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Former names | Computer Laboratory Mathematical Laboratory |
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Established | 14 May 1937 |
Head of Department | Professor Alastair Beresford |
Academic staff | 35 |
Administrative staff | 25 |
Postgraduates | 155 |
Location | William Gates Building, Cambridge , United Kingdom 52°12′40″N0°05′31″E / 52.211°N 0.092°E |
Website | www |
The Department of Computer Science and Technology, formerly the Computer Laboratory, is the computer science department of the University of Cambridge. As of 2023 [update] it employed 56 faculty members, 45 support staff, 105 research staff, and about 205 research students. [1] The current Head of Department is Professor Alastair Beresford.
The department was founded as the Mathematical Laboratory under the leadership of John Lennard-Jones on 14 May 1937, though it did not get properly established until after World War II. The new laboratory was housed in the North Wing of the former Anatomy School, on the New Museums Site. Upon its foundation, it was intended "to provide a computing service for general use, and to be a centre for the development of computational techniques in the University". The Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science was the world's first postgraduate taught course in computing, starting in 1953.
In October 1946, work began under Maurice Wilkes on EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator), which subsequently became the world's first fully operational and practical stored program computer when it ran its first program on 6 May 1949. It inspired the world's first business computer, LEO. It was replaced by EDSAC 2, the first microcoded and bitsliced computer, in 1958.
In 1961, David Hartley developed Autocode, one of the first high-level programming languages, for EDSAC 2. Also in that year, proposals for Titan, based on the Ferranti Atlas machine, were developed. Titan became fully operational in 1964 and EDSAC 2 was retired the following year. In 1967, a full ('24/7') multi-user time-shared service for up to 64 users was inaugurated on Titan.
In 1970, the Mathematical Laboratory was renamed the Computer Laboratory, with separate departments for Teaching and Research and the Computing Service, providing computing services to the university and its colleges. The two did not fully separate until 2001, when the Computer Laboratory moved out to the new William Gates building in West Cambridge, off Madingley Road, leaving behind an independent Computing Service.
In 2002, the Computer Laboratory launched the Cambridge Computer Lab Ring, a graduate society named after the Cambridge Ring network.
On 30 June 2017, the Cambridge University Reporter announced that the Computer Laboratory would change its name to the Department of Computer Science and Technology from 1 October 2017, to reflect the broadened scope of its purpose and activities. [2]
The department currently offers a 3-year undergraduate course and a 1-year masters course (with a large selection of specialised courses in various research areas). Recent research has focused on virtualisation, security, usability, formal verification, formal semantics of programming languages, computer architecture, natural language processing, mobile computing, wireless networking, biometric identification, robotics, routing, positioning systems and sustainability ("Computing for the future of the planet"). Members have been involved in the creation of many successful UK IT companies such as Acorn, ARM, nCipher and XenSource.
As of 2016 [update] , the lab employed 19 professors. Notable ones include:
Other notable staff include Sue Sentance, Robert Watson, Markus Kuhn.
Former staff include:
The lab has been led by:
Members have made impact in computers, Turing machines, microprogramming, subroutines, computer networks, mobile protocols, security, programming languages, kernels, OS, security, virtualisation, location badge systems, etc. Below is a list.
A number of companies have been founded by staff and graduates. Their names were featured in the new entrance in 2012. [13] Some cited examples of successful companies are ARM, Autonomy, Aveva, CSR and Domino. One common factor they share is that key staff or founder members are "drenched in university training and research". [14] The Cambridge Computer Lab Ring was praised for its "tireless work" by Andy Hopper in 2012, at its tenth anniversary dinner. [15]
The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England. EDSAC was the second electronic digital stored-program computer to go into regular service.
The Cambridge Ring was an experimental local area network architecture developed at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge starting in 1974 and continuing into the 1980s. It was a ring network with a theoretical limit of 255 nodes, around which cycled a fixed number of packets. Free packets would be "loaded" with data by a sending machine, marked as received by the destination machine, and "unloaded" on return to the sender; thus in principle, there could be as many simultaneous senders as packets. The network ran over twin twisted-pair cabling.
Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes was an English computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored program computers, and who invented microprogramming, a method for using stored-program logic to operate the control unit of a central processing unit's circuits. At the time of his death, Wilkes was an Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge.
The University of Cambridge Computing Service provided computing facilities across the University of Cambridge between 1970 and 2014. It was located primarily on the New Museums Site, Free School Lane, in the centre of Cambridge, England but, in September 2013 moved to the Roger Needham Building on the West Cambridge site.
David John Wheeler FRS was a computer scientist and professor of computer science at the University of Cambridge.
The history of programming languages spans from documentation of early mechanical computers to modern tools for software development. Early programming languages were highly specialized, relying on mathematical notation and similarly obscure syntax. Throughout the 20th century, research in compiler theory led to the creation of high-level programming languages, which use a more accessible syntax to communicate instructions.
Sir Andrew Hopper is a British-Polish computer technologist and entrepreneur. He is treasurer and vice-president of the Royal Society, Professor of Computer Technology, former Head of the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology, an Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Autocode is the name of a family of "simplified coding systems", later called programming languages, devised in the 1950s and 1960s for a series of digital computers at the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge and London. Autocode was a generic term; the autocodes for different machines were not necessarily closely related as are, for example, the different versions of the single language Fortran.
The Department of Computer Science is the computer science department of the University of Oxford, England, which is part of the university's Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division. It was founded in 1957 as the Computing Laboratory. By 2014 the staff count was 52 members of academic staff and over 80 research staff. The 2019, 2020 and 2021 Times World University Subject Rankings places Oxford University 1st in the world for Computer Science. Oxford University is also the top university for computer science in the UK and Europe according to Business Insider. The 2020 QS University Subject Rankings places The University of Oxford 5th in the world for Computer Science.
Alexander Shafto "Sandy" Douglas CBE was a British professor of computer science, credited with creating the first graphical computer game, OXO, a version of noughts and crosses, in 1952 on the EDSAC computer at University of Cambridge.
John Makepeace Bennett was an early Australian computer scientist. He was Australia's first professor of computer science and the founding president of the Australian Computer Society. His pioneering career included work on early computers such as EDSAC, Ferranti Mark 1* and SILLIAC, and spreading the word about the use of computers through computing courses and computing associations.
Andrew James Herbert, OBE, FREng is a British computer scientist, formerly Chairman of Microsoft Research, for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.
Professor Stanley J. Gill was a British computer scientist credited, along with Maurice Wilkes and David Wheeler, with the invention of the first computer subroutine.
Michael J. T. Guy is a British computer scientist and mathematician. He is known for early work on computer systems, such as the Phoenix system at the University of Cambridge, and for contributions to number theory, computer algebra, and the theory of polyhedra in higher dimensions. He worked closely with John Horton Conway, and is the son of Conway's collaborator Richard K. Guy.
Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was a self-taught programmer and a pioneering British computer scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a technology that underlies most modern search engines. She was an advocate for women in the field of computer science. She even came up with a slogan: “Computing is too important to be left to men.” In 2019, The New York Times published her belated obituary in its series Overlooked, calling her "a pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field." From 2008, to recognize her achievements in the fields of information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), the Karen Spärck Jones Award is awarded to a new recipient with outstanding research in one or both of her fields.
Roger Michael Needham was a British computer scientist.
Ralph Anthony Brooker, was a British computer scientist known for developing the Mark 1 Autocode.
David William Barron FBCS was a British academic in Physics and Computer Science who was described in the Times Higher Education magazine as one of the "founding fathers" of computer science.
Beatrice Helen Worsley was the first female Canadian computer scientist. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge with Maurice Wilkes as adviser, the first Ph.D. granted in what would today be known as computer science. She wrote the first program to run on EDSAC, co-wrote the first compiler for Toronto's Ferranti Mark 1, wrote numerous papers in computer science, and taught computers and engineering at Queen's University and the University of Toronto for over 20 years before her death at the age of 50.
David Fielding Hartley FBCS is a computer scientist and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He was Director of the University of Cambridge Computing Service from 1970–1994, Chief Executive of United Kingdom Joint Academic Network (JANET) 1994–1997, and Executive Director of Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) 1997–2002. He is now much involved with the National Museum of Computing.