There are two deadlines for PhD applications (not applicable to studentship or Visiting Research Student applications) with the Computer Science department:

Monday 17th December 2012 (for September 2013 start date)

For applicants wishing to be considered for funding. In order to maximize your chances of securing funding, we encourage you to apply for this deadline as all streams of funding will be available. Please note: If you are applying for this deadline, your application will not be considered before the Department's Admissions Panel, which will take place on Thursday 17th January 2013. Successful applicants will be invited for interview (see below for interview schedule) and unsuccessful candidates will be notified. The final result of your PhD application will be decided by the Admissions Panel on Friday 8^th February. You will receive email notification of this result.

Monday 1st April 2013 (for September 2013 start date)
For applicants wishing to be considered for departmental studentships only (funding body's regulations restrict these awards to UK and EU nationals), with an expected start of September 2013. Please note: If you are applying for this deadline, your application will not be evaluated before the Department's Admissions Panel, which will be held on Monday 29th April. Successful applicants will be invited for interview (see below for interview schedule) and unsuccessful candidates will be informed of the decision. The final result of your PhD application will be decided by the Admissions Panel on Monday 20th May. You will be emailed the final decision.

You are strongly encouraged to apply as early as possible, especially if you wish to be considered for funding.  Late applications have very little chance of getting funding from departmental or central college sources.

Overseas students must also notify us of any external funding or visa deadlines when applying so we can take these into account.

This section gives a very brief summary of the research interests of Computer Science (and associated) staff. Please follow the links to staff home pages for more comprehensive information.

Danny Alexander

Image processing, pattern recognition and computer vision; medical imaging and medical image processing, magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion imaging; image reconstruction, optimisation and inverse problems.

Simon Arridge

Medical imaging; image processing and reconstruction, particularly medical applications and numerical methods for solving ill-posed inverse problems; scale space and shape descriptors; unsupervised pattern recognition; state space estimation methods for dynamical imaging.

David Barber

Large-scale information processing; probabilistic inference and accurate approximate inference techniques; machine learning and information processing in both natural and artificial systems.

Rachel Benedyk

User interfaces; ergonomics; workplace design; architectural and functional use of space; use of technology by the public; reduction of risk through ergonomics.

Nadia Berthouze

Human-Computer Interaction; affective computing; non-verbal communication; affective posture recognition; cross-cultural studies; personalized information systems; information retrieval; multimodal user interfaces.

Sue Black

Software development and software quality; social media, especially Twitter; social media and software engineering; public engagement and understanding of technology and science; women in computing and science; computer science education; Bletchley Park and computing history.

Ann Blandford

Human–Computer Interaction; interaction design; human error; resilience; sensemaking; information interaction; interactive medical devices; interactive systems in healthcare; usability of digital libraries; understanding systems design in the context of work; socio-technical systems design; methods for designing and evaluating interactive systems.

Gabriel Brostow

Computer vision, computer animation, computational photography, motion perception; data-driven animation, human computer interaction (HCI) for authoring of graphics and visual content, application of vision and pattern recognition to other domains (architecture, special effects, health, emergency response).

Duncan Brumby

Human-Computer Interaction: General interests are in understanding the strategies that people adopt for everyday tasks, such as when multitasking or searching for information on the web.

Kevin Bryson

Bioinformatics and systems biology: analysis and modelling of genomes, transcriptomes, biological networks and protein structure. I have a particular interest in two clinically relevant systems: streptococcus pneumoniae and polyglutamine expansion diseases such as Huntington’s Disease.

Licia Capra

Software engineering for mobile computing; middleware for mobile and distributed systems; coordination of mobile services; trust models and management.

Christopher Clack

Financial Computing and Quantitative Finance; Intelligent Systems in Finance; portfolio optimisation; stock selection; market modelling; risk; evolutionary computing; genetic algorithms and genetic programming; adaptive systems; functional programming.

David Clark

Program and model analysis; language based security; applications of information theory to program analysis and software engineering; quantified information flow (QIF); semantics based malware detection; slicing and dependence analysis; software testing.

Byron Cook

program verification, program logics, program analysis, termination proving, programming languages, theorem proving, constraint solving, biological systems

Nicolas Courtois

Computational cryptanalysis of symmetric and asymmetric ciphers. Automated solving of combinatorial, algebraic and logical problems with SAT solvers and Gröbner bases. Applied cryptography and side-channel attacks. Smart cards and bank cards. Security of complex commercial systems such as payment systems. Financial data security. Usability. Legal and regulatory drivers. Economics of information security. Information security versus competitiveness in business ecosystems. Information security ethics.

