roots in the Computer Group of the Electrical Engineering Department at the Victoria University of Manchester. The Computer Group was established following Freddie Williamss move to the Electrical Engineering Department in 1946. At its formation in 1964, the Department of Computer Science was the first such department in the United Kingdom, with Professor Tom Kilburn serving as Head of Department until 1980. On 1 May 2001, following the death of Kilburn the same year, the Computer Building was renamed Kilburn Building in his honour. The School of Computer Science was formed from the Department when the Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST merged to form the University of Manchester in 2004. It changed back from a school to a department in 2019. The Group/School/Department is notable for the following achievements:

See also the History of the school. The following alumni have been staff in the School

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