Computer Science Research

• Current number of academic staff: 52.
• Current number of research staff and students: Eight research associates/fellows, 60 MPhil/PhD students and numerous internationally recognised visiting academics.
• Research income: Since 2008, the Department has attracted over £4m in research funding.
• Recent publications: All academics in the Department publish regularly, with well over 100 publications per year.
• Partner organisations: We have strong links with industry, government and other academic institutions. Our research has been supported by several companies from the aerospace, automotive, financial, IT and telecommunications sectors.
• Recent events: We host several workshops and conferences and other regular research meetings. Please check our website for forthcoming events.

Student destinations Head of group/division Duration Location Year of entry 2013
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The Department of Informatics has a rapidly rising research profile, with increasing numbers of major externally funded projects, a strong publication profile and significant research activity. Our research is organised around our research groups, and you can find details of the range of current research projects and interests on the Department's research pages.

If you are interested in joining us to undertake PhD research, you should identify topics and academic staff in your area of interest. If you cannot find your chosen topic or area on our individual research section or subgroup pages, contact a relevant member of academic staff for further information and then follow the application procedure.

We are a medium-sized department with many internationally recognised researchers and visiting academics, large groups of PhD students, research assistants, national and international projects, collaborations with other departments and the School as well as links with industry. We offer an exciting environment and excellent opportunities for research.

Our PhD students have access to good library facilities, a personal work area including a desk and high-specification computer, new PhD laboratories, weekly departmental seminars and regular group seminars, and college-based training in transferable and research skills.

We provide MSc specialist courses that you can attend; School and College induction courses; a week of training per year in transferable and research skills and the opportunity to attend one week EPSRC sponsored courses on career prospects for research students. There is also a centrally provided programme of computing and related skills training.

Our research students are also encouraged to submit papers to conferences, and we try to provide financial support for them to travel to present their papers.

The Department of Informatics is located at the Strand Campus of King's College London, in the heart of central London, overlooking the river Thames. Our facilities are within easy reach of the British Computer Society and the Institute of Engineering a& Technology (and the IET Library), with access to a formidable collection of scientific journals and other technical material.

The scope of our research is defined by the interests of our research groups.

Planning, Agents and Intelligent Systems
Planning, Agents and Intelligent Systems (PAIS) is an expanding research group in the Department of Informatics.

The Planning, Agents and Intelligent Systems group comprises twelve academic staff, including five professors (Michael Luck, Peter McBurney, Maria Fox, Derek Long and Andrew Jones) and seven lecturers (Elizabeth Black, Andrew Coles, Jeroen Keppens, Simon Miles, Sanjay Modgil, Katarzyna Musial and Adel Taweel), as well as a rapidly growing number of postdoctoral researchers and PhD students.

Our work is concerned with investigating various aspects of automated planning agent technologies and intelligent systems, as well as AI more generally. Agents are intelligent (typically software) entities that work together to achieve goals that they would not be able to achieve by themselves, or not as easily, while planning is concerned with the identification of sequences of actions in order to achieve specified goals from specified initial conditions.

Some of our recent work has focussed on the following areas, or themes:

• Automated planning,
• Market-based control,
• Automated trading agents & computational economics,
• Deontic logic and normative systems,
• Agent-oriented software engineering,
• Virtual organisations,
• Trust and reputation,
• Argumentation,
• eScience,
• Provenance,
• Formal theory of communication,
• Approximate and qualitative reasoning,
• Data mining,
• Social networks,
• Artificial intelligence & law,
• Application to health informatics.

We are involved in several research projects, contribute to the organisation of various conferences and workshops, and are represented on advisory boards and steering committees in these areas.

We also contribute to the teaching on the MSc in Web Intelligence and the MSc in Computing, IT Law & Management, both run in the Department of Informatics.
Details of the members of PAIS, our publications and projects can be found on these web pages.

Requests for further information about PAIS, its research, or research opportunities should be directed to the Head of Group, Professor Peter McBurney: peter.mcburney@kcl.ac.uk 

Algorithms & Bioinformatics
The research scope of the Algorithms & Bioinformatics group ranges from theoretical computational-complexity issues, through design and analysis of algorithms and data structures for generic computational problems, to developing algorithmic solutions and concrete implementations for various applications, particularly focusing on algorithms for Bioinformatics. Within this spectrum, the research interests of the members of the section include

• String algorithms: text processing, data compression and compressed matching, automata theory. 
• Applications of algorithms in Bioinformatics (string algorithms and optimisation algorithms for analysis of the structure of molecular sequences), image processing and music analysis.
• Graph algorithms and combinatorial optimisation: network optimisation, scheduling, stochastic algorithms, communication algorithms for various types of networks.
• Data structures: design, analysis and efficient implementations.
• Algorithm engineering: developing efficient implementattions of advanced algorithms and algorithmic techniques.
• Analysis of random discrete processes: random graph processes, models of web graphs and peer-to-peer networks, analysis of randomised algorithms, performance of web crawling.

The Algorithm & Bioinformatics group organises annual international research meetings, including the London Stringology Day (since 2000) and the London Algorithmic Workshop (since 2006). Members of the group participate in a number of research projects funded by EPSRC, Royal Society and EU.

Requests for further information about AB should be directed to the Head of Group, Professor Costas Iliopoulos: c.iliopoulos@kcl.ac.uk 

Software Modelling & Applied Logic
The Software Modelling & Applied Logic group studies applications of logic and mathematics to computer science, software engineering, information and software security, multi-agent systems and AI. It investigates various models of reasoning and computation, designing formal languages and tools to describe problem domains (including, in particular, software systems and their security constraints), and analyse their trustworthiness, correctness, expressive power and computational behaviour.

The Software Modelling & Applied Logic group concentrates on two related research directions: 

• The formulation and applications of logic and mathematics across the gamut of computer science and software engineering, including quality of service, business computing, service oriented architectures, model driven architecture, security and artificial intelligence.
• Various models of reasoning and computation, applying them to the design of programming languages, specification languages, theorem provers, information and software security, and software modelling tools.

Requests for further information about the group should be directed to the Head of Group, Professor Maribel Fernandez: Maribel.Fernandez@kcl.ac.uk.