School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

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University of Edinburgh School of Informatics
Informatics Forum University of Edinburgh.JPG
The Informatics Forum, home to the School of Informatics since 2008
Established1998 (1998)
Parent institution
University of Edinburgh
Head of School Helen Hastie [1]
Academic staff
370 [2]
Administrative staff
96 [2]
Students1717 [3]
Undergraduates 1020 [3]
Postgraduates 697 [3]
Location,
Scotland
,
UK
Website www.ed.ac.uk/informatics
University of Edinburgh School of Informatics logo.jpg

The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in informatics. It was created in 1998 from the former department of artificial intelligence, the Centre for Cognitive Science and the department of computer science, along with the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and the Human Communication Research Centre.[ citation needed ]

Contents

Research in the School of Informatics draws on multiple disciplines. The school is particularly known for research in the areas of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, systems biology, mathematical logic and theoretical computer science; but also contributes to many other areas of informatics.

The School of Informatics is ranked 20th in the world by the QS World University Rankings 2023. As of 2022, the school is ranked 1st in the UK according to CSRankings, [4] 1st in the UK in the latest 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF) by research power, [5] and 1st in the world for natural language processing (NLP). [6]

Research

Professor Malcolm Atkinson MalcolmPhilipAtkinson.jpg
Professor Malcolm Atkinson
Professor Philip Wadler Wadler2.JPG
Professor Philip Wadler
Professor Austin Tate Austin-Tate-2009-2400x2400.jpg
Professor Austin Tate
Professor Gordon Plotkin Gordon Plotkin.jpg
Professor Gordon Plotkin
Professor Wenfei Fan Wenfei Fan Royal Society.jpg
Professor Wenfei Fan
Professor Christopher Bishop Chris Bishop June 2015 Image 3 - SMALLER.jpg
Professor Christopher Bishop
Professor Alan Bundy Alan.Bundy.Image.jpg
Professor Alan Bundy
Professor Sethu Vijayakumar Sethu Vijayakumar.jpg
Professor Sethu Vijayakumar
Professor Peter Dayan was awarded the Rumelhart Prize in 2012 and The Brain Prize in 2017. He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1991. Peter Dayan Royal Society.jpg
Professor Peter Dayan was awarded the Rumelhart Prize in 2012 and The Brain Prize in 2017. He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1991.

The School of Informatics was awarded a 5*A [8] in the UK HEFCE's 2001 RAE, the only computer science department in the country to achieve this highest possible rating. [8] In the 2008 RAE, the School's "Quality Profile" was 35/50/15/0/0, which means that of the over 100 Full-time equivalent (FTE) staff research outputs evaluated, 35% were found "world-leading (4*)" and 50% "internationally excellent (3*)". [9] 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*. [10] 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 a number of research Institutes:

Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation: ANC

ANC [11] investigates theoretical and empirical study of brain processes and artificial learning systems, drawing on neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, computational science, mathematics and statistics.

Artificial Intelligence and its Applications Institute: AIAI

Previously known as CISA (Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications), [12] the Artificial Intelligence and its Applications Institute (AIAI) [13] works on the foundations of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, and their application to real-world problems.

Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation: ILCC

ILCC performs 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. [14]

Institute for Computing Systems Architecture: ICSA

ICSA [15] performs research on architecture and engineering of future computing systems: performance and scalability; innovative algorithms, architectures, compilers, languages and protocols.

Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour: IPAB

IPAB [16] links 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

The LFCS [17] Develops and applies foundational understanding of computation and communication: formal models, mathematical theories, and software tools.

Senior academic staff and alumni

Current

Senior academic staff [18] include:

Former

Notable alumni

Alumni of the school of informatics include:

Accommodation

The 2002 Cowgate fire destroyed a number of buildings, [21] including 80 South Bridge, which housed around a quarter of the school and its renowned AI library. [22] By January 2003, space was made available in the University's Appleton Tower as a replacement. [23]

Until June 2008, the School was dispersed over five sites: three in the George Square Campus: Appleton Tower, Buccleuch Place, Forrest Hill; and two at King's Buildings: James Clerk Maxwell Building, and the Darwin Building.

In June and July 2008, the School's research moved into its new home, the Informatics Forum. The building, designed by Bennetts Associates, Reaich and Hall and Buro Happold, now[ when? ] houses some 500 researchers, including staff and graduate students. Construction began in October 2005, and the Forum's completion in July 2008 finally brought the School's researchers together, under one roof, some ten years after its inception.

