TEACHING

The trend in increasing student numbers within the Department continued with a record intake of 170 first year undergraduates. Most pleasing was the substantial increase in applications, rising 90% on the previous year. Internet Computing is now in its second year and, in conjunction, with efforts to widen access, is doing much to strengthen the quality of teaching within the department.

The number of students on the MSc in Computer Science equalled last year’s intake of 49, which in itself was a record. The MSc has now been running for over 25 years and continues to be a successful venture, both for the full time course delivered in Aberystwyth and the more recent development of delivering a part-time version in Singapore.

The Department is unique in organising an Outward Bound weekend at Aberdyfi for all first year students. The weekend, now in its ninth year, is designed to foster a sense of teamwork amongst the students. Its success is evident by the enthusiasm shown by the students during the weekend.

The Computer Science team who participated in the Annual Careers Fair yet again gave a good account of themselves winning the Best Presentation Award, with an imaginative movie adapting the theme of “The Matrix” to student life in Aberystwyth. The consistently high achievement of Computer Science in this competition reflects the emphasis placed on career related activities in our courses.

The Department has been further refining the details of its module offerings to the new Internet Computing and Internet Engineering degree schemes. Some new modules have been taught for the first time this year and other modules are being prepared for introduction in 2002-2003.

The web based multiple-choice objective testing system developed last year for certain modules has continued to besuccessful with the students benefiting from the monthly feedback that the system provides. The concept of multiple-choice testing has been extended, in both online and written form, to several first year main examinations. Indeed, the University as a whole is showing a lot of interest in this in-house development.

Members of the Department’s academic staff continue to be in demand as external examiners for courses in other institutions. In 2001, they examined at the Universities of Cranfield (Royal Military College of Science), East London, Glamorgan, Hertfordshire, Reading, Staffordshire, the Open University and the British Hellenic College, Athens.

RESEARCH

2001 saw a number of exciting new initiatives for 2002 coming on stream. A number of major research grants were awarded, notably a grant for £1.2m to the Computational Biology group (joint with IBS) from the Food Standards Agency. Run in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm, Germany, the aim is to utilise “Metabolome Technology for the Profiling of GM and Conventionally Bred Plant Materials”.

A grant of £500,000 was awarded during 2001 to enable the next phase of the Monet project (Monet 2) to go ahead. The Monet network of excellence in Model-Based Systems and Qualitative Reasoning is one of 20 European networks funded by the EU and consists of 85 research and industrial sites across Europe, coordinated and managed from UWA.

Mr Dave Price has continued his activities providing telematic assistance and advice to regional and national bodies such as Powys County Council, Gwynedd County Council, UW Lampeter and UKERNA. A further group of contracts based around the transmission of audio and video over Internet connections have been won. These contracts have focussed on issues surrounding network quality, in particular, the provision of adequate quality of service to support Internet based videoconferencing using ITU standard H.323.

2001 saw the creation of the Centre for Advanced Software and Intelligence Systems, which is a joint venture between the Computer Science Departments at University of Wales, Aberystwyth and Cardiff University. It specialises in software innovation, development and exploitation and can service industry and business in their widest sense

This is one of 20 Centres of Excellence for Technology and Industrial Collaboration, which are sponsored by the National Assembly for Wales, the Welsh Development Agency and the Higher Education Funding Council - ELWa. There are 20 Centres, selected in recognition of their world-class facilities and exceptional track record of successful industrial collaboration.

The Centre’s mission is the provision and development of a world-class scientific, technical and research resource for the long term benefit of business and industry. We develop innovative software for the solution of problems in engineering, science, business and commerce

The Space Robotics aspect of the Robotics Group’s research has continued to attract a considerable amount of interest from the media, government and other research groups. The group is heavily involved in the Beagle-2 Mars Lander consortium. The Mars Lander is to be launched in 2003 and the group is working on lander robot arm calibration, and software modelling and simulation for mission support. The group is also examining the possibility of using aerobots (ALTAIR-2) and legged robots for future space exploration.

