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The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
Computer Science MSc, PhD
This is a research programme within the Computing subject area.
Key facts
- Subject area: Computing
- Location: Canterbury
- School: School of Computing
- Duration: MSc one year full-time or two years part-time, PhD registration three to four years full-time or five to six years part-time.
- Start: At any time but preferably in September.
- Fees: More info
- Entry requirements: A first or 2.1 degree or advanced/specialist taught MSc in computer science or a related discipline (such as mathematics, business studies or electronics, as long as the degree has a strong computing component). Please also check our general entry requirements (including English language requirements).
Outline
Your research should produce an original contribution in your chosen field of study. You work closely with your supervisor, a member of academic staff, who is your principal source of support. If you choose a research area that has interdisciplinary aspects, you may have more than one supervisor. In addition to regular supervision, you will be supported by a supervisory panel of three academic staff who provide further structured input and guidance.
We offer an extensive support framework to all our research students. We support you in becoming an effective researcher through a series of weekly workshops taken in the first year. These cover researchspecific subjects including how to access journals and review research publications, how to write and publish academic articles and how to present your work at seminars and conferences. You may also attend workshops on key transferable skills including communication, time management and teamwork.
You will join one or more of our well-integrated, active research groups where you will be able to test and discuss your ideas and place your research in a broader context.
We host a seminar series for visiting speakers as well as holding regular seminars within our research groups where research students are encouraged to participate. We also host an annual postgraduate conference where you have the opportunity to both present your work and to gain experience as a conference organiser.
Many of our research students earn money by teaching on our undergraduate programmes. We provide teaching development courses in your first year to give you the skills to teach effectively.
Programme structure
For further information see the School site.
Funding
Each year, the School of Computing offers scholarships and bursaries for well-qualified UK, European and international postgraduate students. These range from discounts on the tuition fees through to awards covering full tuition fees plus maintenance grants of up to the UK Research Councils' level of £13,590 (2011/12 rate).
As well as UK Research Council-funded studentships, every school at Kent offers one or two University postgraduate research scholarships, each available for three years, providing fees at the home/EU rate and a stipend up to £13,590 per annum (2011/12 rate).
Many schools offer scholarships in the form of Graduate Teaching Assistantships (GTAs) whereby postgraduate research students receive financial support in return for teaching. The value of awards may vary, but often cover tuition fees at the home/EU rate and a substantial maintenance grant.
All postgraduate research students are eligible to apply for GTAs. See Graduate Teaching Assistantships.
For further details of postgraduate funding, see Postgraduate funding.
View further information about scholarships available in the School of Computing.
Further information:
Resources and facilities
The School of Computing has a large range of equipment providing both UNIX (TM) and PC-based systems, and a wide variety of mobile devices, smart wireless sensors and digital field-survey equipment. In addition, we have a Field- rogrammable Gate Array-based facility for experimenting with novel architectures for robotic and communications applications and a clusterfacility consisting of 30 Linux-based PCs for parallel computation. New resources include a multi-core enterprise server with 128 hardware threads and a virtual machine server that supports computer security experiments.
Further information:
Research groups
Programming Languages and Systems Research Group
Our research involves all aspects of programming languages and systems, from fundamental theory to practical implementation. The group has interests across a wide range of programming paradigms: object-oriented, concurrent, functional and logic. We research the links between logic and programming languages, the verification of the correctness of programs, and develop tools for refactoring, tracing and testing. We are interested in incorporating safe concurrent programming practices into language design.
The group is also interested in practical implementation of programming languages, from massively concurrent parallel processing to battery-operated mobile systems. Particular research topics include lightweight multi-threading kernels, highly concurrent operating systems, memory managers and garbage collectors.
