Welcome to the Department of Computer Science

The Department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London is an international centre of excellence in research and teaching. Medium-sized and friendly with a strong research expertise in Artificial Intelligence, Theory of Computing and Bioinformatics, we offer an innovative and up-to-date teaching programme.

In the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008, 99% of the department's research publications were rated as of international quality, with over a quarter recognised as world leading, and a futher half internationally excellent.

In the 2008 National Student Survey the Department was second equal in the UK (first equal in England) rankings for Computer Science departments. This strong vote of support by our students - an overall satisfaction rating of 97% - reflects our innovative curriculum, the high level of support given to students starting out in computer science, and the breadth of our research-linked final year options.

Latest news is that this department is listed eighth overall in The Times "Good University Guide 2010" rankings for Computer Science.

Induction Week starts 20 September 2010

Term dates for 2010-2011

Thinking of studying here?

Come along to one of our College Open Days or a special Undergraduate UCAS Open Day and find out more!

We look forward to showing you the Department!

Undergraduate Scholarships for 2010-2011
£1,000 in the first year
The Scholarship Challenge
Donald Davies Scholarship

Postgraduate Scholarships for 2010-2011 including EPSRC/CASE Studentship for PhD in Machine Learning, with Thales UK, starting September 2010 OR January 2011 (deadline for applications 1 November 2010). Eligibility conditions apply.

Graduation 2010 Prizewinners

Computer Science students swept the board at the Graduation ceremony on 15 July 2010 (video, photos), when the awards given by the Faculty of Science to finalists were won by Sian Jones and Conrad Koppitz. Sian, who has graduated with BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics, won the Harrison Prize for the best joint student (finalist) in the Science Faculty, and Conrad gained the Martin-Holloway Prize for the best single honours finalist, having achieved some of the highest marks ever in his final year Computer Science examinations. Both awards are worth £100. Joe Reddington, who was awarded PhD for his thesis "Improvements to Instruction Identification for Custom Instruction Set Design", won the College Team Teaching Prize with Professor Fionn Murtagh of the Computer Science Department and Dr Douglas Cowie of the English Department for their innovative project on team authoring (Joe also won the College's Postgraduate Tutor Teaching Prizes in 2008 and 2009).

Latest News

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Alexander Clark won the best paper prize, sponsored by Google, at the CoNLL 2010 conference on Computational Natural Language Learning for his paper "Efficient, correct, unsupervised learning of context-sensitive languages". "The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing", edited by Alexander Clark, Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin, is published by Wiley-Blackwells, July 2010.

Professor Robert Merton, Harvard Business School, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics, gave the 2010 Kolmogorov Lecture: Observations on the Science of Finance in the Practice of Finance: Past, Present, and Future at Royal Holloway on 23 February 2010.

Matthias Mnich, a co-author of G. Gutin, E.J. Kim and A. Yeo in a paper " Ordinal Embedding Relaxations Parameterized Above Tight Lower Bound, " won the Philips Award of the Royal Society for Mathematics in the Netherlands in April 2010, for a presentation based on the paper.

Bioinformatics research student Prajwal Bhat has won the top prize in the Bright Ideas 2010 competition run by WestFocus (a consortium of around 10 universities including RHUL). Praj's idea is for an eco-friendly and economically viable enzymatic pre-treatment of the toxic effluent from paper manufacturing, using bioengineered yeasts.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Script analysis - Prof Fionn Murtagh and Adam Ganz of the Department of Media Arts have analysed these US television scripts and decoded the structure and hidden patterns in meaning that make them so successful - more. This work has just featured in The Guardian

Pioneering software robots to aid businesses - A joint venture, using intelligent agent technology developed Dr Kostas Stathis's research team in the Department of Computer Science, has been launched with Thinking SAFE Ltd, a software company supplying data backup, disaster recovery and business continuity solutions to clients of all sizes.

Research initiated here in 2006 by Dr Alberto Paccanaro and colleagues from Yale is reported in their recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, highlighted on both ScienceDaily and Science websites. Quantifying environmental adaptation of metabolic pathways in metagenomics describes new mathematical models for analyzing huge amounts of data in different ocean habitats (temperature, salinity etc) and metabolic activity in marine micro-organisms, which could be valuable biosensors for detecting environmental change.