Computer Science

TEACHING

The increase in student numbers within the Department continued with a record intake of 190 first year undergraduates. Internet Computing is now in its third year and this has seen the Department introducing several new modules to support the Internet Computing and Internet Engineering degree schemes.

Other exciting initiatives included the continued development of the MAP (Monitoring, Assessment and Provision) system with the aim of providing a virtual learning environment for students. It supports online assessment, tests and course feedback and is web based. It is already being used extensively by first year Computer Science students and is being extended to Part 2 students. Thanks to support from Information Services and Staff Development, it is also available for use by other Departments. To reflect the aims of MAP, the majority of first year exams are multiple-choice in both written and online form. The aim is that these exams will all be taken online.

The Department’s Outward Bound weekend in Aberdyfi celebrated its 10^th anniversary this year. The Department is unique in organising such weekends and they are designed to foster a sense of teamwork amongst the students. The weekend has achieved national recognition with an article appearing in the THES in Spring 2003.

The Computer Science team continued to give a good account of themselves in the Annual Careers Fair ‘Student Skills Competition’. The consistently high achievement of Computer Science in the competition reflects the emphasis placed upon career related activities in our courses.

Members of the Department’s academic staff continue to be in demand as external examiners for courses in other institutions. In 2002, they examined at the Universities of Warwick, Staffordshire, Hertfordshire, Cranfield (Royal Military College of Science), the Open University, the University of Malaysia and the British Hellenic College, Athens.

RESEARCH

2002 has seen the Department consolidate its research position following the initiatives that were introduced in 2001. Following the award of a £1.2m research grant in 2001 by the Food Standards Agency to the Computational Biology Group, the Department in June ran a workshop on “Databases and Data Handling” for the Food Standards Agency as part of this research programme.

Since its creation in 2001, the Centre for Advanced Software and Intelligence Systems (CASIS) has gone from strength to strength and has succeeded in securing an additional year’s funding. CASIS is a WDA Centre of Excellence and is a joint venture between the Computer Science Departments at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and Cardiff University. The Centre is funded by ELWa, WDA and the NAFW, and is a DTi recognised centre of software engineering excellence. It specialises in software innovation, development and exploitation and can serve industry and business in their widest sense. It is focussed on providing new technologies, creating added-value solutions and enhancing commercial growth in Wales, together with providing the expertise of welsh academics both nationally and internationally. The Centre has received positive feedback from many clients with whom it has dealt with during 2002.

The Department has continued its activities providing telematics assistance and advice to regional and national bodies such as Powys County Council and UKERNA. A further group of contracts based around the transmission of audio and video over Internet connections have been completed. This year has also seen us resuming work in the area of multicast Internet transmission, an area that has evolved greatly in recent years. We have continued work in the area of Internet based videoconferencing using ITU standard H.323.

In the Model-Based Reasoning Group, the second phase of the MONET project (MONET2) is well under way. MONET is a European Network of Excellence in Model Based Systems and Qualitative Reasoning and 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. The remit of MONET2 has been more sharply defined in order to achieve the greatest results. The focus is concentrated on four fields: Automotive, Bio-Medical, Education and Training, and Fault Detection and Diagnosis.

The Intelligent Robotics Group has completed its move into the new Intelligent Systems Laboratory and this is now fully operational. It houses all of the Department’s robots and VICON camera equipment.

The Space Robotics aspect of the Intelligent Robotics Group’s research has continued to attract a considerable amount of interest from the media, government and other research groups. The group is a key member of the Beagle-2 Mars Lander consortium. The Beagle-2 programme is a British led quest to land on Mars as part of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Mission. The Mars Lander is due to be launched in June 2003 and the group has made considerable progress throughout 2002 and has completed the lander robot arm calibration, software modelling and simulation for mission support. The group is also examining the possibility of using aerobot (ALTAIR-2) and legged robots for future space exploration.

PUBLICATIONS

Barnes, D P, The Space & Planetary Robotics Network, Astronomy & Geophysics, V43, 5, (2002), pp 5.22-5.23.

Barnes, D P, F 1 Beagle2 Simulation, Kinematics Calibration and Environment DEM Generation. Seventh ESA Workshop on Advanced Space Technologies for Robotics and Automation (ASTRA), ESTEC, November 2002.

