Golden ambitions

The SESAME consortium is using wireless sensor-based systems with offline and real-time processing and feedback in enhancing the performance of elite athletes and young athletes who have been identified as having world class potential. The focus on athletics provides a challenging but achievable demonstration domain and is timely in view of the national importance of the 2012 Olympics. However, the SESAME technical approach and its solutions will be deliberately generic, to enable their subsequent application to a wider range of training and health care scenarios including, for example, the rehabilitation of patients following surgery, stroke or injury, and support for people with physical disabilities. more>>

Perceptive Particle Swarms

Boonserm Kaewkamnerdpong (Nina) has invented the perceptive particle swarm algorithm, which models movement of nanoscale particles with the properties of simple nanorobots or biological cells. She has shown in her simulation how a set of simple interaction rules can enable them to cluster together in desirable structures, forming patterned coatings on surfaces or even helping to repair damaged blood vessels. Nina is a PhD student in Computer Science, supervised by Peter Bentley. more>>

Mosaic World

Udi Schlessinger has created Mosaic World - a colourful but deceptive virtual world in which "critters" evolve to see, move and cooperate with each other. Udi's critters evolved their eyes and brain, enabling them to understand that food can look different because of shadows and changing light. They also evolve to aggregate together, forming structures like corals or multicellular animals - and enabling them to catch and eat other critters. Udi is based in the department of Ophthalmology and is supervised by Beau Lotto and Peter Bentley (Computer Science). more>>

Virtual Milgram

In an attempt to understand events in which people carry out horrific acts against their fellows, Stanley Milgram carried out experiments in the 1960s at Yale University investigating whether ordinary people might obey the orders of an authority figure to cause pain to a stranger. His study also ignited a debate about the ethics of deception and of putting subjects in a highly distressing situation in the course of research. As a result this line of research is no longer amenable to direct experimental studies. UCL researchers have carried out a replication of Milgram's experiment, but in an immersive virtual environment, where participants were required to give ‘electric shocks’ – to a virtual human. The objective was to study human responses to interaction with a virtual character in the type of extreme social situation exemplified the Milgram's experiment. more>>

Did you look here first?

We don’t give everything in our eyeline equal attention, and websites are no different. If we can measure and then create a model to predict what we will look at, we can make websites work better. For example, we could compress the important part of an image more lightly than the less important areas. Angela Sasse and colleagues at UCL-CS’s Higherview project use innovative technologies such as eyetracking to make some breakthrough findings in this field. To find out more, take your eye to this link more>>

Filthy lucre?

For Jason Kingdon, Sukhdev Khebbal and Suran Goonatilake, the journey to the Sunday Times Rich List began as PhD students in UCL-CS’s Intelligent Systems Group. The anti-fraud systems they developed there formed the basis of a spin-out company, Searchspace (now Fortent), whose clients now include many of the world’s leading financial institutions such as USB, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of New York. Indeed, its anti-money laundering software is the leading such product in the world. In the world of academia, money isn’t always a dirty word. Links:Intelligent Systems Group more >> and Fortent more>>

Is your body off the peg?

Robot, heal thyself

A military reconnaissance robot that uses clever software to adapt if it is damaged on the battlefield, is one of the fruits of a collaboration between UCL computer scientists and BAE Systems. more>>

Insects and all that jazz

Tim Blackwell followed his Physics PhD by taking the MSc in Intelligent Systems in the UCL Computer Science Department. His individual project was on "Swarm Music" and mimics insects swarming to "fly around" the sequence of notes the musician is playing. It was so successful that has jammed live all around the world with the jazz software he produced. He has since published extensively in swarm intelligence and has gone on to become a lecturer in the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is still performing research in the area. more>>

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Aspirin without the headache

We can now predict the crystal structure of Aspirin in 14 hours rather than
3 months, thanks to a collaboration between the Software Systems Engineering
group and UCL's Computational Chemists. more >>

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Think your way out

UCL computer scientists are part of a breakthrough which allows people to
move in a virtual environment using signals directly from their brain. more>>

What’s going on in there?

Pre-term babies who survive intensive care following birth are then particularly vulnerable to brain injury, which can lead to permanent disability. Finding a non-invasive method of assessing the extent of injury and the effectiveness of treatment becomes vital. UCL-CS is at the forefront of the field of Optical Tomography, a technique of using infra-red light to safely measure functional areas within the brain – the computer know-how comes in when restructuring the data into an image of the brain. More >>

How safe is your password?

The human beings who use computers ie us, are routinely a ccused by security professionals as being the ‘weakest link’. We do things like choose predictable passwords or write them on post-it notes and stick them behind the computer. The solution, say new studies by UCL-CS, is not to lambast users but to design security systems which go with rather than against the grain of human nature and abilities. Believe it or not, this is possible. Read on to find out how. More >>

Worried about your liver?

Computer-simulated organs will play a vital role in advances in biology. UCL scientists are leading the way. More>>

Losing money in the markets?

Systemwire, a UCL spinout, aims to save financial institutions millions with their technology which reduces the incidence of broken trades. More>>

Look deeply into the sun

UCL computer scientists are working with a European team of space scientists to build a vast data grid of everything we know about the sun. More>>

Computers for life?

Decoding the genome is one thing. Unlocking that mass of data to cure diseases is another, which is where UCL Bioinformatics comes in. More >>

Walk this way!

The Mobile Systems Interest Group has a project on the use of Social Network Theory in the definition of group mobility models for simulation of mobile ad hoc network protocols. More >>

How long have you been using the Internet?

Professor Peter Kirstein of UCL first linked the US with UCL in 1973 by connecting to the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. He went on to provide the UK's principal Internet link between the UK and the US throughout the 1980s. In 2003 UCL marked the occasion by conferring two honorary fellowships to ex-colleagues of the department. More >>

What is Fugue?

Ms Gordana Novakovic is the Computer Science Department's first Artist-in-Residence. During her residency, Gordana will work closely with Dr. Peter Bentley, Anthony Ruto, and the Australian composer Rainer Linz, on the interactive artwork Fugue. More >>

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