Computer Science and Technology
The University of Sunderland's academic strategy will continue to focus on both basic and applied research while fostering integration of research with teaching, learning and reach out to business and the community. This focuses research mainly on UK and European research initiatives, on current and projected future needs of our taught programmes, and the interests, and needs of business and our local community. Basic research nevertheless underpins research in most areas, often from a need to address open problems in order to support more applied research. There are immediate opportunities for continuing our applied local focus, supported by internationally leading research. Sunderland City won the bid for the UK Digital Challenge, offering opportunities to take forward initial research (funded by CODEWORKS ATL) on IT usage and the ageing population, as well as our broadly based research on inclusive design.
We have several immediate opportunities. Regional initiatives, plus invitations to collaborate from our extensive international networks, will continue to add further opportunities. DSS currently leads a UK consortium in negotiations with the Minister of Economy in Ukraine to set up a think tank to deal with transition problems of former soviet countries. A regional SoftwareCity initiative will be based in Sunderland (a recent feasibility study recommended creation of a new software village on the same campus as the School of Computing and Technology). A new building will support research collaboration with (relocated) local industry. We expect to be actively involved in the 2008-10 R+D programme of CODEWORKS, the regional centre of digital excellence. Regional and national projects within engineering will also continue to provide
Research in Computing is focussed into seven areas:
- Decision Support Systems (DSS)
- e-learning (EL)
- Human Computer Interaction (HCI)
- Information Retrieval (IR)
- Intelligent Systems (IntelliSys)
- Internet Technologies (NetTech)
- Systems Engineering (SysEng).
For further information see the Computing Website.
