The Department of Computer Science at the

University of Manchester , mottoeng = Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity , established = 2004 – University of Manchester Predecessor institutions: 1956 – UMIST (as university college; university 1994) 1904 – Victoria University of Manchester 1880 – Victoria Univ ...

is the longest established department of

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

and one of the largest. It is located in the

Kilburn Building The Kilburn Building is a building on the Oxford Road in Manchester which is home to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. The building was designed by the Building Design Partnership and completed in 1972, with t ...

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.

Teaching and study

Carole_Goble_by_Rob_Whitrow_(15682291039)

Undergraduate

The Department currently offers a wide range of

undergraduate Undergraduate education is education conducted after secondary education and before postgraduate education. It typically includes all postsecondary programs up to the level of a bachelor's degree. For example, in the United States, an entry-le ...

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 degree A joint honours degree (also known as dual honours, double majors, or Two Subject Moderatorship) is a specific type of degree offered generally at the Honours Bachelor's degree level by certain universities in Ireland, the UK, Canada, Malta, and ...

s within the themes of

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

Computer systems engineering Computer engineering (CoE or CpE) is a branch of electrical engineering and computer science that integrates several fields of computer science and electronic engineering required to develop computer hardware and software. Computer engineers n ...

Software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

, Mathematics, Internet Computing, Business applications and

Management Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a Government agency, government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includ ...

. Industrial placements are offered with all undergraduate courses.

Postgraduate

postgraduate Postgraduate or graduate education refers to academic or professional degrees, certificates, diplomas, or other qualifications pursued by post-secondary students who have earned an undergraduate ( bachelor's) degree. The organization and ...

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 Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs; also called Centres for Doctoral TrainingCentr ...

in Computer Science, the first of its kind in the UK.

Notable academic staff

Notable academic staff include: * Andy Brass *

Jack Dongarra Jack Joseph Dongarra (born July 18, 1950) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the American University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Unive ...

* Steve Furber *

Carole Goble Carole Anne Goble, (born 10 April 1961) is a British academic who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. She is principal investigator (PI) of the myGrid, BioCatalogue and myExperiment projects and co-leads the Infor ...

Toby Howard Toby L. J. Howard is an Honorary Reader in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester in the UK, He was Director of undergraduate studies 2011–2019. He retired from the University in July 2020. Education Howard was edu ...

Norman Paton Norman William Paton is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester in the UK where he co-leads the Information Management Group (IMG) with Carole Goble. Education Paton was educated at the University of Aber ...

* Steve Pettifer * Ulrike Sattler * Robert Stevens * *

Andrei Voronkov Andrei Anatolievič Voronkov (born 1959) is a Professor of Formal methods in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. Education Voronkov was educated at Novosibirsk State University, graduating with a PhD in 1987. Res ...

The School is organised into nine different research groups, which received funding from a wide range of sources including the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...

, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

Advanced Processor Technologies

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 Jim Garside, Dr David Lester, Dr , Dr John V Woods, Dr Javier Navaridas, Dr Vasilis Pavlidis, Dr Dirk Koch and Fellow Barry Cheetham. Past research projects include Jamaica,

AMULET microprocessor AMULET is a series of microprocessors implementing the ARM processor architecture. Developed by the ''Advanced Processor Technologies'' group at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester (formerly the AMULET and PAL grou ...

Network On Chip A network on a chip or network-on-chip (NoC or )This article uses the convention that "NoC" is pronounced . Therefore, it uses the convention "a" for the indefinite article corresponding to NoC ("a NoC"). Other sources may pronounce it as an ...

, Asynchronous Digital signal processors and System on a chip.

Bio-Health Informatics

The Bio-Health Informatics Group (BHIG) conducts research in Bioinformatics and Health informatics ranging from the applications in

molecular biology Molecular biology is the branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecular basis of biological activity in and between cells, including biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactions. The study of chemical and physi ...

through to clinical

e-science E-Science or eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable dist ...

and healthcare applications. Academic staff in the group include Professor Andy Brass and Robert Stevens.

Formal Methods

The

Formal Methods In computer science, formal methods are mathematically rigorous techniques for the specification, development, and verification of software and hardware systems. The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the exp ...

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 A vampire is a mythical creature that subsists by feeding on the vital essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living. In European folklore, vampires are undead creatures that often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deat ...

. The group is led by Professor and includes Professor

Peter Aczel Peter Henry George Aczel (; born 31 October 1941) is a British mathematician, logician and Emeritus joint Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. He is known for his work in ...

, Professor

, Professor amongst more than a dozen staff and a large number of research students.

Information Management

The Information Management Group (IMG) conducts basic and applied research into the design, development and use of data and

knowledge management Knowledge management (KM) is the collection of methods relating to creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organisational objectives by making ...

systems. Such research activities are broad in nature as well as scope, including basic research on models and languages that underpin activities on algorithms, technologies and architectures. Challenging applications motivate and validate this research, in particular the Semantic Web and

e-Science E-Science or eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable dist ...