Research areas include:
- theoretical and architectural questions concerning designs for both hardware and software
- abstractions and implementations of concurrency in programming languages
- formal specification of systems and their architecture
- design patterns and tools for enabling the safe and scalable exploitation of concurrency
- compilers, memory managers and garbage collectors
- lightweight multi-threading kernels and highly concurrent operating systems
- architectures for ubiquitous computing and context-aware systems
- software testing and metrics, especially applied to scientific software
- visualisation of programming languages
- refactoring tools and type systems for the functional, concurrent language, Erlang
- checking program termination and fairness
- applications of formal methods to provably correct, secure systems
- model checking and abstract interpretation, including applications to security.
Staff
Dr Fred Barnes, Dr Eerke Boiten, Dr Olaf Chitil, Professor Richard Jones, Dr Stefan Kahrs, Dr Andy King, Dr Rogerio de Lemos, Dr Nick Ryan, Professor Simon Thompson, Gerald Tripp.
Computational Intelligence Research Group
This group brings together interdisciplinary researchers investigating the interface between computer science and the domains of bioscience and cognition. In terms of applying computation to other domains, we have experts in investigating the modelling of gene expression and modelling of human attention, emotions and reasoning. From the perspective of applying biological metaphors to computation, we research new computational methods such as genetic algorithms and swarm intelligence.
The group also develops novel techniques for data mining, visualisation and simulation. These use the results of interdisciplinary research for finding solutions to computationally expensive problems. The methods we develop are also applied to the bioscience and cognitive domains.
The group has strong links with other schools at the University of Kent, as well as with universities, hospitals and scientific research institutes throughout the country and internationally.
Areas of research activity within the group include:
- bio-inspired computing including neural networks, evolutionary computing and swarm intelligence
- application of computational simulations in biology and medicine
- systems biology and bioinformatics
- theory and applications of diagrammatic visualisation methods
- data mining and knowledge discovery
- computational methods in astrophysics and astronomy
- construction of computational models of the human cognitive and neural system.
Staff
David Barnes, Professor Howard Bowman, Dr Dominique Chu, Dr Alex Freitas, Dr Colin Johnson, Dr Peter Rodgers.
Information Systems Security Research Group
This group researches and develops leadingedge, user-friendly security solutions for distributed systems. We have many years' experience of research in public key infrastructures, privilege management infrastructures and identity management, gained by participating in many EC and UK projects since the late 1990s.
Our main research interests include:
- public key and privilege management infrastructures
- trust management and metrics and reputation systems
- policy-based security
- security and risk management
- privacy and security
- identity management
- user-friendly security.
- provably secure crypto-systems and devices
- hardware-based algorithms for high-speed network intrusion detection.
Staff
Professor David Chadwick, Dr Eerke Boiten, Dr Rogerio de Lemos, Dr Andy King, Gerald Tripp.
Computing Education Research Group
We focus on disciplinary-specific pedagogy, especially the teaching and learning of computer science and programming.
Our research interests focus on understanding the aspects of learning that are specific to computing education, and which range from examining general theories of learning, through thematically focused investigations (such as gender), to tool construction. We examine education from multiple aspects, including supporting computing education research infrastructure, working with teachers, or focusing on student learning.
Areas of interest include:
- building an evidence base of research on early programming education
- tool support for learning and teaching of programming, including custom-made development tools, such as educational programming languages, or development environments which can adapt to changes in programming paradigms and technology and pedagogical advances
- analysis of data generated as a part of the learning process, which could be text-based, naturally occurring in the classroom (eg, assessments), generated as a reflective process on learning (eg, diaries), or generated from interaction with programming environments.
Staff
David Barnes, Professor Sally Fincher, Dr Colin Johnson, Professor Michael Kölling, Ian Utting.
Future Computing Research Group
We target the next generation computing paradigms and their applications. The group has been working on grid/cloud computing (internet II), green computing and virtual computing, etc, for many years. A developed grid/cloud computing platform conforms to the internet standard and can universally accelerate office/database/web/media applications by a factor of up to ten. This work won an ACM/IEEE Super Computing Finalist Award. The Group's other important work is on environment-friendly green computing through utilising a revolutionary element – memristor. Most recently, the Group has discovered that memristor has a peculiar effect (they named it ‘delayed switching' in an IEEE paper). It has demonstrated that power-saving memristors can be packed at least twice as densely as semiconductors, achieving a significant breakthrough in computer storage density.