Anna Cox

How humans learn to interact with computer systems (i.e. from instructions, exploration, etc); what people learn from these interactions (i.e. the content of their mental models); understanding information seeking and interactive search; human error; understanding immersion; computational modelling of HCI.

Ingemar Cox

Multimedia, digital rights management, digital watermarking, content identification, relevance feedback, e-commerce, computer vision, information retrieval.

Yvo Desmedt

Cryptography, computer security and network security. Currently focussing on: anonymity; e-voting; critical infrastructure protection; denial of service and robustness; key distribution; models for security; post-quantum cryptography; secure multiparty computation and secret sharing.

John Dowell

User interfaces, especially collaborative learning systems; multimodal systems; information retrieval systems; decision support systems; a cognitive design perspective on the development processes and models used to create user interfaces.

Wolfgang Emmerich

Software engineering principles, methods, tools and notations for middleware-based distributed and mobile software architectures.

Anthony Finkelstein

Requirements engineering; software processes and workflow; document management; management of semi-structured, heterogeneous and inconsistent information; change management; software development tools and environments.

Nicolas Gold

Computer systems for live music performance; computational musicology and music analysis; search-based approaches to sound synthesis; other topics in digital music; digital humanities; service-oriented software; program comprehension; source-code analysis

Denise Gorse

Novel methods for global minimisation (chaperone-based techniques for finding nativelike states of heteropolymer energy functions, smoothing transformations for avoiding local minima in neural network training); bioinformatics (methods for predicting local protein structure, repeating motifs, interface regions in multi-subunit complexes); hardware-realisable stochastic neural networks (spike-based stochastic computing using the pRAM model, applications in pattern recognition and control).

Lewis Griffin

Machine vision; human vision; colour vision; machine learning; ecological optics; medical image analysis; multi-dimensional density and mode estimation; computational neuroanatomy.

Jens Groth

Cryptography, digital signatures, public-key encryption, anonymity,
internet voting, zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation.

Stephen Hailes

Mobile systems at all levels from ad hoc routing protocols through to higher layer issues; security, especially of mobile systems but also more generally; multimedia, in particular networked animation at present.

Mark Handley

Internet architecture; congestion control for high-speed, and its multimedia applications; internet routing; IP multicast; architectural mechanisms to limit denial-of-service attacks.

Mark Harman

Search based softward engineering (SBSE), Program slicing, Program analysis, Software testing, Software measurement, Software metrics, Genetic algorithms.

Dave Hawkes

Image registration; building statistical and anatomical models from image data; image guided interventions; CT reconstruction and application areas in neurosurgery; ENT surgery; oncology and orthopaedics.

Mark Herbster

Machine learning theory (online algorithms); support vector machines; neural networks; evolutionary algorithms; machine learning applied to bioinformatics.

Derek Hill

MRI image acquisition for cardiac and neuroimaging; image registration and shape analysis; quantification of chronic disease progression (dementia and arthritis), diffusion imaging; biomechanical and electromechanical modelling.

Robin Hirsch

Temporal and modal logics; algebraic logic; relation algebra; temporal databases; planning; complexity; model theory; game theory; genetic algorithms.

Tony Hunter

Knowledge representation and reasoning; argumentation; handling inconsistency in information; applications in decision-support and in technologies for understanding and reasoning with information in natural language.

Kyle Jamieson

Wirelessly networked protocols and systems: bit rate adaptation, medium access control, sensor networks, security. Signal processing for the wireless physical layer: OFDM, MIMO, channel coding, spatial multiplexing. System design for energy efficiency.

David Jones

Protein structure prediction and analysis; simulations of protein folding; hidden Markov Models; transmembrane protein analysis; machine learning applications in bioinformatics; microarray data analysis; de novo protein design methodology and genome analysis, including the application of intelligent software agents.

Simon Julier

Nonlinear estimation algorithms for robust tracking and distributed fusion of disparate information sources; map building and localisation; mobile mixed reality systems; agile and context-aware information displays; wearable computers.

