Introduction

The department of computer science at the University of Bristol is an international centre of excellence in the foundations and applications of computing. Staff in the department carry out internationally leading research in Intelligent Systems, Digital Media, Foundations, Personal Systems, and Architecture and Design. Computer science -- and its application across all sciences, computational science -- is currently revolutionising a wide range of human activities, but is also itself undergoing revolutionary change. The department's mission is to anticipate and drive these developments in the aforementioned areas.

Research within the department of computer science is organized around five broad research themes, which are themselves divided into research groups of specific expertise. Due to the many cross-linkages between the interests of the members of staff, it is common for one staff member to be a member of multiple groups, so that research groups and themes are non-disjoint. We feel that this allows our research to be more dynamic and less liable to a silo-mentality, and thus enables us to respond to a changing research landscape with greater agility.

Currently the five broad research themes are as follows:

• Intelligent Systems including traditional AI, machine learning, and biologically inspired computing.
• Computer vision and image procesing, including medical imaging, vision-based animation, SLAM, and signal processing.
• Cryptography.
• Personal Systems including robotics, wearable computing, computer graphics and public computing.
• HARE: Systems Architecture and Design including computer architecture, design, verification, algorithms and languages.

In addition to these five research themes, the department is involved with four cross-departmental research centres:

• The Centre for Law and Information Technology was set up with funds from various companies in both the technology and legal spheres. The centre?s aim is to bring together researchers in both communities to tackle relevant issues from both perspectives. It has initially focused on issues related to privacy, DRM and e-commerce. It has strong links with our researchers in cryptography.
• The Centre in Quantum Computation and Information Processing brings together the university's efforts in the new field of quantum information. The work in this area is organized on a non-departmental basis, supported by an EPSRC IRC, and brings together people from various disciplines. Bristol is world-renowned for its work in this area.
• The Advanced Computing Research Centre brings together all researchers within the university who are interested in topics related to computational science.
• The Bristol Robotics Laboratory is a new collaborative research partnership funded by the University of Bristol, the University of the West of England and HEFCE. It brings together researchers in computer science, anatomy, electronics, neuroscience, psychology and statistics.

The department is also involved in the university-wide Research Themes. These are a UoB strategy to help focus strategic investments into areas in which Bristol is, or can be, world-leading. In particular, we are heavily involved in driving the agendas behind the following themes:

• Exabyte Informatics aims to bring together all the researchers in the university looking at the handling, storing and processing of large amounts of data.
• Neuroscience aims to bring together all the researchers looking into the form and function of the brain.
• Nanoscience and Quantum Information aims to unite the university's work in small scale phenomena, as exemplified by the processing of quantum information.
• Robotics and Autonomous Systems is a focus for work in systems which act under their own control, as exemplified by our robotics work.
• Information Processing in Biological Systems brings together the university's work in genomics, biologically-inspired computing and other areas in which biologists can inspire and be inspired by the processing of information.

The department provides computing, file storage and internet support for all academic and research staff, visitors and research students on an on-demand basis. This includes filestores with multiple copy back-up, multi-terabyte filestores (raided and mirrored), HPC clusters and terabyte real-memory machines. Management of the technical infrastructure is carried out by a small team of highly experienced staff. New investments include high-dynamic-range displays, interactive walls, haptic devices, networking with 10Gbit backbone and 1Gbit to desktop and wireless throughout the department.

Together with the Electronic Engineering Department, it carries out a number of projects through 3CR, a University Innovation Centre initially funded by the DTI but now self-supporting. 3CR is a non-profit company with many Industrial partners including HP, Granada, QinetiQ, Thales and Toshiba; David May chairs its Board.

We currently collaborate with numerous academic organisations in the UK and around the world, including Carnegie-Mellon, Cornell, KU Leuven, ENS Paris and Princeton. Recent developments include our UK partnership with Bath, Southampton and Surrey and the associated international partnership with San-Diego via Set-Squared, our WUN partnerships with a number of leading international Universities, such as Bergen, Urbana-Champaign, Nanjing, Washington State and Wisconsin at Madison.

Funding for our research comes from a variety of sources including EPSRC, ESRC, AHRC, SSRC, MRC, EU, DTI and Industry. We are committed to inter-disciplinary academic research and applied research with industrial partners. To this end, we have pursued a strategy of employing energetic new staff with interests in areas such as neuroscience, quantum information, robotics, and biologically-inspired computing. In Bristol, we are fortunate in that our nearby industry includes computing (HP), Microelectronics (ST, Infineon, Broadcom, Icera, Picochip) and media (BBC, Granada, 422, Ardmann). The activities of each of our research groups involve visiting industrial staff. At present there are 20 of these drawn from various companies drawn from the list above and others.