. Examples of recent research include Protégé, Utopia Documents,

myGrid The myGrid consortium produces and uses a suite of tools design to “help e-Scientists get on with science and get on with scientists”. The tools support the creation of e-laboratories and have been used in domains as diverse as systems biol ...

Taverna workbench Apache Taverna was an open source software tool for designing and executing workflows, initially created by the myGrid project under the name ''Taverna Workbench'', then a project under the Apache incubator. Taverna allowed users to integrate many ...

myExperiment myExperiment is a social web site for researchers sharing research objects such as scientific workflows. The myExperiment website was launched in November 2007 and contains a significant collection of scientific workflows for a variety of workfl ...

, Open PHACTS. Academic staff in group include Professor

CBE, Professor

, Professor Ulrike Sattler, Professor Robert Stevens, , , Simon Harper, , , Rizos Sakelloirou, Sandra Sampaio and Ning Zhang.

Machine Learning and Optimisation

The Machine Learning and Optimisation (MLO) group conduct world-leading research into a wide range of techniques and applications of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

, optimization, data mining, probabilistic modelling,

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. It has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphics ...

and

machine perception Machine perception is the capability of a computer system to interpret data in a manner that is similar to the way humans use their senses to relate to the world around them. The basic method that the computers take in and respond to their enviro ...

. Academic staff include Jon Shapiro (group leader), Gavin Brown, Ke Chen, Richard Neville and Xiaojun Zeng.

Nano Engineering and Storage Technologies

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

cleanroom A cleanroom or clean room is an engineered space, which maintains a very low concentration of airborne particulates. It is well isolated, well-controlled from contamination, and actively cleansed. Such rooms are commonly needed for scientif ...

s and is a founder member of the

Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology The Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology is a centre for interdisciplinary research in mesoscience and nanotechnology headed by Andre Geim at the University of Manchester. The purpose of the centre is to allow researchers to con ...

where the ground-breaking, Nobel Prize–winning work on

graphene Graphene () is an allotrope of carbon consisting of a single layer of atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice nanostructure.

by Andre Geim and

Konstantin Novoselov Sir Konstantin Sergeevich Novoselov ( rus, Константи́н Серге́евич Новосёлов, p=kənstɐnʲˈtʲin sʲɪrˈɡʲe(j)ɪvʲɪtɕ nəvɐˈsʲɵləf; born 1974) is a Russian-British physicist, and a professor at the ...

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.

Software Systems

The Software Systems group is concerned with the design, modelling, simulation and construction of

mission-critical A mission critical factor of a system is any factor (component, equipment, personnel, process, procedure, software, etc.) that is essential to business operation or to an organization. Failure or disruption of mission critical factors will resu ...

systems that challenge the states-of-the-art in both software engineering and

performance engineering Performance engineering encompasses the techniques applied during a systems development life cycle to ensure the non-functional requirements for performance (such as throughput, latency, or memory usage) will be met. It may be alternatively refe ...

. 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. Academic staff members include Professor John Keane, Kung-Kiu Lau, Liping Zhao and Graham Riley.

Text Mining

The

Text Mining Text mining, also referred to as ''text data mining'', similar to text analytics, is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extract ...

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 Jun'ichi Tsujii, John McNaught (retired) and .

Advanced Interfaces

The Advanced Interfaces Group (AIG) researches

virtual environment A virtual environment is a networked application that allows a user to interact with both the computing environment and the work of other users. Email, chat Chat or chats may refer to: Communication * Conversation, particularly casual * Onlin ...

s, collaborative visualization systems, and computer vision. The group is led by Steve Pettifer and includes academic staff Aphrodite Galata,

(Honorary Reader), Tim Morris. Research projects include UTOPIA software.

Imaging Science

The

Imaging science Imaging is the representation or reproduction of an object's form; especially a visual representation (i.e., the formation of an image). Imaging technology is the application of materials and methods to create, preserve, or duplicate images. ...

s 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 jointly with the

School of Medicine A medical school is a tertiary educational institution, or part of such an institution, that teaches medicine, and awards a professional degree for physicians. Such medical degrees include the Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS, M ...

. The group includes Professor Tim Cootes.

Management

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

Heads of School/Department

The Department of Computer Science (in 2018, the School of Computer Science was turned into the Department of Computer Science) has been run by # since 2022 The School of Computer Science (2004–2018) was run by # Robert Stevens 2016–2022 # Jim Miles 2011–2016 #

2008–2011
Chris Taylor
2004–2008 Prior to merger with

UMIST The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) was a university based in the centre of the city of Manchester in England. It specialised in technical and scientific subjects and was a major centre for research. On 1 Oct ...

