The Department of Computer Science at the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The University of Manchester is c ...

is the longest established department of

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

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 Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the 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 Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road in Manchester which is home to the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. The building was de ...

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

Undergraduate

The Department currently offers a wide range of

undergraduate Undergraduate education is education conducted after secondary education and before postgraduate education, usually in a college or university. It typically includes all postsecondary programs up to the level of a bachelor's degree. For example, ...

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 Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

Computer systems engineering Computer engineering (CE, CoE, or CpE) is a branch of engineering specialized in developing computer hardware and software. It integrates several fields of electrical engineering, electronics engineering and computer science. Computer engine ...

Software engineering Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining Application software, software applications. It involves applying engineering design process, engineering principl ...

Mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

, Internet Computing,

Business applications Business software (or a business application) is any software or set of computer programs used by business users to perform various business functions. These business applications are used to increase productivity, measure productivity, and per ...

and

Management Management (or managing) is the administration of organizations, whether businesses, nonprofit organizations, or a Government agency, government bodies through business administration, Nonprofit studies, nonprofit management, or the political s ...

. Industrial placements are offered with all undergraduate courses.

Postgraduate

postgraduate Postgraduate education, graduate education, or graduate school consists of academic or professional degrees, certificates, diplomas, or other qualifications usually pursued by post-secondary students who have earned an undergraduate (bachelor' ...

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 a University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Univers ...

* 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 I ...

* Toby Howard * Norman Paton * 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, University of Manchester, Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. Education Voronkov was educated at Novosibir ...

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 union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British UK Research Councils, Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical scienc ...

and

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, is a non-departmental public body (NDPB), and is the largest UK public funder of non-medical bioscience. It predominantly funds science, scient ...

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 A spinnaker is a sail designed specifically for sailing off the wind on courses between a Point of sail#Reaching, reach (wind at 90° to the course) to Point of sail#Running downwind, downwind (course in the same direction as the wind). Spinna ...

, 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 An amulet, also known as a good luck charm or phylactery, is an object believed to confer protection upon its possessor. The word "amulet" comes from the Latin word , which Pliny's ''Natural History'' describes as "an object that protects a perso ...

, Network On Chip,

Asynchronous Asynchrony is any dynamic far from synchronization. If and as parts of an asynchronous system become more synchronized, those parts or even the whole system can be said to be in sync. Asynchrony or asynchronous may refer to: Electronics and com ...

Digital signal processor A digital signal processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor chip, with its architecture optimized for the operational needs of digital signal processing. DSPs are fabricated on metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit chips. ...

s and

System on a chip A system on a chip (SoC) is an integrated circuit that combines most or all key components of a computer or Electronics, electronic system onto a single microchip. Typically, an SoC includes a central processing unit (CPU) with computer memory, ...

Bio-Health Informatics

The Bio-Health Informatics Group (BHIG) conducts research in

Bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...

and

Health informatics Health informatics combines communications, information technology (IT), and health care to enhance patient care and is at the forefront of the medical technological revolution. It can be viewed as a branch of engineering and applied science. ...

ranging from the applications in

molecular biology Molecular biology is a branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecule, molecular basis of biological activity in and between Cell (biology), cells, including biomolecule, biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactio ...

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 dis ...

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 mathematics, mathematically rigorous techniques for the formal specification, specification, development, Program analysis, analysis, and formal verification, verification of software and computer hardware, ...

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 Vitalism, vital essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living. In European folklore, vampires are undead, undead humanoid creatures that often visited loved ones and c ...

. The group is led by Professor and includes Professor Peter Aczel, Professor

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

Information Management

The

Information Management Information management (IM) is the appropriate and optimized capture, storage, retrieval, and use of information. It may be personal information management or organizational. Information management for organizations concerns a cycle of organiz ...

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

knowledge management Knowledge management (KM) is the set of procedures for producing, disseminating, utilizing, and overseeing an organization's knowledge and data. It alludes to a multidisciplinary strategy that maximizes knowledge utilization to accomplish organ ...

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 The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

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 dis ...

. Examples of recent research include

Protégé Mentorship is the patronage, influence, guidance, or direction given by a mentor. A mentor is someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person. In an organizational setting, a mentor influences the perso ...

, Utopia Documents, myGrid, Taverna workbench, myExperiment, Open PHACTS. Academic staff in group include Professor

CBE, Professor Norman Paton, 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 research into a wide range of techniques and applications of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

, optimization,

data mining Data mining is the process of extracting and finding patterns in massive data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and ...

