The Department's Research
The Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck is a world-class centre of expertise in information and knowledge management, intelligent systems and computational intelligence. We also have major interdisciplinary activities in life sciences informatics and technology-enhanced learning. Our research collaborations include many industrial and research partners in the UK and abroad, and we maintain a high level of activity in organising international conferences and workshops.
In the RAE 2008, almost all of the Department's research was judged as being of international significance, with 15% being world-leading, 50% internationally excellent, and 30% internationally recognised. We have international research links with over 50 universities in Europe, USA, Far East, South America and Australia. Academic staff serve on numerous journal editorial boards and conference programme committees.
Much of our research is funded by the UK research councils: we currently hold grants from the EPSRC, ESRC and AHRC. We were recently successful in being awarded two major grants under the highly competitive ESRC/EPSRC Technology Enhanced Learning programme: Intelligent Support for Mathematics Generalisation and Learning Design Support Environment for Lecturers.
There are two main research groups: Information Management and Web Technologies and Computational Intelligence, which form the focus for our discipline-specific research. In addition, informal interest groups emerge and evolve over time within and between these main groups, for example in search engine technology, sensor networks, semantic web, computer vision, cluster analysis, adaptive systems and learning environments.
There are two main interdisciplinary research activities: the London Knowledge Lab and Life Sciences Informatics. We set up the London Knowledge Lab in 2004, in collaboration with the Departments of Mathematics, Science and Technology, and Culture, Language and Communication from the Institute of Education. The London Knowledge Lab is a unique collaboration of computer scientists, social scientists and educationalists, exploring the ways in which new digital technologies and media are shaping the future of learning and knowledge. We also collaborate in the Institute for Structural Molecular Biology together with several other departments from Birkbeck and University College London.