Barnes, D P, F 1 Landmark Recognition for Localisation and Navigation of Planetary Aerobots. Seventh ESA Workshop on Advanced Space Technologies for Robotics and Automation (ASTRA), ESTEC, November 2002.

Barnes, D P, Determination of Planetary Meteorology from Aerobot Flight Sensors. 7th ESA Workshop on Advanced Space Technologies for Robotics and Automation (ASTRA), ESTEC, November 2002.

Bunting, R, Lewis, G, Long, F W, Plakosh, D, Seacord, R, & Wrage, L, Knowledge Management in Component-Based Software Engineering. International Conference on Information and Knowledge Engineering (IKE'02), Las Vegas, USA, June 24-27, 2002, pp 91-95.

Clare, A J, & King, R D, Machine learning of functional class from phenotype data, Bionformatics, 18, 1, (2002), pp 160-166.

Coghill, G M, Garrett, S M, & King, R D, Learning Qualitative Models in the Presence of Noise, QR'02 Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning, 2002.

Ellis, D I, Broadhurst, D, Kell, D B, Rowland, J J, & Goodacre, R, Rapid and quantitative detection of the microbial spoilage of meat using FT-IR spectroscopy and machine learning, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 68, (2002), pp 2822-2828.

Garrett, S M, & Walker, J H, Combining Evolutionary and 'Non'-Evolutionary Methods in Tracking Dynamic Global Optima, GECCO-2002, New York, USA, 9th-13th July 2002, pp 359-366.

Garrett, S M, Coghill, G M, Srinivasan, A, & King, R D, Learning qualitative models of physical and biological systems. In: Computational Discovery of Communicable Knowledge, (eds S Dzeroski and L Todorovski), (2002).

Gunstone, R, & Lee, M H, Constraining Developmental Learning via Imitation. In: Proc. Biologically-Inspired Robotics: The Legacy of W. Grey Walter (WGW'02), EPSRC/BBSRC International Workshop, HP labs, Bristol, August 14-16, 2002, pp158-165.

Hesketh, A R, Chandra, G, Shaw, A D, Rowland, J J, Kell, D B, Bibb, M J, & Chater, K F, Primary and secondary metabolism, and post-translational protein modifications, as portrayed by proteomic analysis of Streptomyces coelicolor, Molecular Microbiology, 46, 4, (2002), pp 917-932.

Holstein, H, Gravimagnetic invariance for uniform polyhedra, Geophysics, 67, (2002) pp 1126-1133.

Holstein, H, Gravimagnetic similarity for uniform polyhedra, Geophysics, 67, (2002), pp 1134-1137.

Holstein, H, & Li, B, Low Density Feature Point Matching for Articulated Pose Identification, British Machine Vision Conference, Cardiff, UK, September 2002.

Lee, M H, Meng, Q, & Holstein, H, Learning and Reuse of Experience in Behavior-Based Service Robots, Seventh International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotic and Vision (ICARCV 2002), Singapore, December 2-5, 2002, pp 1019-24.

Li, B & Holstein, H, Matching Feature Points for Articulated Pose Identification, Conference on Control, Automation, Robotic and Vision (ICARCV 2002), Singapore, December 2-5, 2002.

Li, B, & Holstein, H, Recognition of human periodic motion – a frequency domain approach. In: Proceedings of the International Conference of Pattern Recognition (ICPR), Québec, Canada, 2002, 1, pp 311-314.

Li, B, & Holstein, H, Dynamic Segment-Based Sparse Feature-Point Matching in Articulate Motion. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Hammamet, Tunisia, October 6-9, 2002.

Liu, Y, & Holstein, H, A Pseudo Linearizaton Method for Accurate Pose Estimation from a Single Image, IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2002), Rochester, New York, USA, 2, September 22-25, 2002, pp 557-560.

Liu, Y, & Labrosse, F, Inverse Validation for Accurate Range Image. Registration with Structured Data. In: Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Québec, Canada, 3, August 11-15, 2002, pp 537-540.

Liu, Y, & Rodrigues, M A, Geometrical Analysis of Two Sets of 3D Correspondence Data Patterns for the Registration of Free-form Shapes, Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, 33 (4), (2002), pp 409-436.