, the School of Computer Science was the Department of Computer Science. It was run by # Steve Furber 2001–2004 #

Brian Warboys Brian Warboys (born 30 April 1942), was a British Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Manchester from 1985 until he retired in September 2007. He was subsequently appointed as Professor Emeritus and continues to undertake resea ...

1996–2001 # Howard Barringer 1991–1996 # John Gurd 1987–1991 # Dai Edwards 1980–1987 #

Tom Kilburn Tom Kilburn (11 August 1921 – 17 January 2001) was an English mathematician and computer scientist. Over the course of a productive 30-year career, he was involved in the development of five computers of great historical significance. With ...

1964–1980

History

The school has its roots in the Computer Group of the Electrical Engineering Department at the

Victoria University of Manchester The Victoria University of Manchester, usually referred to as simply the University of Manchester, was a university in Manchester, England. It was founded in 1851 as Owens College. In 1880, the college joined the federal Victoria University. Afte ...

. The Computer Group was established following Freddie Williams's 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

, with Professor

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

and

merged to form the

in 2004. It changed back from a school to a department in 2019. The Group/School/Department is notable for the following achievements: * The world's first electronic stored-program digital computer (the

Manchester Baby The Manchester Baby, also called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), was the first electronic stored-program computer. It was built at the University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill, and ran its ...

) *

Virtual memory In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a very ...

using

paging In computer operating systems, memory paging is a memory management scheme by which a computer stores and retrieves data from secondary storage for use in main memory. In this scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage ...

(see

Atlas Computer The Atlas Computer was one of the world's first supercomputers, in use from 1962 (when it was claimed to be the most powerful computer in the world) to 1972. Atlas' capacity promoted the saying that when it went offline, half of the United Ki ...

) *

Manchester encoding In telecommunication and data storage, Manchester code (also known as phase encoding, or PE) is a line code in which the encoding of each data bit is either low then high, or high then low, for equal time. It is a self-clocking signal with no D ...

* The

series ( asynchronous implementations of the

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

computer architecture In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, the ...

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

Alumni and Emeritus

The school and department has several notable

alumni Alumni (singular: alumnus (masculine) or alumna (feminine)) are former students of a school, college, or university who have either attended or graduated in some fashion from the institution. The feminine plural alumnae is sometimes used for grou ...

and Emeritus staff including: *

Terri Attwood Teresa K. Attwood is a Professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Computer Science and School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester and a visiting fellow at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). She held a Roy ...

, Emeritus Professor * Alan Rector, Emeritus Professor * Roger Hubbold. Emeritus Professor * Jim Miles (retired) * Allan M. Ramsay (retired) *

Ian Horrocks Ian Robert Horrocks One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford in the UK and a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. His research ...

, Professor of Computer Science at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

* Hilary Kahn, a professor in the computer science department *

first head of the Department of Computer Science * , Professor at the

University of Birmingham The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a Public university, public research university located in Edgbaston, Birmingham, United Kingdom. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingha ...

Pedro Mendes Pedro is a masculine given name. Pedro is the Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician name for ''Peter''. Its French equivalent is Pierre while its English and Germanic form is Peter. The counterpart patronymic surname of the name Pedro, meaning ...

, Professor at the

University of Connecticut Health Center UConn Health (formerly known as the UConn Health Center) is the branch of the University of Connecticut that oversees clinical care, advanced biomedical research, and academic education in medicine. The main branch is located in Farmington, Connec ...

* , Professor of Computational and Systems Biology in the School of Biological Sciences * Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of machine learning at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical co ...

was deputy director of the computing laboratory and a

Reader A reader is a person who reads. It may also refer to: Computing and technology * Adobe Reader (now Adobe Acrobat), a PDF reader * Bible Reader for Palm, a discontinued PDA application * A card reader, for extracting data from various forms of ...

in the Mathematics Department *

, Professor * David Bree, Emeritus Professor of Artificial Intelligence * Freddie Williams * Simon Lavington *

Geoff Tootill Geoff C. Tootill (4 March 1922 – 26 October 2017) was an electronic engineer and computer scientist who worked in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Manchester with Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn developing the Man ...

Nandini Mukherjee Nandini Mukherjee (née Mukhopadhyay) is an Indian computer scientist. She is a Professor of Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Education Mukherjee took her Madhyamik examination from Kamala ...

* Ross D. King, creator of Robot Scientist,

Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge The Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (CEB) is one of the teaching and research departments at the University of Cambridge. The department trains undergraduate students and conducts original research at the interfaces between e ...

* Ian Watson, and Emeritus Professor * Alasdair Rawsthorne * Simon Segars CEO of Arm Ltd. * Bonamy Grimes, co-founder of

Skyscanner Skyscanner is a metasearch engine and travel agency based in Edinburgh, Scotland. The site is available in over 30 languages and is used by 100 million people per month. The company lets people research and book travel options for their trips ...

* Gareth Williams, co-founder of

* Jon Andrews, vice president at

Apple Inc Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

References

{{Authority control

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...