We conduct research in five key application areas, often in collaboration with other disciplines, and with research partners both inside and outside the University of Cambridge.
Emily Shuckburgh, Professor of Environmental Data Science leads the AI for the Study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER) doctoral training centre, which we co-host. Many of its students are supervised/co-supervised by our academics.
We also co-host the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits, set up to support students and researchers in the relevant areas of computer science, environmental science, and economics; and to create a decentralised marketplace where purchasers of carbon credits can confidently and directly fund trusted nature-based projects.
And we have an Energy and Environment Research Group, which applies computer science to address renewable energy integration, energy demand reduction, and the assessment and management of environmental impact from human activities.
We held a Climate and Sustainability Research Showcase in January 2024 featuring talks by early-career researchers from this Department and the AI for the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER) doctoral training centre.
This Department administers the virtual Alta Institute which investigates new ways of using technology to enhance language learning and develop cutting-edge approaches to assessment.
We also have two educational collaborations with Raspberry Pi: Ada Computer Science, a free online platform for teaching and learning GCSE & A Level Computer Science, and the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, which carries out research to help increase our understanding of what works in the teaching and learning of computing. It was featured at the Education Research Showcase we held in January 2022.
Healthcare-related research ranges from using body sound recordings to train computer models to predict Covid-19, to employing AI techniques in the quest to improve cancer treatment. These were among the projects discussed at our Healthcare Research Showcase in January 2021.
Also featured at this event were a study into the design of a Robot Mindfulness Coach, and predicting outcomes for psychotic disorders, using brain connectivity and transcribed speech data.
The goal of this research is to create technologies that better meet human needs, through studying the needs of humans. Using diverse research methods from social science, experimental psychology, cognitive science and other disciplines, we address grand challenges such as social and emotional interaction with robots, or crossing the perceptual line between interaction with virtual and real worlds.
We work with AI, machine learning and data science methods to build intelligent tools for digital life, supporting business and engineering, artistic expression and enquiry, and enabling collaborative design processes that address global challenges.
Computer security has been among our research interests for many years. We research the technologies used by security engineers; we also study the dependability of whole systems, which involves the economics of information security and spills over into policy.
We have established groups collecting data on cybercrime and abuse for use by researchers worldwide (the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre); developing novel vulnerability-mitigation mechanisms that are now starting to appear in commercial CPU designs (the CHERI project); and studying hardware tamper-resistance and emission security (the Tamper Lab).
A Security Research Showcase in January 2023 highlighted some of the security work being carried out here, from protecting whistleblowers to preventing the abuse of item-tracking technology, and from software compartmentalisation to cybercrime.
