The Department of Computer Science has 30 full-time research-active academic staff in four main research groups: Communications, Multimedia and Distributed Systems; Software Systems Engineering; Intelligent Systems, and Vision, Imaging, Virtual Environments and Simulation. The Department was rated grade 5 in the last research assessment exercise. There are approximately 75 full time equivalent PhD students, and 40 full-time research fellows, amounting to approximately £2.29M of annual research funding.

This group has grown rapidly in the last five years. Professor Mel Slater leads the research on Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics, and there are two Lecturers, Dr Yiorgos Chrysanthou and Dr Anthony Steed, in this area. Professor Bernard Buxton leads the research on machine vision. Dr Simon Arridge, Reader, leads the research on medical image processing, and is a principal investigator on the new IRC ‘From medical images and signals to clinical information’. Dr Daniel Alexander is a recently appointed lecturer in the area of image processing and machine vision. Dr Søren-Aksel Sørensen leads the research on simulation.

The VECG team within VIVES carries out research ranging from the technical side of computer graphics, including visibility and rendering, through virtual environments systems research, to the human factors side – such as understanding contributors to the sense of presence in virtual environments and collaboration within shared VEs. There are currently 16 PhD students and Research Fellows (and three vacancies), and two EPSRC supported international visiting researchers in the team.

The team is a member of the new EPSRC Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration, EQUATOR. This started 1st October, 2000 for 6 years, with funding for a three research Fellows and two PhD students working in the area of the interface between physical and digital worlds. The focus of the UCL contribution is towards virtual worlds, including fundamental research in computer graphics and VE systems. The team has excellent computational facilities – for example, a 4-sided CAVE-like system called a ReaCTor funded under the 1998-99 JREI funding round, and recently installed. This is driven by an 8 processor SGI Onyx with four Infinite Reality2 graphics pipes. In addition the team has a 2 processor Onyx IR that drives a range of head-mounted displays, and several conventional workstation displays and PCs.