Research and Development
InfoLab21 is one of the largest and most significant ICT research establishments worldwide and holds Lancaster University's School of Computing and Communications.
Research Themes
Research is organised around 5 major themes
- Communications and Networking
- Computer Systems
- Intelligent Systems
- Software Engineering
- Human-Computer Interaction
The School of Computing and Communications is committed to conducting world-class research with high impact. We publish in leading peer-reviewed journals and conferences, play major roles in the international research community, engage closely with industry and research users, and are active in developing new interdisciplinary research agendas.
Our research is recognized for its exceptional quality and international reputation. The UK Research Assessment Exercise 2008 found all of our research activity (100%) to be at least of international standing, and rated 80% of our research as world leading or internationally excellent. An International Review of UK Computer Science cited us as one of only a handful of centres undertaking "leading edge systems research".
The School’s research output spans five major sub-fields of our discipline: Communications and Networking, Computer Systems, Intelligent Systems, Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction. We actively pursue research agendas that cut across traditional field boundaries to achieve transformative developments in several sub-fields simultaneously. Over the last 15 years, this has established Lancaster as a world-leading place for research on Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing. We also recognize the importance of Computing and Communications for tackling societal challenges in interdisciplinary research initiatives, and are building a strong reputation in Social Computing.
We are proud of our vibrant research culture in the School. Over 80 full-time academic and research staff and over 100 research students have been attracted to Lancaster from all over the world. Across all our activities, we share a strong engineering ethos in our research that emphasizes understanding of real-world challenges and development and experimental evaluation of systems.
Our research is supported by grants from the UK Research Councils, the European Commission and industrial sponsors. The total value of our current grants exceeds £12M. Our grant portfolio reflects our commitment to collaborative research, including on international scale. We attract more funding per staff for Computing and Communications research from Europe than any other University in the UK.
Business Collaboration
To find out how your business can collaborate with our researchers please contact our Business Relationship Officers
Clare Edwards
tel: +44 (0)1524 510466
email: c.a.edwards@lancaster.ac.uk
or
Samantha Winder
tel: +44 (0)01524 510463
email: s.winder@lancaster.ac.uk
Demonstrator
View posters, videos and brochures demonstrating some of the areas of research inside InfoLab21 in out Demonstrator section.
Collaboration with Other Disciplines
Lancaster University has a strong tradition of collaboration both across themes and across departmental boundaries, which is quite rare in the university sector and yet something which is crucially important given the nature of real world problems.
In addition to the School of Computing and Communications, InfoLab21 takes advantage of the many other excellent sources of expertise in the University, for example the Lancaster Environment Centre (LEC) which contains the largest group of environmental researchers in Europe and the outstanding Management School which offers a tremendous range of business expertise and management training. There is also active collaboration with the departments of Engineering, Environmental Science and Psychology.