The Robotics Group has now moved into a larger laboratory which is due to become fully operational in 2002.

PUBLICATIONS

Alsberg, B K, Marchand-Geneste, N & King, R D, A new 3D molecular structure representation based on quantum topology with application to structure-property relationships, Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems, 54, (2001), pp 75-91.

Bianchi, G, Giansante, L, Shaw, A & Kell, D B Chemometric criteria for the characterisation of Italian protected denomination of origin (DOP) olive oils from their metabolic profiles. Eur. J. Lipid Sci. Technol. 103, 2001, pp 141-150.

Barnes, D P, Aerobot airdata measurement for planetary exploration. In: Proc. Towards Intelligent Mobile Robots, TIMR-01, Technical Report Series, Department of Computer Science, Manchester University, (2001), pp 49-56.

Détienne, Françoise. Software Design - Cognitive Aspects. Translated and edited by Bott, M F. Springer Verlag, London, (2001), pp xiii+139.

Clare, A J & King, R D, Knowledge discovery in multi-label phenotype data. In: The 5th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD'01) (eds L De Raedt, A Siebes) Lecture Notes in A.I. 2168 Sringer-Verlag, Heidelberg, (2001), pp 42-53.

Coghill, G M, On the construction of smart adaptive systems: model based reasoning as examplar. First international workshop on hybrid systems, Tenerife, 13-14 December 2001, pp 342-347.

Coghill, G M & Shen Q, Towards the specification of models for diagnosis of dynamic systems, Artificial Intelligence Communications, 14 (2), (2001), pp 93-104

Helma, C, King, R D, Kramer, S, & Srinivasan, A, The predictive toxicology challenge 2000-2001, Bioinformatics, 17, (2001), pp 107-108.

Holstein, H, Discussion, on “An analytical expression for the gravity field of a polyhedral body with linearly varying density” (R.O. Hansen). Geophysics, 66, (2001), pp 1327-1328.

Karwath, A & King, R D, An automated ILP server in the field of bioinformatics. In: The Eleventh International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming (ILP'01). (eds C Rouveirol, M Sebag) Lecture Notes in A.I. 2157 Sringer-Verlag, Heidelberg, (2001), pp 91-103.

King, R D, Karwath, A, Clare, A, & Dehaspe, L, The Utility of Different Representations of Protein Sequence for Predicting Functional Class, Bioinformatics, 17, (2001), pp 445-454.

King, R D, Srinivasan, A, & Dehaspe, L Warmr, A Data Mining Tool for Chemical Data, Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design, 15, (2001), pp 173-181.

Labrosse, F & Willis, P, Towards Continuous Image Representations, Proceedings of the International Conference in Central Europe on Computer Graphics. In: Visualization and Computer Vision (WSCG), vol 1, February 5-9 2001, pp 206-213.

Lacey, N & Lee, M H, The Implications of Philosophical Foundations for Knowledge Representation and Learning in Agents. In: Proc. AISB’01 Symposium on Adaptive Agents and Multi-agent Systems, York, March 2001, pp 13-24.

Lee, M H, Bell J, & Coghill, G M, Ambiguities and deviations in qualitative circuit analysis, Proceedings of the 15^th International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning: QR'01, San Antonio, Texas, May 17-18, (2001), pp 51-58.

Long, F W, Building Systems from Commercial Components (eds K Wallnau, S Hissam & R Seacord), Addison Wesley, August 2001.

Meng, Q & Lee, M H, Automatic Error Recovery in Behaviour-Based Assistive Robots with Learning from Experience. In Proc. INES 2001, 5th IEEE Int. Conf. on Intelligent Engineering Systems, Helsinki, Finland, September 2001, pp 291-296.

Meng, Q & Lee, M H, Behaviour-Based Assistive Robotics for the Home. In: Proc. SMC2001, IEEE 2001 Int. Conf. on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Tucson, Arizona, Oct 2001, pp 684-689.

