Over the past ten years, the department has steadily broadened its range of activities. Unlike the Computer Science departments in many universities, we have been concerned to apply the latest computing technology and our own expertise to a range of problems in other academic disciplines, in industry and commerce, and in the public sector. The results of this approach are very evident in what follows. Our activities extend from small wind energy systems to land mine detection devices, from drug design to mineral prospecting, and from the safety of car electronics to the provision of high bandwith communications in rural Wales. In many cases are contributions are directly technical and depend on our expertise; in others, however, we contribute through our membership of a wide variety of national committees and professional bodies.

While assessments of research and teaching quality have to be taken very seriously, it is easy to neglect those aspects of a university's activities that are not measured by such exercises. A small but significant part of our activities falls that category. If we were to neglect it, we would be giving passive assent to a narrow view of the purpose of a university; we would be depriving ourselves of opportunities to contribute to the public good; and we would be running the risk of being caught out by the next change in the rules, which might well decide to assess those activities.
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TEACHING

The 1997 ceremonies saw more students graduating from the department than ever before. There were 55 graduates with initial degrees (MEng, BEng, and BSc), as well as 31 graduates from our conversion MSc course. Three students were awarded a BSc in Computer Science with first class honours and a similar number were awarded firsts on the BEng in Software Engineering. Three students were awarded the MSc with distinction.

While we are delighted to see these increasing numbers of graduates, there is a cost. Ten years ago, the department taught 117 full-time equivalent students (ftes), with 11 academic staff. In the 1996/97 session, we taught 317 ftes with 15 academic staff. Government policy of increasing participation in higher education without a proportionate increase in funding can certainly be justified but, as these figures show, it inevitably means that students have less contact with staff and less individual attention than they used to.

Students from the department are increasingly in demand by employers offering industrial placements. The content of our courses and the quality of the teaching the students receive is highly valued and, in the last two years, has led to our being unable to meet the demand.

Members of the department's academic staff continue to be in demand as external examiners for courses in other institutions. In 1997, they examined at the Open University and at the universities of Bournemouth, Huddersfield, Lancaster, Reading and York.
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RESEARCH

The year has been the department's most successful ever in terms of winning research contracts, with contracts to a total value of £862,958. This reflects our excellent record of turning fundamental research into leading-edge technology that can be applied in industry.

The most prestigious of these contracts is the award, from the European Union, of the contract to administer MONET, a network of excellence bringing together over 50 collaborators from all over Europe.

Nearly 20% of the research contracts awarded have come from the BBSRC, demonstrating the steadily increasing strength of our research in the applications of artificial intelligence, in particular machine learning, to biological problems.

The department was pleased to welcome Dr Paul Callahan of the Johns Hopkins University and ETH Zürich as a visitor for the autumn term.

Members of the academic staff of the department have served as external examiners for higher degrees in the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hull, Leeds, Salford, and York
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PUBLICATIONS

Alsberg, B K, Goodacre, R, Rowland, J J and Kell, D B 1997. Classification of pyrolysis mass spectra by fuzzy multivariate rule induction; comparison with regression, K-nearest neighbour, neural and decision-tree methods. Anal. Chim. Acta, 348, 389-407.

Alsberg, B K, Woodward, A M, Winson, M K, Rowland, J J and Kell, D B 1997. Wavelet denoising of infrared spectra. Analyst, 122(7), 645-652.

Bott, F 1997. Selling, Marketing and Procuring Software. In: Myers, C, Hall, T and Pitt. D. (eds), The Responsible Software Engineer. 277-284. Springer Verlag, London.

Broadhurst, D, Goodacre, R, Jones, A, Rowland, J J and Kell, D B 1997. Genetic algorithms as a method for variable selection in PLS regression, with applications to pyrolysis mass spectrometry. Anal. Chim. Acta, 348, 71-86.

Coghill, G M, Chantler, M J, Shen, Q. and Leitch, R R 1997 (August 26-28). Towards model switching for diagnosis of dynamic systems. Pages 564-570 of: Proceedings of IFAC Symposium on fault detection, supervision and safety for technical processes. SAFEPROCESS'97, University of Hull.

Cohn, A G, Bennett, B, Gooday, J and Gotts, N M 1997. Qualitative Spatial Representation and Reasoning with the Region Connection Calculus. Geoinformatica, 1(3), 275-316.

Cohn, A G, Bennett, B, Gooday, J and Gotts, N M 1997. Representing and Reasoning with Qualitative Spatial Relations about Regions. In: Stock, Olivero (ed), Spatial and Temporal Reasoning. Kluwer.

Cohn, A G, Gotts, N M, Cui, Z, Randell, D A, Bennett, B and Gooday, J M 1998. Exploiting Temporal Continuity in Qualitative Spatial Calculi. In: Golledge, R G and Egenhofer, M J (eds), Spatial and Temporal Reasoning in Geographical Information Systems. Oxford University Press.

Dawson-Howe, K M and Williams, T G 1997 (29 September-1 October 1997). Automating the Probing Process. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop of Sustainable Humanitarian Demining.

Dawson-Howe, K M and Williams, T G 1997 (8-11 July). Autonomous Probing Robots for the detection of abandoned landmines. Pages 51-57 of: Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Intelligent Robotics Systems (SIRS-97).

Innocencio, E, Viana, P, Loftus C and Sherratt, E 1997. The Unification of OMT, SDL and IDL for Service Creation. In: Proc. 8th SDL Forum. North Holland.

Hunt, J E 1997. Constructing modular user interfaces in Java. Java Report, 2(8), 25-32.

Hunt, J E 1997. Growing Java Beans. Application Development Advisor, 1(2).

Hunt, J E 1997. Java and Object Orientation : An introduction. Springer Verlag. ISBN 3-540-76201-9.

Hunt, J E 1997. Juggling with Java Methods. Application Development Advisor, 1(1).

Hunt, J E 1997. Smalltalk and Object Orientation: An introduction. Springer Verlag. ISBN 3-540-76115-2.

Hunt, J E 1997. Using Case-Based Reasoning as the basis of an Intelligent Class Finder. In: Proc. Object Technology'97. Object Technology'97. ISBN 0-9525040-0-6.

Hunt, J E. 1997. Case Based Diagnosis and Repair of Software Faults. Expert Systems Journal, 14(1), 15-23.

Huss, R A, Holstein, H and O'Connor, J J 1997 (Nov). A Two-Dimensional Computer Model of the Effect of Cartilage Deformation on Laxity of the Knee Joint. Tech. rept. UWA-DCS-97- 026. University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Aberystwyth.

Jones, A, Rowland, J J, Woodward, A M and Kell, D B 1997. An instrument for the acquisition and analysis of the nonlinear dielectric spectra of biological samples. Trans. Inst. Meas. Control. In press.

King, R D, Saqi, M, Sayle, R and Sternberg, M J E 1997. DSC: public domain protein secondary structure prediction. CABIOS, 13, 473-474.

Lacey, N, Nakata, K and Lee, M H 1997 Investigating the Effects of Explicit Epistemology on a Distributed Learning System. In: Distributed Artificial Intelligence meets machine learning. Gerhard Weiss (ed). Lecture notes in Artificial Intelligence. Vol. 1221. Berlin: Springer Verlag.

Lee, M H, McCardle, J and M, Coghill G 1997. Industrial applications of model based reasoning. Digest 97(338), 1-5, Colloquium by A4(Artificial Intelligence) on applications of model based reasoning. IEEE,.

Loftus, C, Sherratt, E and Demestichas, P 1997. Engineering for Quality of Service. In: Proc of TINA '97, Santiago, Chile Computer Society Press, for IEEE.

Loftus, C, Sherratt, E, Innocencio, E, and Viana, P 1997. The Unification of OMT, SDL and IDL for Service Creation. Pages 443-458 of: Cavalli, A. and Sarma, A. (eds), Proc. of SDL '97. Elsevier Science Publishers.

Loftus, C W, Olsen, A, Innocencio, E. and Viana, P 1997 (October). A Code Generation Strategy for CORBA-Based Internet Applications. Pages 160-169 of: Proc. of EDOC '97 (Enterprise Distributed Object Computing). IEEE Computer Society.

Neal, M J, Rowland, J J and Lee, M H 1997. A behaviour-based approach to robotic grasp formulation: experimental evaluation in a food product handling application. Pages 304-309 of: IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Albuquerque.

Neal, M J, Boyce, D, Rowland, J J, Lee, M H and Olivier, P L 1997. Robotic grasping by showing: an experimental comparison of two algorithms. Preprints IFAC SICICA'97, pages 345-350, Annecy, France.

Nicholls, H R, Rowland, J J and Taylor, M G 1997. Using Simulation for Plant Monitoring in Real Time. IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, pages 3209-3212. Albuquerque.

Olivier, P 1997. Coordinating the visual and verbal domains. In: Workshop on Perceptual User Interfaces.

Olivier, P 1997. Diagrams and machine reasoning. In: EPSRC/ESRC Workshop on Thinking with Diagrams.

Olivier, P 1997. Estimating visuospatial properties in graphics. In: Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-97) Workshop on Language and Space.

Olivier, P 1997. Hierarchy and attention in computational imagery. Machine GRAPHICS and VISION, 6(1), 77-88.

Olivier, P 1997. Perceptual rendering for multimodal communication. In: British Computer Society SGES Expert Systems Conference.

Price, C J and Taylor, N S 1997 (July). Multiple Fault Diagnosis Using FMEA. Pages 1052-1057 of: Proc. AAAI97/IAAI97.

Price, C J, Pugh, D R, Snooke, N, Hunt, J E and Wilson, M S 1997. Combining Functional and Structural Reasoning for Safety Analysis of Electrical Designs. Knowledge Engineering Review, 12(3), 271-285.

Price, C J, Pegler, I S, Ratcliffe M B and McManus, A. 1997. From Troubleshooting to Process Design: Closing the Manufacturing Loop. Page 8 of: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 2nd International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning. Springer for ICCBR-97 Providence, Rhode Island, USA.

Price, D E, Ratcliffe, M B, Davies, T, Jones R W, Tedd, M D and Price, G M 1997 (March). Design of a Network based Remote Advisory Service. Queen's University of Belfast.

Ratcliffe, M B, Parker, G R and Price, D E 1997 (January). The Remote Advisory Service at Aberystwyth. In: Universities and College Information Systems Association (UCISA) Conference on "Technology to help Advisors".

Reiser, P G K 1997. EVIL1: a Learning System to Evolve Logical Theories. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Logic Programming and Multi-Agents, 95-101.

Reiser, P G K 1997. An Evolutionary Learning System for Knowledge Discovery. Abstracts of the International Association of Interdisciplinary Research Conference on Learning, 234-237. (extended abstract).

Reiser, P G K 1997. An Evolutionary Learning System for Knowledge Discovery. Tech. rept. UWA-DCS-97-025. University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Department of Computer Science.

Reiser, P G K 1997. Evolutionary Models of Machine Learning. Proceedings of the International Association of Interdisciplinary Research Conference on Learning. (in press).

Rigas, D I, Alty, J L and Long, F W 1997 (September). Can music support interfaces to complex databases? Proceedings of the 23rd Euromicro Conference, pages 78-84. Budapest. IEEE Computer Society Press.

Shaw, A D, di Camillo, G, Vlahov, A, Jones, A, Bianchi, G, Rowland, J J and Kell, D B 1997. Discrimination of the variety and region of origin of extra virgin olive oils using 13C NMR and multivariate calibration with variable reduction. Anal. Chim. Acta, 348, 357-374.

Sherratt, E 1997. Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Formal Software Development. In: Proc. 1st Irish Workshop on Formal Methods. Springer (EWIC).

Snooke, N and Price, C J 1997 (June). Challenges for Qualitative Electrical Reasoning in Automotive Circuit Simulation. In: Proceedings of QR-97.

Snooke, N and Price, C J 1997 (December). Hierarchical Functional Reasoning. In: Proceedings Expert Systems 98.

Srinivasan, A and King, R D 1997. Feature construction with Inductive Logic Programming: a study of quantitative predictions of biological activity aided by structural attributes. In: Proceedings of 6th Inductive Logic Programming Workshop. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 1314. Berlin: Springer Verlag.

Srinivasan, A, King, R D, Muggleton, S H and Sternberg, M J E 1997. Carcinogenesis predictions using ILP. Pages 273-287 of: Proceedings of 7th Inductive Logic Programming Workshop, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 1297. Berlin: Springer Verlag.

Srinivasan, A, King, R D, Muggleton, S H and Sternberg, M J E 1997. The predictive toxicology evaluation challenge. Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 4-9. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

Williams, T G T and Hardy, N W 1997 (25-27 March). The application of behaviour-based methodologies to compliant motion control. In: Gray, John and Caldwell, Darwin (eds), International Workshop on Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Machines. Telford Research Institute of Cybernetics, University of Salford.

Wilson, M S, King, C M and Hunt, J E 1997. Evolving Hierarchical Robot Behaviours. In: Sharkey (ed) Robotics and Autonomous Systems 22(3-4), pages 215-230. Elsevier. Special Issue on Robot Learning: The New Wave.

Winson, M K, Goodacre, R, Timmins, 'E, Jones, A, Alsberg, B K, Woodward, A M, Rowland, J J and Kell, D B 1997. Diffuse Reflectance Absorbance Spectroscopy Taking In Chemometrics (DRASTIC). A hyperspectral FT-IR-based approach to rapid screening for metabolite overproduction. Anal. Chim. Acta, 348, 273-282.
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MEMBERSHIP OF ADVISORY BODIES

Bott, M F Member of the BCS Board of Examiners and Accreditation Panel. University of Wales representative on Boards of Study at British Hellenic College, Athens, and the Universitas Nebrissensis, Madrid.

Hunt, J E Java Columnist and Editorial Adviser, for Application Development Adviser. Editorial Adviser for The Java Report Online. Member of the Committee of the BCS Specialist Group on Expert Systems. Secretary of the BCS Specialist Group on Expert Systems.

Lee, M H Invited Referee for the Public Good Science Fund of the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, New Zealand. Re-elected to Engineering USP of University of Wales. Member of Conference Advisory Board of Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Design (AID'98) to be held 20-23 July 1998 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Long, F W Visiting Scientist at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University Member of the Software Engineering Environments Conferences Steering Committee and of the programme committee for SEE '97. University of Wales moderator for the BSc in Business Computing and Information Technology at Informatics in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Hong Kong.

Price, C J Institute of Electrical Engineers A4 committee.

Tedd, M D Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils (JISC). Advisory Committee on Networking (ACN). Committee for Electronic Information (CEI). Member of the Consumer Panel to advise the Director General of OFTEL on issues arising from the introduction of digital broadcasting and the convergence of the telecommunication and broadcasting industries. Chairman of the Welsh Advisory Committee on Telecommunications, of the ACN Monitoring Subcommittee, Vice Chairman of the Steering Group of the Llwybr/Pathway (Rural Wales Information Society) Project. Member of the Steering Committee of the Wales Information Society Project. Vice Chairman of the Governors of Penglais School.
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MEMBERSHIP OF EDITORIAL BOARDS

Bott, M F BCS/Springer Practitioner Series.

Lee, M H Artificial Intelligence in Engineering, Elsevier, Journal of Systems Engineering, Springer.

Olivier, P L Joint editor with Stephen Hirtle (Pittsburgh), Spatial Cognition and Computation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Kluwer Academic Publishers. First issue due January, 1999. Book Review Editor, Expert Systems: the International Journal of Engineering and Neural Networks, Blackwell Publishers.

Price, C J Book review editor of Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.
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RESEARCH GRANTS AND CONTRACTS RECEIVED
 

LECTURES AND ADDRESSES TO LEARNED SOCIETIES AND CONFERENCES

Hunt, J E MONET, The 17th BCS Int. Expert Systems Conference, Cambridge, 15 December 1997

Lee, M H MONET - A European Network for Model-Based and Qualitative Reasoning Systems, 11th International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning (QR'97), 3-6 June 1997, Cortona, Italy. Industrial Applications of Model Based Reasoning, IEE Colloquium Professional Group A4 (Artificial Intelligence) on Applications of Model-Based Reasoning, IEE, London, 17 November 1997. MONET, 1st Annual Workshop of ESPRIT Networks of Excellence, University of Newcastle, 13-14 March 1997.

McCardle, J R MONET, IEE Colloquium on Applications of Model-Based Reasoning, London, 17 November 1997.

Olivier, P L Interpreting the engineer's sketch, Commentary on Thomas Stahovich, Fall Symposium on Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations II, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, MIT, MA, 9 November 1997. Spatial story visualization, Commentary on Singh, Mishra and Mukerjee, Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-97) Workshop on Language and Space, Providence, Rhode Island, 27 July 1997. Representation and processing of spatial expressions, invited talk, Department of Psychology Seminar, University of Plymouth, 26 February 1997.

Price, C J MONET, 8th Int. Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis, DX '97, Le Mont-St-Michel, France, 15 September 1997

E M Sherratt Software engineering applications, foundations and technology. Position paper given at the first meeting of the UK Software Engineering Association, Imperial College, London, April 1997.
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POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIPS AND STUDENTSHIPS

EPSRC Research Studentships were awarded to: Neil Callaway and Andreas Karwath

Research studentships funded by the Department were awarded to: Dominic Tristram, Edward Wiles, Jonathan Pickering, and David Islam.
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HIGHER DEGREES AWARDED

PhD

Ketteridge, B T Optimisation of Geophysical Investigation Methods.

Dyke, A Design Replays: The Capturing and reusing of Design Information as an aid to Software Development.

Rimmer, E Multi-Level Spatial Learning and Reasoning from Observation

McIntyre, S An Intuitive Approach to Device Modelling

MPhil

Izett, I R Instrumentation for the Evaluation of Small Wind Energy Systems
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CONFERENCES

Hunt, J E Member, programme committee, DX'97, Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis, September 1997, France. Chair of the Conference Technical Stream, BCS Expert Systems Conference, December 1997.

Lee, M H Invited member, Programme Committee of TIMR-UK'97, UK Conference On Autonomous Mobile Robotics, Manchester, September 1997.

Olivier, P L Organising committee member of the 2nd Workshop on Conceptual Descriptions from Images, International Conference on Computer Vision, Bombay, India, 1998. Organising committee member of the Fall Symposium on Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations II, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, MIT, MA, 1997. Chair of the Workshop on Language and Space, National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Providence, Rhode Island, 1997.

Price, C J Organised two colloquia in London for the IEE on Intelligent Design and on Applications of Model-based reasoning.
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