Liu, Y, Rodrigues, M A, & Wei, Q, Using Neighbouring Relationships to Eliminate False Matches for Accurate Registration of Free-form Surfaces, Journal of Digital Imaging, 15 (supplement 1), (2002), pp 267-269.

Liu, Y, & Rodrigues, M A, Accurate Registration of Structured Data Using Two Overlapping Range Images. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Washington DC, May 11-15, 2002, 3, pp 2519-2524.

Liu, Y, & Rodrigues, M A, Registering Two Overlapping Range Images Using Relative Registration Error Histogram. In: Proceedings of IEEE 2002 International Conference on Image Processing, Rochester, New York, September 22-25, 2002, 3, pp 841-844.

Karwath, A, & King, R D, Homology Induction: The Use of Machine Learning to Improve Sequence Similarity Searches, BMC Bioinformatics, 3, 11, (2002).

McGovern, A C, Broadhurst, D, Taylor, J, Gilbert, R J, Kaderbhai, N, Winson, M K, Small, D A, Rowland, J J, Kell, D B, & Goodacre, R, Monitoring of complex industrial bioprocesses for metabolite concentrations using modern spectroscopies and machine learning: application to gibberellic acid production, Biotechnology and Bioengineering, 78, (2002), pp 527-538.

Marchand-Geneste, N, Watson, K A, Alsberg, B, King, R D, A new approach to pharmacophore mapping and QSAR analysis using Inductive Logic Programming. Application to thermolysin inhibitors and glycogen phosphorylase b inhibitors, Journal of Medical Chemistry, 45, (2002), pp 399-409.

Neal, M, An artificial immune system for continuous analysis of time varying data. In: Proceedings of ICARIS 2002, pp 76-85.

Price, C J, Incremental automated diagnostics. In: Procs AAAI Spring Symposium on Information Refinement and Revision for Decision Making: Modeling for Diagnostics, Prognostics, and Prediction, Palo Alto, March 2002.

Price, C J, & Hughes, N, Effective Automated Sneak Circuit Analysis. In: Procs Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, Seattle, January 2002.

Price, C J, & Taylor, N S, Automating Multiple Failure FMEA, Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 76, (2002), pp 1-10.

Price, D E & Spence, A J, An Introduction to H.323 videoconferencing. UKERNA/VTAS. http://www.video.ja.net/323intro.pdf

Ratcliffe, M B, & Price, C J, Moving toward an Interactive Model Based Design Assistor (IMBDA). In: Workshop Proceedings Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), San Sebastian, Spain, June 2002, pp 71-75.

Ratcliffe, M B, Thomas, L A, & Woodbury, J, Improving Motivation and Performance Through Personal Development in Large Introductory Software Engineering Courses. 15th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training, Kentucky, USA, Feb 2002, pp 108-115, ISBN 0 7695 1515 0.

Rodrigues, M A, & Liu, Y, On the Representation of Rigid Body Transformations for Accurate Registration of Free Form Shapes, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 39 (1), (2002), pp 37-52.

Rodrigues, M A, & Liu, Y, Exploiting Structural Constraints for Accurate Image Registration. In: Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2002), September 30 - October 4, 2002, Lausanne, Switzerland, 1, pp 1-6.

Rowland, J J, Interpreting Analytical Spectra with Evolutionary Computation. In: Evolutionary Computation in Bioinformatics. (eds Fogel, G B and Corne, D W), Morgan Kaufmann, (2002), San Francisco, pp 341-365, ISBN 1-55860-797-8.

Rowland, J J, & Taylor, J, Adaptive denoising in spectral analysis by genetic programming. In: Proceedings IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (part of WCCI), May 2002, pp 133-138. ISBN 0-7803-7281-6.

Snooke, N A, Price, C J, & Ellis, D, Whole Lifecycle Electrical Design Analysis. In: Foresight Vehicle, Paper Number 02FCC108, SAE Future Car Congress, Washington D.C., June 2002.

Snooke, N A, Abstracting Automotive System Models from Component-based Simulation with Multi Level behaviour, QR2002, Sitges, Spain, 2002.

Snooke, N, Price, D, & Ellis, Whole Lifecycle Electrical Design Analysis in Foresight Vehicle, SAE Future Car 2002.

Thomas, L A, Ratcliffe, M B, & Woodbury, J, Learning Styles and Performance in the Introductory Programming Sequence. 33rd ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Kentucky, USA, Feb 2002, pp 33-37 ISBN 1 58113 473 8.