Price, D E, Constable G.C, Network QoS and Resource Issues, Report of the VIP Demonstrator Project. http://www.ja.net/development/video/vip/reports/aber.html

Raamsdonk, L M, Teusink, B, Broadhurst, D, Zhang, N, Hayes, A, Walsh, M C, Berden, J A, Brindle, K M, Kell, D B, Rowland, J J, Westerhoff, Hans V, Karel van Dam & Oliver, S G. A functional genomics strategy that uses metabolome data to reveal the phenotype of silent mutations, Nature Biotech, 19 (1), (2001), pp 45-50.

Ratcliffe, M B, Thomas, L A & Woodbury, J,

A Learning Environment for First Year Software Engineers, 14^th Conference of Software Engineering Education & Training, North Carolina, USA, February 2001, pp 268-275.

Ratcliffe, M B, Woodbury, J & Thomas, L A,

A Pedagogically Driven, Directed Learning Environment. 2^nd Annual LTSN-ICS Conference, University of London, August 2001.

Snooke, N A. BCS Expert systems conference.

ES2001 Cambridge. 12 December 2001, 3, pp 100 - 114.

Snooke N A & Shipman R, Generating Automotive Electrical System Models from Component Based Qualitative Simulation, Expert Systems 2001, 11-12 Dec 2001, Cambridge UK, Research and Development in intelligent Systems XVIII, pp.100-114, (Springer).

Taylor, J, Rowland, J J & Kell D B, Spectral analysis via supervised genetic search with application-specific mutations, Proc CEC 2001: IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Seoul, South Korea, May 2001, pp 133-142.

Vaidyanathan, S, Rowland J J, Kell, D B & Goodacre, R, Rapid discrimination of aerobic endospore-forming bacteria via electrospray-ionisation mass spectrometry of whole cell suspensions, Analytical Chemistry, 73, (2001), pp 4134-4144.

Williams, T G, Rowland J J & Lee M H. Teaching from examples in assembly and manipulation of snack-food ingredients by robot. Proc IROS 2001: IEEE Int. Conf on Intelligent Robotics and Systems, Hawaii, USA, (2001), pp 2300-2305.

Williams, T G, Rowland, J J & Lee, M H, Robotic Assembly of Naturally Varying Food Items via Teaching by Example, 9^th International Symposium on Intelligent Robotic Systems, Toulouse, France, (2001), pp 133-142.

Wilson, M S & Neal, M J, Diminishing Returns of Engineering Effort in Telerobotic Systems,

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics - Part A:Systems and Humans, 31, 5, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, (editor Dautenhahn, K) (Special Issue on Socially Intelligent Agents - The Human in the Loop), September 2001, pp 459-465.

Woodbury, J, Ratcliffe, M B & Thomas, L A

Building and Deploying an Extensible CAA System: from theory to practice. 5^th International Computer Assisted Assessment Conference, Loughborough, July 2001, pp 531-547.

Woodward, A M, Kaderbhai, N, Kaderbhai, M, Shaw, A D, Rowland J J & Kell, D B. Histometrics: improvement of the dynamic range of fluorescently stained proteins resolved in electrophoretic gels using hyperscpectral imaging, Proteomics, 1, (2001), pp 1351-1358.

MEMBERSHIP OF ADVISORY BODIES

Barnes, D P. Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College, Control Systems Engineering, Integration and Autonomy, 2000 – 2002. Programme Committee Member for the Int. Advanced Robotics Programme (IARP), IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, First Workshop on Technical Challenge for Dependable Robots in Human Environments, Seoul, Korea, May 21-22, 2001.

Bott, M F. Member of the Programme Committee for the First International Conference on COTS-Based Systems, in Orlando, Florida (ICCBS).

King, R D. Member of the BBSRC Engineering and Biotechnology Committee PKDD 2001.

Lee, M H. Member of International Advisory Board of AID'02 - The Seventh International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Design, to be held 15-18 July 2002 at Cambridge University, UK. Member of the Program Committee of the 16th International Conference on Industrial & Engineering Application of Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems (IEA/AIE-2003) to be held in Loughborough in June 2003.

