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University of Portsmouth
RAE analysis
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UoA CS Additional information (RA6d analysis)
Index
Collaborative research
The multidisciplinary nature of research in Computer Science is reflected in the widely collaborative activities of staff. This is especially so in the case of BIOCORE where collaboration with clinicians and health carers is integral to the nature of the research carried out within the group. Collaborative research in BIOCORE can be distinctly categorised at the national and international levels as follows:
National Collaboration
Work focusing on the development of intelligent computing techniques - including image processing and parallel processing paradigms - applied to oncology is jointly carried out with: the Freeman Hospital, Newcastle upon Tyne (Dr MK Bennett, Prof A Murray), on colorectal cancer and bladder cancer; the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Newcastle University Cancer Research Unit (Mr TWJ Lennard, Dr B Angus, Dr MS Lakshmi) on breast cancer; the Northern Oesophago-Gastric Cancer Unit, Newcastle upon Tyne (Messrs SM Griffin, SA Raimes), and the Cumberland Infirmary, Cumbria (Dr J Wayman), on oesophago-gastric cancer; Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Gateshead (Drs J Monaghan, A Lopez and R Naik), on gynaecological oncology; Sheffield University, the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Sheffield (Prof FC Hamdy), Newcastle University Medical School (Prof DE Neal) and Leicester General Hospital (Prof JK Mellon), on prostate and bladder cancers.
International Collaboration
Here again, applications in the area of cancer diagnosis, prognosis and patient management are jointly investigated with: the Urology and Nephrology Centre, Mansoura University, Egypt (Prof M Ghoneim), on bladder cancer; the University of Milan, Italy (Drs E Albertazzi, F Cajone, BE Leone), the Gujarat Cancer and Research Institute, Ahmedabad, India (Dr J
Bhatavdekar) and the Institute for Molecular Medicine, USA (Prof GV Sherbet), on image cytometry of breast cancer; the Universities of Milan, Italy (Prof D Marini), and Barcelona, Spain (Prof E Luque), on colorectal cancer; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA (Prof AA Forastiere, Dr EI Heath), on oesophageal cancer.
In the case of DKERG, research collaboration is equally varied. On the national and international fronts, strong partnerships exist with the following: IUT de Bayonne (Dr T Nodenot), France, University of Rousse (Dr M Marinov), Bulgaria, SAIT-VIDEOHOUSE - Belgian satellite communication company - (Mr M Maes) and British Telecom (Mr N Palmer) on educational technology, open-distance learning applications using telematics, multimedia and collaborative learning; British Aerospace (Mr C Yates),
Aerospatiale SNI (Mr Y Baudier), Alenia Aeronautica (Dr E Valfre), Rover Group (Mr J Todd), Ford (Mr C Clements), BMW (Mr H Jina), Rolls-Royce (Dr M Cotterill), Volkswagen AG (Dr N Pfeiff), Dassault Systèmes (Mr S Rein), IBM (Mr G Smith), VTT (Dr H Virta) and the Technical University of Berlin (Prof J Lüddermann) on the application of software engineering methods to safety critical hypermedia and computer tools in industrial design.
Teaching Company Schemes: We have had six TCS since '96, the partners being H Charlesworth & Co. Ltd, H H Calmon Ltd, Caltell Communications Ltd, Servoplas, Crosrol Ltd, and PumaSoft Ltd.
Some Data on RA2 International Conference Contributions:
ICTAI'96 [Kitchin-1]: 37 long papers accepted out of 162 submissions; KBCS'00 [Kitchin-4]: 50 papers accepted out of 160 submissions; ASE'98 [McCluskey-3]: 24 papers selected from 150 submissions; ICML'98 [McCluskey-4]: 66 technical papers accepted out of 215 submissions.
Noted references of non-entered staff:
[1] M.Ingleby, W.G.Brockhaus, 'Phonological Primes: Cues and Acoustic Signatures' Chapter 2 in J Durand & B Laks (Editors) Phonology, from Phonetics to Cognition, Oxford University Press, '01.
[2] M.Ingleby, W.G.Brockhaus, 'Unary Primes and Constituent Structure in Language Engneering", Bulletin De La Communcation Parlee, No. 5, pp109-129, March '00.
