Department of Computer Science

Industrial Research Projects

The Department has a strong record of collaborative research with industry. Recent examples include:

Stoves Project

Collaboration between Dr. Frans Coenen and Stoves Group PLC, on Model Based Methods for supporting field service engineers in a flexible manufacturing context.
(Foresight-Link award commenced in December 1999, completed in January 2003.)

Market-Based Control of Complex Computational Systems

A major EPSRC-funded research project jointly undertaken with the Universities of Birmingham and Southampton, together with British Telecommunications, Hewlett-Packard and BAE Systems. The project aimed to adapt ideas from economics to the design and management of complex distributed computer systems, such as those used in fleets of self-guided aircraft, in the GRID, or in large-scale commercial P2P networks.

PIPS project

An EC-funded research project aimed at prototyping a novel information platform for the consumers of health care. Partners included universities in Italy, UK, Spain and Poland, Atos Origin, Atena, and Neusoft three IT companies,FHSR one of the leading Italian private health care organisations, ITACA, a private research and development organisation, Astrazeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, two leading worldwide pharmaceutical companies, MARSH, a world leading company in insurance services, Medic4All a company specialising in telemedicine services and technology, and three health related organisations, Health on the Net Foundation, University Health Network, and GRENC.

Verification of autonomous space systems

Research undertaken by the Liverpool Verification Laboratory, working with Science Systems. This collaboration led to the Agents in Space Symposium, held in Liverpool during July 2005. This work continued in collaboration with the University of Southampton, for example using their formation flying testing facility and Cranfield University, though their work on autonomous robotics.

Similar ongoing work with the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (NASA) provides work-leading research on the verification of human-robot collaboration, particularly within space exploration. Ongoing collaboration concerns the potential analysis of human-robot teamwork on Mars, being simulated within NASA.

Argumentation Service Platform with Integrated Components (ASPIC)

An EC-funded research project to design and prototype advanced methods for computer argument in distributed computer systems. Partners included universities in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Slovenia and the USA, along with Europe's largest cancer research organization, Cancer Research UK, and two leading Greek IT companies, LogicDIS and Zeus. Potential commercial applications included advanced medical reasoning systems and financial credit evaluation systems.

Semantic Web Technologies Lab

With Hewlett Packard Research Labs, Bristol, we have been investigating the use of ideas from the multi-agent systems community in the semantic web; particularly, the use of ontologies for semantic service description, and the development of practical reasoning architectures for the semantic web.