computer science research institute - Research - University of Ulster

2. FOREwORd by THE
RESEARCH INSTITUTE dIRECTOR
This is the second Annual Report of the Computer
Science Research Institute (CSRI), which was
established as part of the University’s institutional
strategy to facilitate greater selectivity in research
support. The Institute currently comprises 48
research active staff from three Schools in the Faculty
of Computing and Engineering: Schools of Computing
and Information Engineering (at Coleraine), Computing
and Intelligent Systems (at Magee), and Computing
and Mathematics (at Jordanstown), together with 20
research associates and research fellows, and over
70 doctoral research students. A list of academic
staff members of the Research Institute can be seen in Section 3. A major
development during 2007 has been the establishment of the Intelligent Systems
Research Centre, to which we welcome two new senior external appointments:
Dr. Laxmidhar Behera (Reader in Robotics) and Dr. Shyam Chakraborty (Reader
in Wireless Technology), along with four new research associate appointments.
We also welcome three new appointments under the University’s Research
Lectureship programme: Dr. Ammar Belatreche, Dr. Damien Coyle, and Dr. Dewar
Finlay. The end of the academic year has seen the retirement, after a long and
distinguished career, of Dr. Tony Donegan (Reader Emeritus in Mathematics).
In cooperation with the Faculty of Computing and Engineering Research
Graduate School, the CSRI again recruited some of the most highly qualified
research students in the University in our annual competition for scholarships
funded by DEL and by the Vice-Chancellor’s Research Studentship programme.
13 new PhD students were recruited during 2006-07, and details of all of the
new projects can be seen in Section 4. The last year has been a very successful
one for PhD student completions, with 13 doctoral students completing their
thesis between August 2006 and July 2007. Thesis topics covered a broad range
of research areas, including telecommunications network services and protocols,
information retrieval, computational neuroscience, embedded systems, computer
architectures, business systems modelling and optimisation, logic, medical image
processing, and healthcare informatics. Details of the completed PhD projects
can also be seen in Section 4. Our programme of research student internships
with Cisco Systems research laboratories, USA, continued in Summer 2007,
with two PhD students completing internships in San Jose, California and one
in Rayleigh, North Carolina. In 2007 the Faculty’s Research Graduate School
extended its already rigorous progress assessment schedule for our PhD students
by introducing a very successful poster presentation session for Year 2 students
at the annual Faculty Research Dinner.
The CSRI has established a track record of research publication in internationally
leading journals and conferences. The 2006-07 year has been particularly
productive for research outputs, including over 20 publications in the prestigious
Transactions of the IEEE/ACM. Details of selected publications by members
of the Research Institute during 2006-07 can be seen in Section 5. Research
within the Information and Software Engineering group is focussed on
four areas: knowledge and data engineering, image processing, software process
engineering, and telecommunications and network engineering. In the Intelligent
Systems group, research is focussed on computational intelligence, particularly
biologically-inspired computation, including work on spiking neural networks,
fuzzy systems, cognitive robotics, wireless sensory systems, re-configurable
computing and embedded systems. Research within the Artificial Intelligence
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