Research
The School of Informatics was awarded a 5*A in the UK HEFCE's 2001 RAE, the only computer science department in the country to achieve this highest possible rating. In the 2008 RAE, the School's "Quality Profile" was 35/50/15/0/0, which means that of the over 100 FTE staff research outputs evaluated, 35% were found "world-leading (4*)" and 50% "internationally excellent (3*)". These figures can be interpreted in a number of ways, but place the School first by volume and tied for second (following Cambridge with 45/45/10/0/0) by percentage of research rated 3* or 4*. The School is generally considered world-leading, standing with the foremost U.S. institutes, particularly in areas such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine translation, and theoretical computer science.
The School has seven research Institutes:
- Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation (IANC)
- Theoretical and empirical study of brain processes and artificial learning systems, drawing on neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, computational science, mathematics and statistics.
- Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications
- Basic and applied research and development in knowledge representation and reasoning.
- Through its Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) it works with others to deploy the technologies associated with this research.
- Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation (ILCC)
- Research on all aspects of natural language processing, drawing on machine learning, statistical modeling, and computational, psychological, and linguistic theories of communication among humans and between humans and machines using text, speech and other modalities.
- Institute for Computing Systems Architecture (ICSA)
- Architecture and engineering of future computing systems: performance and scalability; innovative algorithms, architectures, compilers, languages and protocols.
- Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour (IPAB)
- Linking computational action, perception, representation, transformation and generation processes to real or virtual worlds: statistical machine learning, computer vision, mobile and humanoid robotics, motor control, graphics and visualization.
- Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science (LFCS)
- Developing and applying foundational understanding of computation and communication: formal models, mathematical theories, and software tools.
- Informatics Life Sciences Institute (ILSI)
- Work at the informatics/life sciences interface and will draw together and build on existing work including well-established activities in neuroinformatics, modelling,sensori-motor control and bio-mimetic robotics, together with computational systems biology, synthetic biology and bio-informatics.
Read more about this topic: University Of Edinburgh School Of Informatics
Famous quotes containing the word research:
“Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“Men talk, but rarely about anything personal. Recent research on friendship ... has shown that male relationships are based on shared activities: men tend to do things together rather than simply be together.... Female friendships, particularly close friendships, are usually based on self-disclosure, or on talking about intimate aspects of their lives.”
—Bettina Arndt (20th century)
“To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities ... than a rigorously enforced divorce from war- oriented research and all connected enterprises.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)