Research

Welcome to our research pages which summarise our interests and give examples of the impact it has had.

We carry out fundamental computing science research which we evaluate and extend through application to industrial and interdisciplinary challenges. Our work constantly evolves to address the new challenges posed by a fast-changing environment: one in which computer systems become ever more complex, critical and interconnected, as well as often being directly related to the public at large.

Research Groups and Themes

Our research groups reflect the areas in which Newcastle has major expertise. These are:

  • Dependability: researching the development and deployment of trustworthy computer-based systems
  • Distributed Systems: conducting fundamental research in protocols, algorithms and middleware, and constructing realistic applications to demonstrate and to evaluate the viability of ideas
  • Modelling and Reasoning: modelling systems and formal reasoning about their properties
  • Scaleable Information Management: enabling people to use information where, when and how they need it; this includes multidisciplinary research, especially into biological systems.

Groups are supplemented by agile and cross-cutting themes. These are formed to address new challenges which do not fall neatly into the remit of one of the current groups. For more information about particular themes, please select the appropriate link from the menu at the left hand side.

Research Centres

We have four research units that further stimulate our research:

See more information on the centres.

Projects

All our research groups are supported by, and in many cases lead, large multi-site national and international projects involving the active engagement of both industry and other research disciplines. We currently have a portfolio of projects worth over £10M, and have had many successful projects in the past.

Impact

Over the last 50 years, our research has had a significant impact on both the wider field of academic research and on the computer industry. For example the Impact Project of the ACM Special Interest Group in Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) noted that:

"Without researchers laying the foundations in Computer Science departments at Brown, CMU, Cambridge, Newcastle, MIT, Vrije, University of Washington and without industrial researchers consolidating basic research results, we would not have the 8.5 billion dollar middleware market in the same form as we have it today"

Read more examples about the impact of our research.