Brad Karp

Routing (particularly geographic routing) for sensor networks, other multi-hop wireless networks and the internet; internet worm defence, including automated worm signature generation; internet-based distributed systems, including those based on Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs); distributed storage for sensor networks.

Jan Kautz

Computer graphics; realistic, real-time rendering; image- and video-based rendering; material and scene acquisition; inverse rendering problems; synergy of computer vision and graphics.

Peter Kirstein

Computer networks; networked multimedia; international data network activities; document services; security; active networks; wireless networks; voice/IP, mobile networks.

Jens Krinke 

Program analysis, program slicing and dependence analysis; clone detection and code provenance; automatic bug detection; taint analysis and information flow control for realistic systems; mining software repositories.

Emmanuel Letier

Requirements engineering; system behaviour modelling and analysis using goals, scenarios, and state-machines; handling non-functional requirements and supporting decision making during requirements engineering and software design.

Zhaoping Li

Computational/experimental vision in humans or biological vision, segmentation and object recognition, Sensory signal encoding and decoding, nonlinear neural dynamics, control theory and systems, signal processing, neural networks.

Paul Marshall

Interaction design, embodied interaction interaction and tangible interfaces, technologies for face-to-face collaboration, design of technologies to fit specific physical contexts, extended cognition and perception

Niloy Mitra

Geometry processing; symmetry detection; shape analysis; 3D geometry acquisition both for indoor and outdoor scenes; computer graphics; analysis of 3D model collections; image understanding; interaction design; 3D modeling systems; fabrication-aware design

Peter O'Hearn

Mathematical and philosophical logic; program logic and semantics; program analysis; verification; operating systems

Massimiliano Pontil

Machine learning theory, pattern recognition and statistics; machine learning problems arising in computational vision, natural language processing and bioinformatics.

Simon Prince

Computer vision; face recognition; image-based rendering; augmented reality; stereoscopic vision; computational modelling of early human vision; non-stationary inverse problems.

Sebastian Riedel

Natural Language Processing; Machine Learning; Joint/Holistic Processing; Information Extraction; Graphical Models; Scaling up Inference; Learning from Weak Supervision; Probabilistic Programming and Statistical Relational Learning; Mining Scientific Literature

Graham Roberts

Object-oriented software development; test-driven programming; agile methods; design patterns; pattern languages; software architecture; Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and programming languages; GUI construction and the use of frameworks; Java programming.

Yvonne Rogers

human-computer interaction, interaction design, ubiquitous computing, behavioural change, interactivity and representations, external cognition, technology-enhanced learning, novel interfaces

M. Angela Sasse

Human-centred technology design; human-centred design of novel communications and multimedia technologies (fourth generation mobile applications and services, human-centred Quality of Service (QoS), measuring perception and impact of audio and video quality, eyetracking and physiological measurements); usability and effectiveness of security systems (authentication systems, biometrics, user education and training, security in large distributed environments).

John Shawe-Taylor

Machine learning theory, pattern analysis and statistics, kernel methods, support vector machines, computer vision, natural language processing, neuroscience and bioinformatics.

Mel Slater

Computer graphics and virtual reality: the computer graphics research is concerned mostly with real-time methods for global illumination; the virtual reality research focuses understanding and improving people’s experience in virtual reality through focus on their sense of presence. An important application area is to use virtual reality in the context of psychological therapy.

Srini Srinivasan

Haptics, robotics, virtual environments, teleoperation.

Anthony Steed

Virtual reality and 3D user interfaces; collaborative virtual environments and relationship to ubiquitous systems; real-time 3D graphics for large models; mixed-reality and augmented-reality systems.

Phil Treleaven

Artificial intelligence; 3D Body Scanning; financial and economic forecasting; entrepreneurship.

Jun Wang

Information retrieval and web search; collaborative filtering and recommender systems and data mining; web economy and online advertising; social 'the wisdom of crowds' approaches for content understanding, organisation, and retrieval; peer-to-peer information retrieval and filtering; multimedia content analysis, indexing and retrieval.

Tim Weyrich

Appearance acquisition and 3D reconstruction; realistic reflectance models for computer graphics; point-based graphics; interactive applications in art and cultural heritage preservation.

Emine Yilmaz 

Information retrieval; web science; web search; data mining; applications of machine learning.

Shi Zhou

Internet topology, characterisation and modelling of complex telecommunications networks, network security, detection of network anomalies.