Computer Science

Research Groups and Highlighed PhDs

If you are keen to pursue a research degree, each of the School of Computing's five research groups has suggested projects: do contact the project proposers or the head of research group to tell us that you are interested. 

Programming Languages and Systems 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 batteryoperated 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 
• refactoring of functional and concurrent languages
• applications of formal methods to provably correct, secure systems
• model checking and abstract interpretation, including applications to discovering security vulnerabilities
• program verification and theorem proving

Computational Intelligence 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 modeling 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 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 including gene expression modelling
• theory and application of diagrammatic visualisation methods
• data mining and knowledge discovery
• construction of computational models of the human cognitive and neural system.

Cyber Security Research Group

Security - of information, systems, and communications - has become a central issue in our society. Interaction between people's personal devices (far beyond just phones and computers) and the rest of the connected world is nearly continuous; and with the advent of the Internet Of Things its scope will only grow.

In that context, so much can go wrong - every communication can potentially be intercepted, modified, or spoofed, and surreptitiously obtained data can be commercially exploited or used for privacy invasions. In fact, data flows in society are such that many people already feel they have lost control over where (their) data goes.

The cyber security research group operates within that context. All members bring a particular technological emphasis - the analysis of particular classes of security problems or their solutions - but are fully aware that it all fits within a wider context of people using systems and communicating data in secure and insecure ways, and how external pressures beyond the mere technology impact on that. The topic of computer security then naturally widens to include topics like privacy, cyber crime, and ethics and law relating to computing, as well as bringing in aspects of psychology, sociology and economics.

From that perspective, the Cyber Security research group played a key role in setting up, and continues to be a core contributor to, the University's Interdisciplinary Cyber Security Research Centre, see www.cybersecurity.kent.ac.uk.

The group has a strong involvement with postgraduate teaching in this area. It teaches most of the core modules in MSc programmes in Computer Security, and Networks and Security. A new (from September 2017) MSc Course in Cyber Security has been provisionally certified by GCHQ. The group is also involved in undergraduate modules in this area, postgraduate programmes in other schools and UK activities to define curricula in Cyber Security.

Areas of Research Activity

Members are engaged in the following areas of research (research areas in more detail) .

• Data Ethics and Privacy
• Authorisation Infrastructures
• Cybercrime
• Internet Of Things Security and Privacy
• Authentication
• Quantum Computation and Information, with Security Applications 
• Formal Methods for Cryptography
• Steganography and Steganalysis
• Trust Management and Metrics and Reputation Systems
• Tools for Vulnerability Analysis
• Self-Adaptation applied to Security and Privacy
• Cloud Security
• Human Aspects of Security
• Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology
• Identity Management

Data Science Research Group

Data Science is about developing new techniques to better understand data and draws on many areas within and outside of computer science. Our research group develops and applies methods to interpret rich information sources.Our research comes under three themes:

eHealth

• Dr Caroline Li gathers and analyses EEG data for to study of seasonal affective disorder.
• Dr Srivas Chennu works on neurodynamics of consciousness, developing new tools to study brain networks, including improved diagnostics and prognostics during emergence from coma. He also uses neural network modelling for predictive coding in cognition.
• Dr Palani Ramaswamy has worked on biological signal analysis, brain-computer interfaces and biometrics. He has applied machine learning techniques to these and other fields.

Systems

• Dr Fernando Otero, Professor Alex Frietas and  Dr Matteo Migliavacca, have developed new search-based approaches to computation, such as ant colony optimisation methods for predicting protein function.
• Professor Frank Wang has shown that memristors can provide a radically new way to construct neural networks. In addition he has developed models of cloud computing for big data.