The School of Computing and Engineering has over 2000 full and part-time students on its own courses and teaches in other Schools on service teaching contracts. The School has nearly 80 academic staff and in excess of 50 administrative and technical staff across two academic departments:
The School is committed to deliver high quality, relevant, and up-to-date teaching and to the development of effective teaching, learning and assessment strategies. However, Research in the School is also extremely important and has grown significantly over the last few years, through increased external funding, professorial and readership appointments and grouping of staff. There are currently over 85 research students and research assistants/fellows. The School has always been strongly involved in reach-out activities, mainly through KTP programmes (approximately 25 in the last decade) and other income generating activities.
The Department employs around 40 FTE academic staff across the Queensgate and Barnsley campuses and its course portfolio is structured into two subject areas - Computing and Multimedia and Film.
The department has eleven dedicated computer laboratories, a green room and video studio for visual effects production, industry-standard full motion capture facilities, and a fully operational games production studio (Canalside Studios) staffed by students. Canalside Studios secured a Microsoft X-Box Live Arcade publishing contract based upon its success in the International Dream Build Play competition, and this year won the UK finals of the Microsoft Imagine Cup.
Research is coordinated through the Informatics Research Group (IRG) and the main areas of our research are information extraction, knowledge engineering and intelligent interface technology. Our current research groups are as follows:
Within the Department, research areas of text mining, data mining, automated web service composition, machine learning of action knowledge, artificial intelligence (AI) in computer games and language analysis and tagging of phone texts provide opportunities for applied mathematics and computing research. Beyond this the University has an increasing number of research centres which span subject disciplines including high performance computing, engineering, applied sciences research areas, low carbon, materials, precision technologies, energy and transport. Colleagues within the department are becoming increasingly involved in these research areas providing a broad and varied research community.
The Department covers three subject areas: Mechanical and Automotive Engineering, Electronic and Electrical Engineering and Music Technology.
All subject areas were awarded the highest possible quality ratings in the most recent quality reviews by the national Quality Assurance Agency. The MEng/BEng (Hons) programmes in the Mechanical and Automotive and Electronic and Electrical subject areas have been fully accredited by their respective Professional Institutions, the IMechE and the IET, for over 20 years.
In the most recent national Research Assessment Exercise, the Mechanical and Automotive Subject Area was rated 4, and the Electronic and Electrical Subject Area was rated 3.
Research in the Department is organised as follows:
The Advanced Machining Technology Group, The Surface Metrology Group and Engineering Control and Machine Performance Group form the Department's Centre for Precision Technologies and support the associated commercial centre, the Centre for Industrial Collaboration, established with support from Yorkshire Forward in 2005.