[3] S.Scott "Separating Constraint Dimensions in a Scheduling Problem to Reduce Search Space" Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on AI (ECAI-98), Brighton, UK.[4] J.V.Bonner: Human factors design tools for consumer product interfaces, International Encyclopedia of Ergonomics and Human Factors (Ed) W Karwowski, Taylor and Francis, '99.
[5] M A R Kirby, D Rigas, D O'Connel, "AUDIOTEST: Utilising Audio to Communicate Information in Programming Debugging", Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on HCI, Munich, Germany, '99.
[6] Sixsmith, A, K Lunn and P Sharples, "Preliminary results of the specification of the functional requirements of the PLANEC system". In Graafmans J et al (eds) Gerontechnology: A sustainable Investment in the Future. IOS Press, '97.
Members of staff are involved in consultancy work and other forms of technology transfer. In particular, Thomas combines his Professorship at Middlesex University with independent consultancy work at Serco, and is a Director of several technology-related businesses. The PUMA approach (see HCI section) was presented as a tutorial at national and international conferences (BCS HCI'98 and ACM CHI'99) and tested through work with Praxis Critical Systems ltd. and Domino plc. At Web9, Jones chaired the first workshop on mobile web browsing as well as leading a tutorial on the same subject. Results of our work on digital libraries are being adopted by Waikato, BT, the Whittington Hospital and others.
Members of the School have also been involved in a wide variety of Public Understanding of Science activities. For example, Thimbleby has been a member of PITCOM (the Parliamentary Information Technology Committee) since 1993, on the executive in 1998, and the programme subcommittee since 1999, and is also a member of the Church of England Working Party on IT. Woodman was the technical consultant to the 1998 BBC2 series ‘theWebStory.com’. Many other staff have been involved in activities such as writing newspaper, encyclopaedia and magazine articles, appearing on radio and TV programmes, visiting schools, running British Association Science, Engineering and Technology events, and lecturing and participating in International Science Festivals.
The following may serve as evidence of the impact of our research.
· Our work on "Method and Apparatus for Extracting Domain Knowledge for Software Code or Other data"
with BT has resulted in a patent which was filed on 6th July 2000 under the UK application number
0016639.7.· Our work on transformation systems for reverse engineering and system migration has led to a commercial
product known as FermaT, marketed by Software Migration Ltd. which is currently widely used by
industry. A notable example is in its use in a major industrial migration application where over 100,000
lines of IBM 370 Assembler are translated into ANSI C.
· The Generic Control Architecture for Telerobotics (GCAT) developed has been taken by DERA and will
form the basis of the infrastructure for their next generation telerobotic systems.
· Thorough evaluation of the crisp expert system for umbilical acid-base analysis led to its commercial exploitation, and it is now employed in over 25 hospitals within the UK, including Kings College Hospital and Bristol Maternity Hospital. Subsequent work highlighted the requirement for fuzzy logic to better match human expert performance and the system was extended to incorporate fuzzy logic. Several companies have expressed interest in this improved fuzzy system and commercial exploitation rights are currently under negotiation.
· Following an EPSRC Award (entitled ‘Safe and Dependable Information Technology’), under the
Partnership with Public Understanding initiative, a show-case of examplars and demonstrations have
been designed and built which is now being displayed at Snibston Discovery Park, Leicestershire. Its
purpose is to increase public awareness of the many issues involved in the specification and design of safe
and dependable systems. In addition we have produced, and widely distributed a CD ROM containing
detailed information about critical systems, simulators, quizzes, etc.
· The work on Interval Temporal Logic has been the basis for the development of Duration Calculus (DC)
which is one of the major achievements of the ESPRIT-funded PROCOS project that was led by Prof.
Hoare. Currently Intel (Strategic CAD Lab., Microprocessor Products Group headed by Dr. J.W. O’Leary)
are using ITL at various stages in their hardware verification projects.
The Department hosted the 10th European Simulation Symposium in October 1998. The Symposium was sponsored by the Society for Computer Simulation, five national Simulation Societies, the European Simulation Council, and the Federation of European Simulation Societies. 135 research papers by 298 authors were accepted from 35 countries from North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. The ESS’98 Proceedings (ISBN:1-56555-147-8) are fully referenced and abstracted by BIDS, ISI and INSPEC.