Thomas, L, Ratcliffe, M, Woodbury, J, & Jarman, E, Learning Styles and Performance in the Introductory Programming Sequence. SIGCSE Bulletin, 34, 1, (2002).

Walker, J, & Wilson, M S, Lifelong Evolution for Adaptive Robots. In: Proc.IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2002, pp 984-989.

Walker, J, & Wilson, M S, How useful is lifelong evolution in the physical world? In: Proc. Seventh International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behaviour, (SAB), 2002, pp 347-348.

MEMBERSHIP OF ADVISORY BODIES

Barnes, D P. Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College, Control Systems Engineering, Integration and Autonomy. Convention host for the UK Space and Planetary Robotics Network Workshop, Aberystwyth, September 2002.

Garrett, S M. Publicity Secretary for the International Conference in Artificial Immune Systems (ICARIS).

Holstein, H. AISB’03 Chairman of the Organising Committee for the Symposium on “Biologically-inspired computer vision, theory and practice” Session chairman at the ICARCV’02 Conference, Singapore, (Int Conf on Control, Automation, Robotics and Computer Vision).

King, R D. Member of the BBSRC Engineering and Biotechnology Committee. Member of the BBSRC Bioinformatics Panel. Member of the JISC Committee.

Labrosse, F. Co-chair of the “Biologically-inspired Machine Vision, Theory and Application” AISB03 symposium.

Lee, M H. Member of EPSRC Peer Review College. Executive Team Member of IEE Robotics & Mechatronics Professional Network. Founder member of the Mid Wales Technium Management Board.

Long, F W. Member of the organizing committee and Poster Chair for ICCBSS 2003 (International Conference on COTS-Based Software Systems).

Neal, M J. Program committee member for ICARIS, International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems, 2002.

Price, C J. Member of the 16^thInternational Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning, QR'02. Member of the 13th International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis, DX02. EPSRC College Member.

Ratcliffe, M B. Refereeing, judging for Undergraduate prizes for SIGCSE conference, Kentucky, USA, Feb 2002.

Rowland, J J. Member of the Technical Program Commitees PPSN, EVOBIO.

Sherratt, E M. Convention host for the 3^rd SAM (SDL and MSc) Workshop, SDL Forum Society, Aberystwyth, June 2002.

Wilson, M. Treasurer for International Society for Adaptive Behaviour. Member of EPSRC Peer Review College. Member of Programme Committee for SAB '02.

MEMBERSHIP OF EDITORIAL BOARDS

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

Lee, M H. Member of the Editorial Board of Advanced Engineering Informatics. Member of the Editorial Board for PhD thesis publications within ECCAI (European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence). Member of the Editorial Board of Schedae Informaticae (Institute of Computer Science, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, POLAND).

Liu, Y. Guest editor for the special issue of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition on The Registration and Fusion of Range Images, Vol. 87, No. 1/2/3, pp. 1-131.

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

RESEARCH GRANTS AND CONTRACTS RECEIVED

Researchers: D P Barnes

Sponsors: Defence Science & Technology Laboratory

Research Area: Legged Surveillance Vehicle Locomotion Over Uneven Terrain

Financial Support: £13,200

Researchers: D P Barnes, C J Price

Sponsors: EPSRC

Research Area: Model Based Methods for Kinematic Fault Diagnosis & Remediation

Financial Support: £250,201

Researchers: R D King, C J Price

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: Bio-Logical: An Intelligent Database for Knowledge Discovery in Functional Genomics

Financial Support: £591,244

Researchers: D E Price

Sponsors: UKERNA/University of Newcastle

Research Area: JANET Video Technologies Advisory Service. Technical Advisor

Financial Support: £3,600

Researchers: D E Price, A J Spence

Sponsors: UKERNA/University of Newcastle

Research Area: Production of a new JANET Multicast Technical Guide

Financial Support: £8,960

Researchers: J J Rowland, D B Kell

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: A Noninvasive Nonlinear Dielectric Spectrometer

Financial Support: £270,204

In addition, the following research work funded by outside institutions continued during 2002.