, probabilistic modelling,

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the task of assigning a class to an observation based on patterns extracted from data. While similar, pattern recognition (PR) is not to be confused with pattern machines (PM) which may possess PR capabilities but their p ...

and machine perception. 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 that 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 scientifi ...

s and is a founder member of the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology where the ground-breaking, Nobel Prize–winning work on

graphene Graphene () is a carbon allotrope consisting of a Single-layer materials, single layer of atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice, honeycomb planar nanostructure. The name "graphene" is derived from "graphite" and the suffix -ene, indicating ...

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. His work on graphene ...

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 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, text data mining (TDM) or 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 extracting information from differe ...

group performs research to extract useful information and knowledge from unstructured text, particularly in the field of

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...

. 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 environments, collaborative visualization systems, and

computer vision Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...

. The group is led by Steve Pettifer and includes academic staff Aphrodite Galata, Toby Howard (Honorary Reader), Tim Morris. Research projects include UTOPIA software.

Imaging Science

The Imaging sciences is part of the Centre for Imaging Sciences, a 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. 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 # Norman Paton 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 univer ...

, 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 his 30-year career, he was involved in the development of five computers of great historical significance. With Freddie Williams he wor ...

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. A ...

. 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 Calland Williams, Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Ge ...

) *

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 ver ...

using

paging In computer operating systems, memory paging is a memory management scheme that allows the physical Computer memory, memory used by a program to be non-contiguous. This also helps avoid the problem of memory fragmentation and requiring compact ...

(see Atlas Computer) *

Manchester encoding In telecommunications 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 ...

* The

series (

asynchronous Asynchrony is any dynamic far from synchronization. If and as parts of an asynchronous system become more synchronized, those parts or even the whole system can be said to be in sync. Asynchrony or asynchronous may refer to: Electronics and com ...

implementations of the ARM computer architecture) 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 (: alumnus () or alumna ()) are former students or graduates of a school, college, or university. The feminine plural alumnae is sometimes used for groups of women, and alums (: alum) or alumns (: alumn) as gender-neutral alternatives. Th ...

and

Emeritus ''Emeritus/Emerita'' () is an honorary title granted to someone who retires from a position of distinction, most commonly an academic faculty position, but is allowed to continue using the previous title, as in "professor emeritus". In some c ...

staff including: * Victoria Stavridou-Coleman,

Chief Scientist of the United States Air Force The Chief Scientist of the Air Force is the most senior science and technology representative in the United States Department of the Air Force. The current Chief Scientist of the United States Air Force is Victoria Coleman, sworn in on April 6, ...

Terri Attwood Teresa K. Attwood (born 20 November 1959) 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 (E ...

Professor * Alan Rector, Emeritus Professor * Roger Hubbold. Emeritus Professor * Jim Miles (retired) * Allan M. Ramsay (retired) * Ian Horrocks, Professor of Computer Science at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

Hilary Kahn Hilary J. Kahn (1943–2007) was a South African British computer scientist who spent most of her career as a professor at the University of Manchester, where she worked on computer-aided design and information modelling. Kahn participated in ...

, 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 in Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingham (founded in 1825 as ...

* Pedro Mendes, Professor at the

University of Connecticut Health Center UConn Health is a healthcare system and hospital, and branch of the University of Connecticut that oversees clinical care, advanced biomedical research, and academic education in medicine. The system is funded directly by the State of Connecticut ...

* , Professor of Computational and Systems Biology in the

School of Biological Sciences School of Biological Sciences may refer to: * Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory School of Biological Sciences * Irell & Manella Graduate School of Biological Sciences * School of Biological Sciences, University of Manchester * UCI School of Biological ...

* Neil Lawrence,

DeepMind DeepMind Technologies Limited, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British–American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Go ...

Professor of machine learning at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

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

was deputy director of the computing laboratory and a Reader in the Mathematics Department *

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

Geoff Tootill Geoffrey ("Geoff") Colin 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 ...

* Nandini Mukherjee * 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 ...

* Ian Watson, and

Professor * Alasdair Rawsthorne * Simon Segars CEO of Arm Ltd. * Bonamy Grimes, co-founder of Skyscanner * Gareth Williams, co-founder of Skyscanner * Jon Andrews, vice president at

Apple Inc Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer ...

References

{{Authority control

Manchester Manchester () is a city and the metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England. It had an estimated population of in . Greater Manchester is the third-most populous metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, with a population of 2.92&nbs ...