Queen Mary, University of London

Our history

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A long and accomplished history
The Computer Science department at Queen Mary was one of the first to be established in the UK in 1965. It has a long history of innovation and a world-wide reputation for being at the cutting edge of Computer Science.

  • Peter Landin, the inventor of input output 'streams', and pioneer in the theory of programming languages works in our department
  • The Transputer, a super power computer on a chip, was conceived by Ian Barron while he was a Senior Research Fellow in the department.
  • We developed the first hardware-based windowed desktop machine in Europe, around the same time as Xerox PARC in the USA.
  • Our Department was the first in UK, and the second in Europe, to have the now popular Unix operating system.
  • We were the first teaching laboratory to provide Apple / Unix workstations for students
  • We were one of the first UK universities to offer an undergraduate degree programme in computer science. We started in 1968, five years before any other college in the University of London.
  • Sylvia Wilbur, working with UCL, helped set up the first Internet node in the UK.
  • We showed for the first time, using a computer game, that humans are susceptible to motion camouflage, a stealth strategy used by hoverflies to sneak up on potential mates.

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A leading presence
Our strength and our increasingly leading position in the UK are shown in a number of ways.

  • We have achieved the second biggest EPSRC funding in London amongst all 42 London HE institutions, in the combined fields of Computer Science and Information Technology
  • We achieved the third largest EPSRC funding in the UK for "theory and AI"
  • London Knowledge Management Network and London theory group are among the strongest UK groupings.

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An international presence
Queen Mary Computer Science is networked internationally and its research groups are part of the leading international consortia in their respective fields, with strong research collaborations with institutions throughout the EU, USA and Asia-Pacific: for example the Information Retrieval group lead an international consortium. This international orientation is reflected in our colleagues, who come from over 12 different countries.

Queen Mary is ranked in the top 100 in the most recent (2006) world university rankings according to The Times Higher. Queen Mary is ranked at 99 - up from 112 in 2005. The College is also in Europe's top 50 universities, ranked at 41. The rankings are based on the results of a survey of 3,703 academics worldwide, focusing on research, teaching and international outlook. The third edition of the rankings lists the world's top 200 universities according to a range of data including: research, measuring the intellectual power a university has relative to its size, based on citations of academic papers; peer review, which involves academics around the world naming the top institutions in their area; and staff-to-student ratio.

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Research focus
While building on our long history and distinguished reputation, we have pursued a systematic policy of recruitment of productive young researchers, identifying the next generation of Computer Science research leaders. As a result 50 per cent of staff are under 40 years old. This is a key part of our strategy to achieve the highest rating at the next Research Assessment Exercise.

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The expertise of the Department has three strong themes.

  • It is very strong in the core logic, maths, statistics and cognitive science needed to understand computer systems, their interaction with the world and the information they process
  • But is also very practical and applications oriented, characterised by the development of commercial technologies and spin-out companies in computational logic, computer vision, decision support and information retrieval . All these applications remain closely linked to the Department's research.
  • The Department is very interdisciplinary in its approach and encourages interdisciplinary research between groups.

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Widening the appeal of Computer Science
In addition to our core academic strengths, we are well known for our commitment to groundbreaking projects aimed at widening the appreciation and understanding of Computer Science amongst the public and specific under-represented groups.

  • Our freely available cs4fn: Computer Science for Fun webzine and magazine is our alternative take on computer science topics. We think its fun and hope you will too
  • The Department has helped develop the popular SodaRace project, an online Olympic games which pits human creativity against machine learning
  • The BrainAcademy project, aimed at introducing the excitement of Computer Science to school students who may not have thought of it being relevant to them
  • Professor Ursula Martin leads local, national and international initiatives for women in computing, especially research.

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