Researchers: B Alsberg

Sponsors: EPSRC

Research Area: Solving Peak Shift Problems in Infrared Spectroscopy with the Peak Parameter Representation (PPR)

Financial Support: £62,439

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

Sponsors: Food Standards Agency

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

Financial Support: £1,206,603

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

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: Characterisation of Intact Microorganisms Using Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometry

Financial Support: £205,640

Researchers: D B Kell, J J Rowland

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: Functional Genomics Via the Metabolome

Financial Support: £321,360

Researchers: D B Kell, J J Rowland

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: Making the Most of Genome Sequence: The Application of Transcriptome and Proteome Analysis to Streptomyces Coelicolor A3 (2)

Financial Support: £232,980

Researchers: D B Kell, J J Rowland

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: Registration and Compression of Proteome Gel Images

Financial Support: £185,388

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

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: The Robot Scientist: Application to Functional Genomics

Financial Support: £313,380

Researchers: R D King

Sponsors: BBSRC

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

Financial Support: £146,664

Researchers: R D King

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: Prediction of Protein Function in Plant Genomes Using Data Mining

Financial Support: £164,992

Researchers: R D King

Sponsors: British Council

Research Area: Modular Characterisation of Metallothioneins

Financial Support: £1,600

Researchers: M H Lee

Sponsors: Welsh Development Agency, HEFCW, NAW

Research Area: Centre of Excellence for Technology & Industrial Collaboration

Financial Support: £300,000

Researchers: M H Lee

Sponsors: EPSRC

Research Area: Developmental Learning Algorithms for Embedded Agents

Financial Support: £208,307

Researchers: M H Lee, C J Price

Sponsors: European Commission

Research Area: MONET 2 - Network of Excellence

Financial Support: £465,959

Researchers: C J Price, N N Snooke

Sponsors: EPSRC

Research Area: Whole Vehicle Whole Lifestyle Electrical Design Analysis

Financial Support: £245,528

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

Sponsors: BBSRC

Research Area: Combinatorial Optimisation in Directed Evolution Experiments - A Systematic Approach

Financial Support: £265,904

Researchers: N N Snooke, C J Price

Sponsors: EPSRC

Research Area: Automated Safety Analysis of Software in Electronic Systems

Financial Support: £150,352

LECTURES AND ADDRESSES TO LEARNED SOCIETIES AND CONFERENCES

Bott, M F. “Contractual Issues Arising from the Use of COTS.” European COTS Users Working Group. 7 May 2002.

Garrett, S M. GECCO, July 9-11^th, New York, USA.

Holstein, H. “Learning and Reuse of Experience in Behavior-Based Service Robots”. Conference on Control, Automation, Robotic and Vision (ICARCV 2002), 2-5 December 2002, Singapore. “Recognition of human periodic motion – a frequency domain approach”. Proceedings of the International Conference of Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2002, Québec, Canada. “A Pseudo Linearizaton Method for Accurate Pose Estimation from a Single Image”, IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2002), September 22-25, Rochester, New York, USA. Seminar: “Low Density Feature Point Matching for Articulated Pose Identification” Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, 2002.

Lee, M H. “Novel software methods for the automation of food processing tasks” presented at the “Opportunities for innovation in robotics”, Conference, Campden & Chorleywood Food Research Association, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, October 2002.

Neal, M J. Research seminar at University of Kent at Canterbury: A stable artificial immune network for learning time-varying data, November 2002.

Price, C J. Incremental automated diagnostics, Procs AAAI Spring Symposium on Information Refinement and Revision for Decision Making: Modeling for Diagnostics, Prognostics, and Prediction, Palo Alto, March 2002. Presentation at Saber workshop, Germany.

Thomas, L and Ratcliffe, M B. “Learning Styles and Performance in the Introductory Programming Sequence” presented at SIGCSE 2002.

POSTGRADUATE SCOLARSHIPS AND STUDENTSHIPS

EPSRC Research Studentship were awarded to Claire Rocks and Xing Zhang.

Departmental Awards were awarded to James Carr, Benjamin Thomasson, and Jennifer White.

HIGHER DEGREES AWARDED

PhD

Karwath, Andreas, Large Logical Databases and their Applications to Computational Biology.

MPhil

Daud, Md. Nor Ridzuan, Learning Qualitative Models of Physical Systems.

MSc

The Degree of MSc in Computer Science was awarded to 39 candidates, including 6 who studied for the degree in Singapore.

CONFERENCES