Price, C J. Member of the 15^th International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning, QR'01. Member of the 12^th International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis. Member of the EPSRC Peer Review.

Price, D E. HEFCW/FEFCW FUNDED Welsh Video Network Procurement Panel member. Welsh Video Network Translation Project Steering Group. Review Group for Academic Computer Service, UW, Lampeter. UKERNA/SuperJANET 4, Quality of Service Think Tank member. UKERNA/SuperJANET 4, H.323 Architecture Group member.

Ratcliffe, M B. Member of the Advisory Board for Karachi Institute of Technology.

Wilson, M S. Member of the Programme committee for TIMR 01. Member of the Programme committee for SAB02.

MEMBERSHIP OF EDITORIAL BOARDS

Bott, M F. Member of the Editorial Board of the BCS/Springer Practitioner Series.

Lee, M H. Member of Editorial Board of Artificial Intelligence in Engineering, Elsevier Science. Member of Editorial Board of Artificial Intelligence Communications, IOS Press

Price, C J. Member of Editorial Board of Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

RESEARCH GRANTS AND CONTRACTS RECEIVED

Researchers: D P Barnes

Sponsors: EPSRC

Research Area: ICASE Award with Dstl Ltd, Legged Surveillance Vehicle Locomotion over Uneven Terrain.

Financial Support: £46,113

Researchers: D P Barnes, H Holstein M Wilson, J J Rowland, M H Lee

Sponsor: HEFCW - JREI

Research Area: Enhancement of Capital Grant for Research Infrastructure Allocation.

Financial Support: £25,000

Researchers: J Draper, D B Kell, R Goodacre, A R Smith, R Darby, C J Price, R D King, J J Rowland, N Hardy

Sponsors: Food Standard Agency

Research Area: Metabolome Technology for the Profiling of GM and Conventionally Bred Plant Materials.

Financial Support: £1,206,603

Researchers: D B Kell, M K Winson, J J Rowland

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: Sequencing Single Neucleic Acid Molecules.

Financial Support: £306,756

Researchers: R D King

Sponsor: British Council

Research Area: Modular Characterisation of Metallothioneins

Financial support: £1,600

Researchers: R D King

Sponsor: BBSRC/EPSRC

Research Area: Prediction of Protein Function in Plant Genomes

Financial Support: £164,992

Researchers: M H Lee, G M Coghill

Sponsors: European Commission

Research Area: MONET II – Network of Excellence

Financial Support: £465,959

Researchers: M H Lee

Sponsors: EPSRC

Research Area: Developmental Learning Algorithms for Embedded Agents

Financial Support: £208,307

Researchers: M H Lee

Sponsors: Welsh Development Agency/HEFCW/NAW

Research Area: CETIC Centre for Excellence

Financial Support: £300,000

Researchers: D E Price

Sponsors: UKERNA/University of Newcastle

Research Area: JANET Video Technologies Advisory Service. Technical Advisor.

Financial Support: £11,254

Researchers: D E Price

Sponsors: Powys County Council

Research Area: Development of a Webcasting services to enable network access to Council Meetings

Financial Support: £4,700

Researchers: D E Price

Sponsors: UW, Lampeter

Research Area: ACS Review

Financial Support: £2,737

Researchers: N A Snooke, C J Price

Sponsors: EPSRC

Research Area: SoftMEA – Automated Safety Analysis of Software in Electronic Systems

Financial Support: £150,352

Researchers: M K Winson, D B Kell, J J Rowland

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: Combinatorial optimization in directed evolution experiments: a systematic approach

Financial Support: £265,904

In addition, the following research work funded by outside institutions continued during 2001.

Researchers: B K Alsberg

Sponsor: EPSRC

Research Area: Solving peak shift problems in infrared spectroscopy with the peak parameter representation.

