The Department of Computing Science has a long-standing reputation in Intelligent Systems. Much of the Department’s current research looks at the problems of managing knowledge and information in the context of the Internet and World Wide Web and in the automatic generation of natural language tailored for the reader. A key problem is helping humans make decisions and take actions when faced with a vast amount of available data and information.
In the most recent UK research quality assessment, RAE 2008, 70% of Computing Science research was assessed to be world leading and internationally excellent in terms of originality, significance and rigour (20% at 4* and 50% at 3*), with 100% of our research being internationally recognised. A quarter of our research outputs (publications) were rated as reporting on world-leading research (4*).
Recently Aberdeen University was awarded £11.8M by RCUK (led by EPSRC) to establish a Digital Economy Research Hub for the rural digital economy; one of the largest projects ever awarded by the UK Research Councils. This 5-year funded research effort represents a major investment into world leading cross-disciplinary research in Aberdeen (www.dotrural.ac.uk), and Computing Science plays a leading role in this research effort.
In addition to making significant contributions to knowledge in computing science, an important aspect of our research culture is working in collaboration with experts in other disciplines including economics, physics, biological and medical sciences, and the social sciences. Details of these collaborations can be found in our research theme and project pages.
The Department is involved in several international collaborative projects including the £2.9M ITA project with academic and industrial partners in the UK and USA led by IBM. The Natural Language Generation research group holds a prestigious EPSRC Platform Grant granted in recognition of their world leading research in this area. The £1.3M PolicyGrid/PolicyGrid II project and associated eSocial Science research node and the £2.5M CRISP (Combinatorial responses of fungal pathogens to their human hosts: an Integrative Systems Biology Approach) further illustrate our strong interdisciplinary research collaborations.