In August 2018, the School gained another research space in the form of the Bayes Centre, a purpose-built data science and Artificial Intelligence hub shared with multiple other data science and informatics groups, [24] as well as the University's Maxwell Graduate Institute, encompassing the PhD research output of the mathematics departments at both Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jon Oberlander</span>

Jon Reid Oberlander FRSE was a British philosopher and cognitive scientist who was Professor of Epistemics at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He received a BA in Philosophy from Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1983 and a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Edinburgh in 1987.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gordon Plotkin</span> Computer Scientist

Gordon David Plotkin, is a theoretical computer scientist in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Plotkin is probably best known for his introduction of structural operational semantics (SOS) and his work on denotational semantics. In particular, his notes on A Structural Approach to Operational Semantics were very influential. He has contributed to many other areas of computer science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Wadler</span> American computer scientist

Philip Lee Wadler is a UK-based American computer scientist known for his contributions to programming language design and type theory. He is the chair of theoretical computer science at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He has contributed to the theory behind functional programming and the use of monads; and the designs of the purely functional language Haskell and the XQuery declarative query language. In 1984, he created the Orwell language. Wadler was involved in adding generic types to Java 5.0. He is also author of "Theorems for free!", a paper that gave rise to much research on functional language optimization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Dayan</span> Researcher in computational neuroscience

Peter Dayan is a British neuroscientist and computer scientist who is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, along with Ivan De Araujo. He is co-author of Theoretical Neuroscience, an influential textbook on computational neuroscience. He is known for applying Bayesian methods from machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand neural function and is particularly recognized for relating neurotransmitter levels to prediction errors and Bayesian uncertainties. He has pioneered the field of reinforcement learning (RL) where he helped develop the Q-learning algorithm, and made contributions to unsupervised learning, including the wake-sleep algorithm for neural networks and the Helmholtz machine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Bundy</span> British artificial intelligence researcher (born 1947)

Alan Richard Bundy is a professor at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, known for his contributions to automated reasoning, especially to proof planning, the use of meta-level reasoning to guide proof search.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zoubin Ghahramani</span> British-Iranian machine learning researcher

Zoubin Ghahramani FRS is a British-Iranian researcher and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He holds joint appointments at University College London and the Alan Turing Institute. and has been a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge since 2009. He was Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science from 2003–2012. He was also the Chief Scientist of Uber from 2016 until 2020. He joined Google Brain in 2020 as senior research director. He is also Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Austin Tate</span>

Austin Tate is Emeritus Professor of Knowledge-based systems in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. From 1985 to 2019 he was Director of AIAI in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

Mark Jerome Steedman, is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist.

Johanna Doris Moore FRSE is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist. Her research publications include contributions to natural language generation, spoken dialogue systems, computational models of discourse, intelligent tutoring and training systems, human-computer interaction, user modeling, and knowledge representation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Bishop</span> British computer scientist (born 1959)

Christopher Michael Bishop is a British computer scientist. He is a Microsoft Technical Fellow and Director of Microsoft Research AI4Science. He is also Honorary Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. Chris was a founding member of the UK AI Council, and in 2019 he was appointed to the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Blake (scientist)</span> British scientist

Andrew Blake FREng, FRS, is a British scientist, former laboratory director of Microsoft Research Cambridge and Microsoft Distinguished Scientist, former director of the Alan Turing Institute, Chair of the Samsung AI Centre in Cambridge, honorary professor at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and a leading researcher in computer vision.

Ursula Hilda Mary Martin is a British computer scientist, with research interests in theoretical computer science and formal methods. She is also known for her activities aimed at encouraging women in the fields of computing and mathematics. Since 2019, she has served as a professor at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nigel Shadbolt</span> Principal of Jesus College, Oxford

Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Tim Berners-Lee. He is also a visiting professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Shadbolt is an interdisciplinary researcher, policy expert and commentator. His research focuses on understanding how intelligent behaviour is embodied and emerges in humans, machines and, most recently, on the Web, and has made contributions to the fields of Psychology, Cognitive science, Computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Computer science and the emerging field of Web science.