Robert John Jones, a member of the scientific staff at CERN was awarded his PhD by published work in 1997 through the School. Mike Salampasis’ PhD was nominated by the external examiner for the CPHC Distinguished Dissertation Competition in 1998. Jonathan Owens, a research student in the School received the British Technology Group prize for his submission to "SET (Science, Engineering & Technology) for Britain" exhibition at the Houses of Parliament in 2000.
A number of important Meetings and Conferences have been held in Sunderland in the relevant period: these include a meeting of the Northern Information Systems Group (NISG), Jan98; EXPERSYS 97; COMDEM 99; EXPERSYS 99; and perhaps most notably the highly successful HCI 2000.
Companies: Seahorse Creations has been formed to exploit our HCI and multi-media research in the production of advanced educational and entertainment multi-media related to scuba diving and the underwater world.
Researchers in Computing have developed collaborative relationships with the Delta Institute at the University of Wolverhampton. This concentrates on the design, development and application of ICT learning technologies and is led by Professor Steve Molyneux, (IBM Professor of Interactive Technologies and Microsoft Chair of Advanced Learning Technologies). Professor Molyneux has attracted major European funding (£6,861,000) to develop the Broadnet framework, which delivers high quality learning materials to small and medium sized enterprises across the West Midlands. In 1999, he received initial funding of £200,000 from a number of multi-national IT, telecommunications and publishing companies to develop the Learning Lab at Wolverhampton. This provides a centre of excellence for all those involved in design, development and use of learning technologies. As a result of the Broadnet project the Wolverhampton Online Learning Framework (WOLF) was developed. This is now commercially available as a result of a contract with Granada Learning, the UK's leading provider of multimedia learning and software.
The category B staff listed were returned as category A staff in UOA25 in RAE96. The exception is Mackenzie, who was in UOA25 in 1992 but UOA23 for 1996, and was again active in Computing during this period [Eld1-4]. Although we have lost several research active staff during the period, the area of main activity is unchanged, and replacement and new appointments demonstrate a growing research base.
Research grants and RAE funding employ 0.5 FTE computer support staff and 0.1 FTE secretarial staff and each directly supports the research activity of the School.
Additional observations
In assessing our progress it may be noted that our true external research income from 1996-2000 is understated by 43% for two reasons: (1) MANTCHI (£34K) is excluded because the funding, though competitive, came from a SHEFC initiative which is disallowed for submission under RAE rules; (2) two payments, in excess of £32K, are more than one year overdue for Esprit 25754 VISCOUNT, which finished Feb 2000 – the CEC give the reason for the delay as being a suspected overclaim by one of the industrial partners.
Arnold led a UEA team exhibiting several prototypes at ACM1: Beyond Cyberspace at San Jose. Following Cox’s Autumn 2000 study leave visiting Nuance (Menlo Park CA), Breen has been given extended leave of absence to establish a UK research arm for Nuance in the Norwich Science Park. Dowsing has been in discussion at ministerial level with the Western Australian Government concerning automated assessment. The Computer Museum, Boston, MA commissioned Luis Fabian Bachrach to create a photographic portrait of Forrest: he is one of only three UK graphics workers recognised in this way. Rayward-Smith was a member of the QAA benchmarking panel.
Birkbeck specialises in the provision of higher education by evening study for students who are engaged in earning their living or other responsibilities during the day. Consequently, the majority of the School’s research student FTEs are part-time students. These part-time research students receive the same quality of academic and technical support as full-time students They contribute considerably to our industrial links and collaborations, helping to ensure that our research is relevant to the needs of industry and society at large.
Sustaining a research project over the many years needed to successfully complete a PhD part-time is difficult in any discipline. In a rapidly changing technological field such as computer science, there is the added challenge of ensuring that the research activity remains state-of-the-art during this period. When this is combined with external factors such as work relocation and changing family commitments, the part-time PhD completion rate will inevitably be lower than that of full-time students. Thus, of our 7 PhD graduates during this RAE period, 4 were full-time and 3 were part-time. We are expecting a further 8 PhD graduates in 2001, 4 full-time and 4 part-time.
The Laboratory maintains full information on its web pages about all its activities, including research and teaching, summaries of research highlights and software packages, and more detailed information about the research groups and their seminar series. The URL is http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk.
a) miscellaneous activities :
Member of the British Machine Vision Association (Maybank, Ferryman - CVG).
Member of IEEE (Maybank - CVG)
Member of Societe Mathematique de France (Maybank-CVG)
British Society for the Philosophy of Science (Anderson - CVG).