Financial support: £60,000

Researchers: D B Kell, J J Rowland, B K Alsberg

Sponsor: BBSRC

Research area: Registration and compression of proteome gel images using a novel transform.

Financial support: £185,388

Researchers: G M Coghill

Sponsor: EPSRC

Research Area: Model Switching in Diagnosis

Financial support: £52,738

Researchers: R Goodacre, D B Kell and J J Rowland

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: Characterisation of Intact Microorganisms using Electrospray Ionisation Mass Spectrometry

Financial Support: £205,640

Researchers: D B Kell and J J Rowland

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: Making the most of a Genome Sequence: the Application of Transcriptome and Proteome Analysis to Streptomyces….

Financial Support: £232,980

Researchers: D B Kell and J J Rowland

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: Functional Genomics via the Metabolome

Financial Support: £321,360

Researchers: R D King and B K Alsberg

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: Inductive Logic programming for 3-Dimensional Structure Based Drug Design

Financial Support: £146,664

Researchers: R D King, G M Coghill, D B Kell

Sponsor: BBSRC

Research Area: Bioinformatic System Identification

Financial Support: £160,696

Researchers: R D King, J J Rowland and D B Kell

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: The Robot Scientist: Application to Functional Genomics

Financial Support: £313,380

Researchers: C J Price and N A Snooke

Sponsors: EPSRC/ Ford (USA)

Research Area: Dougal- Whole Vehicle Whole Lifecycle Electrical Design Analysis.

Financial Support: £245,528

Researcher: J J Rowland, M H Lee

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: ‘Teaching by Example’ for Flexible Automation in Food Product Assembly.

Financial Support: £163,904

Researchers J J Rowland, D P Barnes, R Featherstone, H Holstein, M Wilson

Sponsors: HEFCW Research Capital Initiative

Research Area: A Motion Tracking Facility for Robotics and Biomechanics

Financial Support: £100,000

LECTURES AND ADDRESSES TO LEARNED SOCIETIES AND CONFERENCES

Barnes, D P. Aerobots for Planetary Exploration, Institute of Physics Lecture, University of Wales, Bangor, 8 February 2001.

Lee, M H. Qualitative Modelling in Electrical Failure Analysis: From AI Theory to Real-World Applications, Department of Computer Science, University of Essex, 23 November 2001.

Ward, D D & Price, C J, System functional safety through automated electrical design analysis, Paper Number 01PC-250, SAE Congress, Detroit, March 2001.

Price, D E et al. VIP Demonstrator Project. Networkshop 2001, Exeter, 27 March 2001.

Price, D E, QoS Requirements to Support Video and Audio Applications, UKERNA QoS Workshop, London, 26 July 2001.

Price, D E, Overview of (H.320 and H.323) Videoconferencing Technology. JANET Video Services – The Future, London, 6 November 2001.

Price, D E, Quality of Service in Support of H.323 Videoconferencing. JANET Video Services – The Future, London, 6 November 2001.

Price, D E, Quality of Service in Support of H.323 Videoconferencing. JANET VideoTAG, 6 December 2001.

POSTGRADUATE SCOLARSHIPS AND STUDENTSHIPS

An EPSRC Research Studentship was awarded to Richard Gunstone, Julian Henley, and Coby Karp.

A BBSRC Studentship was awarded to Richard Smith.

A UWA Research Studentship was awarded to Eddie Taylor.

HIGHER DEGREES AWARDED

PhD

Armstrong, Edwin. Actuator & Sensor coupling for reconfigurable Robotic Systems.

Starr, Andrew. Numerical Modelling of ice sheets using adaptive grids.

Wiles, Edward. Economic Models of Software Re-use: A comparison and validation.

MPhil

Wartman, Robert. Processing spatial prepositions.

MSc

The Degree of MSc in Computer Science was awarded to 25 candidates, including 8 who studied for the degree in Singapore.

CONFERENCES

Long, F W. Member of the organizing committee and publicity co-chair for ICCBSS 2002 (International Conference