Overview

Prof. Cliff Jones is Research Director.

Groups

The School's research activity is structured into groups. These groups cover the areas of

• Dependability
• Distributed Systems
• Data-Intensive Systems Research
• Theoretical Computing Science

The boundaries between the areas are deliberately not drawn very sharply, and some members of staff find themselves working in projects in more than one area, just as some research is carried out on an individual basis.

Common themes link the groups. For example, the application of object-orientation to dependability, distributed systems and parallelism. Interaction between groups and with other institutions is promoted by seminars, an internally-refereed technical report series, an active visitor programme and the web. Work in each of the groups is led by one or more senior members of staff.

Institutes

We have close links with the Informatics Research Institute. This was established at Newcastle University in 2004. Informatics is a multidisciplinary science that concerns natural and artificial computation and communication. The Institute brings together academics from the full spectrum of the engineering, mathematical, physical, life and social sciences, and by doing so initiates more interdisciplinary projects.

Centres

We also house the Centre for Software Reliability (CSR) and the North-East Regional e-Science Centre (NEReSC). NEReSC is a front door for e-Science in the area, offering expertise to university researchers and industry.

The Centre for Software Reliability (CSR) is a research centre within the School of Computing Science; it conducts research on how to achieve improved levels of dependability from computing systems. Current projects address software and system requirements (their representation, evolution and analysis); formal specifications; dependable architectures; socio-technical engineering issues encompassing cost and dependability trade - offs.

CSR is also responsible for the planning and organisation of an established programme of technology transfer events (about ten each year, with an annual 3-day symposium and 2 day critical conference). This programme was orginally sponsored by DTI/EPSRC under the auspices of the Safety-Critical Systems and Software Reliability & Metrics community clubs; the clubs have the support of the BCS, IEE and HSE.