Staff
Professor Frank Wang, Dr Sining Wu.
Show all
|Staff research
David Barnes: Lecturer.
Tools for testing numerical and scientific software; computer simulation in biology; technological support for computer science learning and teaching.
Fred Barnes: Lecturer.
The occam-pi programming language; fast (sub 100ns context-switch/communication) user-level thread scheduling; interfacing C and occam-pi; dynamic parallel computing, mobile data, channels and processes; distributed parallel computing; languages, compilers, program transformation, run-time systems and formal methods.
Dr Eerke Boiten: Senior Lecturer.
Formal methods, refinement, cryptography, security.
Professor Howard Bowman: Professor of Cognition and Logic.
Human attention, emotions, reasoning; connectionist modelling; symbolic modelling; EEG recording and analysis methods; formal methods and concurrency theory.
Professor David Chadwick: Professor of Information Systems Security
Computer security.
Dr Olaf Chitil: Lecturer.
Functional programming and tracing.
Dominique Chu: Academic Fellow.
Computational systems biology and simulation of biological systems.
Dr Rogerio de Lemos: Lecturer.
Architecting dependable systems: abstractions for fault tolerance, and verification and validation of dependable software architectures; software engineering for self-adaptive systems: dynamic generation of management processes, abstractions for supporting self-adaptability and self-organisation; software development for safetycritical systems; dependability and bio-inspired computing.
Professor Sally Fincher: Professor of Computing Education.
The construction and boundaries of CS education; the teacher perspective, especially teacher decision-making; patterns and pattern languages, their use in knowledge-transfer, and their application to CS pedagogy.
Dr Alex Freitas: Reader in Computational Intelligence.
Data mining; bio-inspired computational intelligence algorithms; bioinformatics.
Dr Colin Johnson: Senior Lecturer.
Bioinformatics; computer simulation in biology; bio-inspired computing including genetic algorithms, genetic programming and swarm intelligence methods.
Professor Richard Jones: Professor of Computer Systems
Implementation of programming languages; memory management; garbage collection, distributed garbage collection; object demographics; program analysis for improved memory management; program visualisation.
Dr Stefan Kahrs: Lecturer.
Expressiveness of programming languages, type systems, term rewriting, infinitary rewriting.
Dr Peter Kenny: Lecturer.
Scientific computing, especially in physics and biosciences; computer graphics, digital imaging and computer animation.
Dr Andy King: Reader in Program Analysis.
Abstract interpretation and security.
Professor Michael Kölling: Professor of Computer Science.
Object-oriented systems; programming languages; computer science education; development environments and tools; visualisation; user interfaces.
Dr Peter Rodgers: Senior Lecturer.
Diagrammatic systems; graph drawing; Euler diagram visualisation.
Dr Nick Ryan: Lecturer.
Mobile and ubiquitous systems; location and context-awareness, particularly in field sciences; visualisation and description of ancient environments.
Professor Simon Thompson: Professor of Logic and Computation.
Functional programming and refactoring.
Gerald Tripp: Lecturer.
Techniques for the analysis and control of highspeed packet networks, including system monitoring and network intrusion detection; use of special-purpose hardware and firmware designs to perform high-speed string and regular expression matching.
Ian Utting: Senior Lecturer.
Tool support for teaching and learning in CS, especially programming, and especially small and mobile devices.
Further information:
Contact details
Admissions enquiries
T: +44 (0)1227 827272
E: information@kent.ac.uk
Subject enquiries
Course Administration Office,
School of Computing, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NF, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 764000
E: (research programmes) computer-science@kent.ac.uk
E: (taught programmes) cs-msc-admissions@kent.ac.uk
Further information: