Research

Our longstanding, strong and dynamic research culture has given rise to our international reputation for world-class research.

Our research is organised into three groups:

• Complex systems
• Data and knowledge engineering
• Visual computing

The areas of research we prioritise are:

• Data privacy and cybersecurity
• Distributed and parallel systems
• Human factors technology
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
• Social computing
• Text and data mining
• Quantum technologies and engineering

Multidisciplinary impact

Our knowledge and expertise is being applied in innovative ways to help drive forward the research agenda and help our industrial and public sector partners solve problems. Our work is having an impact in a number of diverse areas:

• healthcare (patient record systems and information visualisation)
• defence
• the environment (biodiversity management and geospatial information systems)
• telecommunications (communications network design and virtual organisations)
• engineering design (especially reverse engineering of solid shape)
• high-performance and grid computing (distributed processing, knowledge management and immersive visualisation).

Collaboration

Much of our research is interdisciplinary, in collaboration with Schools at Cardiff and other top universities, across the full spectrum of engineering and physical sciences, biomedical and life sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.

Collaborative partnerships include the Human Factors Technology Centre and the Wales Institute of Mathematical and Computational Sciences (WIMCS). We welcome the development of further partnerships with industry and the public sector.

Research facilities

We have a diverse range of facilities and systems that underpin our cutting-edge research.These include dedicated resources for:

• Motion capture
• 3D data capture
• Knowledge representation and reasoning
• Cloud computing
• Computational modelling
• Internet of Things research
• Computational music

Find out more about our dedicated research facilities

Sustained funding

Our national and international funding sources include:

• The Royal Society
• Welsh Assembly (including HEFCW)
• UK government (including EPSRC, DTI and OFCOM)
• European Union.

Our multi-million pound research is also boosted by working with our industrial partners. These include:

• Cancer Research Wales
• IBM UK
• Ordnance Survey
• Wellcome Trust.

Our annual research income currently averages around £2 million.