Informatics is the study of computational systems. According to the ACM Europe Council and Informatics Europe, informatics is synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession, in which the central notion is transformation of information. In some cases, the term "informatics" may also be used with different meanings, e.g. in the context of social computing, or in context of library science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wenfei Fan</span> Chinese-British computer scientist

Wenfei Fan is a Chinese-British computer scientist and professor of web data management at the University of Edinburgh. His research investigates database theory and database systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sethu Vijayakumar</span>

Sethu Vijayakumar FRSE is Professor of Robotics at the University of Edinburgh and a judge on the BBC2 show Robot Wars. He is the Programme co-Director for Artificial Intelligence at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, with the responsibility for defining and driving the institute's Robotics and Autonomous Systems agenda. He co-founded the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics in 2015 and was instrumental in bringing the first NASA Valkyrie humanoid robot out of the United States of America, and to Europe, where is it a focus of research at the School of Informatics. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2013.

The Roger Needham award is a prize given scientists who are recognised for important contributions made to computer science research The British Computer Society established an annual Roger Needham Award in honour of Roger Needham in 2004. It is a £5000 prize is presented to an individual for making "a distinguished research contribution in computer science by a UK-based researcher within ten years of their PhD." The award is funded by Microsoft Research. The winner of the prize has an opportunity to give a public lecture.

Mirella Lapata FRSE is a computer scientist and Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Working on the general problem of extracting semantic information from large bodies of text, Lapata develops computer algorithms and models in the field of natural language processing (NLP).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Takayuki Ito</span> Japanese computer scientist

Takayuki Ito is a Japanese computer scientist who specialized in the fields of artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. He worked as assistant professor in the computer science department of Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology from 2001 until 2003, served as associate professor in the computer science department of Nagoya Institute of Technology (2006–2014), worked as full professor in the computer science department of Nagoya Institute of Technology (2014–2020). He also served as chair of the department (2016–2018)and also director the NITech Artificial Intelligence Research Center at Nagoya Institute of Technology.

Fiona McNeill is a Reader in Computer Science Education at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. She is co-chair of the British Computer Society's Scottish Computing Education Committee and represents the BCS in the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Learned Societies’ Group.

References

  1. "Contact us". University of Edinburgh School of Informatics. 11 September 2018. Retrieved 11 September 2018.
  2. 1 2 "Staff Headcount & Full Time Equivalent Statistics (FTE) as at Oct 17". Human Resources, The University of Edinburgh. October 2018. Retrieved 9 May 2018.
  3. 1 2 3 "University of Edinburgh Factsheet 2017/2018" (PDF). Governance & Strategic Planning, The University of Edinburgh. 31 January 2018. Retrieved 9 May 2018.
  4. Berger, Emery D. (2020). "CSRankings".
  5. "Research rankings confirm Edinburgh as world leader". The University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 15 May 2022.
  6. Berger, Emery D. (2020). "CSRankings".
  7. Dayan, Peter Samuel (1991). Reinforcing connectionism: learning the statistical way. lib.ed.ac.uk (PhD thesis). hdl:1842/14754. EThOS   uk.bl.ethos.649240. Lock-green.svg
  8. 1 2 "RAE 2001 : Results". rae.ac.uk.
  9. "RAE 2008 : Quality profiles". rae.ac.uk.
  10. "Informatics News: RAE 2008 results: Informatics and Computer Science".
  11. "Welcome — ANC - Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation". www.anc.ed.ac.uk.
  12. "CISA is changing its name | InfWeb". web.inf.ed.ac.uk. Retrieved 30 March 2021.
  13. "AIAI - InfWeb". web.inf.ed.ac.uk.
  14. "ILCC - InfWeb". web.inf.ed.ac.uk.
  15. "ICSA - InfWeb". web.inf.ed.ac.uk.
  16. "IPAB - InfWeb". web.inf.ed.ac.uk.
  17. "Welcome to LFCS — LFCS". wcms.inf.ed.ac.uk.
  18. "People". The University of Edinburgh.
  19. Hinton, Geoffrey Everest (1977). Relaxation and its role in vision. lib.ed.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh. hdl:1842/8121. OCLC   18656113. EThOS   uk.bl.ethos.482889. Lock-green.svg
  20. Anon (2014). "Shadbolt, Prof. Nigel Richard" . Who's Who (online edition via Oxford University Press  ed.). A & C Black. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U245873.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  21. Seenan, Gerard (9 December 2002). "Fire devastates Edinburgh's Old Town". the Guardian. Retrieved 30 March 2021.
  22. agencies, Staff and (9 December 2002). "Edinburgh AI archive lost in fire". the Guardian. Retrieved 30 March 2021.
  23. Fourman, Michael Paul. "Emergency Arrangements". www.inf.ed.ac.uk. Retrieved 30 March 2021.
  24. "Groups within Bayes Centre".

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