Consultant and strong links with with NuTech Solutions Inc, based at North Carolina and headed by Zbigniew Michalewicz.and Lawrence (Dave) Davis. (Corne - PEDAL).
Reviewer for Distinguished Dissertation scheme organised by CPCS and BCS for publication of British PhD dissertations in Computer Science (Megson - PEDAL).
Director SALGEN Systems Ltd, bringing research through to IP licenses (Megson - PEDAL).
Director CertainTee International, applying research to sports/leisure markets (Anderson -CVG)
Member of the Price Waterhouse Coopers HEFCE UK e-University Business Model Study Team producing 'Business Model For The e-University' Q.Thompson, K.D.Baker, A.Cromwell, P.Gist, R.Rhys and A.Wolfe, HEFCE Report 00/44, 10 October 2000. (Baker - CVG).
b) conference activity :
Since 1996 staff have been involved in the 26 international conferences as chairs, workshop chairs, or organisers (CVG 4, ASE 12, PEDAL 10) and members of programme committees for approximately 48 international events (CVG 10, ASE 8, PEDAL 30). Most notably STEP97, Royal Society meetings, SPIE, AISB, IMACS, EuroMicro, EuroPar, EuroPVM, PATAT and IEEE. With respect to IEEE Reading has been represented on 14 different conference committees. Maybank makes substantial contributions to the public understanding of science including the following: New Scientist (1999), Forbes Magazine (2000), TV (BBC, Sky News, Anglia TV, Discovery Channel, and forthcoming Channel 4 documentary on visual surveillance), together with many articles in the national press.
c) additional collaborations :
Dr Loader spent a sabbatical at Emory University Atlanta.
Dr Williams spent a sabbatical with Vodafone.Dr McKee was appointed Visiting Research Scholar at the MIT Field Robotics Laboratory, Boston, USA, May to June 1999, Visiting Research Scientist at the Planetary Robotics Laboratory, the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, USA, June to September 1999, and Visiting Research Scientist at the Planetary Robotics Laboratory, the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, USA, August to September, 2000.
d) other items :
Expansion of the Postgraduate population has continued with the award of EPSRC studentships to the School wide taught MSc Programme. Alexandrov is co-ordinating an Advanced European MSC (9 academic and two industrial partners) which is industrially focused and has as integral part 6 months research and development project with a major industrial company in EU or US and /or renowned international academic institution. Current MSc (29) students participate in major research projects such as developing HARNESS metacomputing environment in Oak Ridge National Lab (USA) and Collaborative Computing Framework in Emory University (USA). An EU MSc on Distance and Distributed Learning, is being developed. Alexandrov has been nominated by IBM and is a member of the EU wide curricula development group (with leading industrial partners: IBM, Nokia, Philips, Siemens, Thompson, BT, Telefonica) and liaison with Skills Profiles group in Phase II of EU Information and Communication Technologies Skills Gap research and development project aiming at creating a new ICT EU wide curricula facilitating new e-learning methods. Alexandrov is also involved in EU-US consortium experimenting with virtual teams approach for managing research projects.
MSc and industrial courses based on research (particularly based on HISE results but also HCI and RTS) have been taught to 800 people from more than 60 companies/organisations in 3 continents. 3398 total student-days have been presented on-site for major companies and 515 student-days to public locations for mixed industrial audiences.
A number of start-up companies are based on results of the department’s research. For example, Pattern Computing and Cybula Ltd. exploit the the neural networks research. Northern Real-Time Applications Ltd. (NRTA) and Realogy Ltd. exploit embedded real-time technologies for a number of industries particularly the automotive industry. Lexicle Ltd. exploits Manandhar's research in natural language processing and Olivier's research in artificial intelligence applied to graphics.
The cost of reorganisation in 1998 was high in terms of staff time, especially for senior staff. This led to a temporary dip in grant applications, coinciding with the end of the large grant funding HCRC, which shows up in the RA4 expenditure figures for 1999/2000 and 2000/2001. Recent funding successes (for example, our participation in two IRCs) have not yet shown up in these figures.
Additional Information
The submitted patent by Cockshott [Coc4] relates to optimisation techniques in video compression. It has been licensed to Orange for use in their Video phone, and to Essential Viewing Ltd for web applications.
W.S. Johnstone is employed purely as a teaching assistant.
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