Computer Science

The Department of Computing and Communication Technologies is engaged in some very exciting research initiatives in computer science. Around 30 researchers, including academic staff, research assistants and PhD students are involved in this research, which falls within six main areas: Advanced Reliable Computer Systems, Applied Formal Methods, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Software Engineering and Web Technology.

In the Research Assessment Exercise of 2008 our research was very positively reviewed. All the research was at least nationally recognised, half was judged internationally excellent and of this, 15% was judged to be world-leading.

Advanced Reliable Computer Systems

The Advanced Reliable Computer Systems (ARCoS) group, lead by Dr Abusaleh Jabir, carries out research in the design, test, and verification of reliable computer systems. This includes architectural and systems level VLSI designs, security, power, and process variation aware designs, algebraic modelling of hardware, fault tolerance and testability, detection of Hardware Trojans and other malware in VLSI systems for malicious intensions. Application areas include reliable and efficient systems in submicron and nano technology, attack tolerant crypto hardware for improved security, mobile and wearable electronic devices, reliable sensors, etc. The group has over 50 publications in these areas in journals and conferences such as the IEEE/ACM Transactions, IET Proceedings, etc, and patents have been filed for commercial exploitation of the research.

Applied Formal Methods

The Applied Formal Methods group, led by Prof Hong Zhu, is concerned with the theoretical foundations of software engineering. It focuses on applying mathematical theories and methods to a wide range of fundamental problems in software development, covering requirements analysis, formal specification, software design, implementation, and testing methodologies, etc. Research has been carried out on agent-oriented software development, formal methods for program derivation, software modelling languages, formalisation of design patterns and cloud computing.

Computer Vision

The Computer Vision Group is a large and expanding group that was founded in 2004 by Prof Philip Torr and Prof William Clocksin. The group is currently working on over £1M worth of external research contracts to carry out research in computer vision and machine learning. The research by the group in these areas has led to practical applications that have attracted funding from Sony, Google, Sharp, Vicon, EPSRC, 2d3 and Yotta, as well as UK government agencies such as HMGCC. The group was won several best paper awards at vision conferences such as ICCV, CVPR, ECCV and BMVC as well as honourable mention at NIPS. For more details of the work of this group, please visit the Oxford Brookes Vision Group website.

Machine Learning

The Machine Learning group is led by Dr Nigel Crook and focuses on biologically inspired approaches to machine learning and approximate reasoning. The biologically inspired work seeks to combine theoretical principles with knowledge about biological systems to develop novel learning paradigms. The work on approximate reasoning includes subjective probability, belief revision, knowledge representation, and decision making, with a focus on imprecise (non-additive) probabilities. This includes all the mathematical properties of non-additive probabilities and their application to decision making under partial or missing data. The work on machine learning for human motion analysis includes identity recognition from gait and action recognition.

Software Engineering

The Software Engineering Research Group, led by Prof Rachel Harrison, takes an empirical and experimental approach to software engineering, studying software systems in order to characterize and improve the systems. The group is currently working on projects in the areas of:

• A Process for Risk-Driven Requirements Engineering and Analysis (APRES) (a joint project with University College London)
• People at the Centre of Mobile Application Design (PACMAD)
• Software Engineering and Machine Learning for decision making (a joint project with the University of Alcala, Spain)
• Methods for Social Media Collaborative Work (SMCW)

Our work sometimes involves doing interdisciplinary research with psychologists as well as working with other disciplines of computer science such as human computer interaction, artificial intelligence, etc. The group has attracted funding from The Open Group for providing services in the area of enterprise architecture.

Web Technology and Digital Forensics

Web Technologies provide the basis for very many systems in daily use and offer exciting opportunities for engineering new applications. The group is led by Prof David Duce and has broad research interests from web graphics and visualization, to semantic web and web services. Recent work has led to web-based approaches to engineering adaptive collaborative applications, reasoning about diagrams using semantic web technologies and ontology-based approaches to managing compliance to regulatory frameworks. The group also works in the Digital Forensics field. Current research goals are concerned with developing conceptual foundations for forensic investigation and the representation of evidence and reasoning.