The School of Computer Science sets up the “Centre of Excellence for Research in Computational Intelligence and Applications” (CERCIA), with substantial funding (circa £2.6 million) from AWM, (the regional development agency) and support from several leading companies, such as BTexact Technologies, Honda Research Institute (Europe), Rolls Royce, Qinetiq, HP Labs, ProEnviro, Severn Trent Water, STMicroelectronics, Thales, etc. The focus of the Centre is applied research and exploitation of computational intelligence (CI) technologies, which not only have increasingly become an indispensable part of key technologies in ICT, but also extend their applicability to a wide range of fields, e.g., engineering, telecommunications, finance, economics, biology, medicine,transportation, environmental science, social sciences, etc.

The Centre’s research strength comes from a group of more than 25 full-time researchers in CI and natural computation in the School, its extensive international links, and its partnerships with external businesses. The Centre is led by Prof. Xin Yao (the Director) and aims to create a cluster of academic and industrial partners who are involved in and need CI technologies so that expertise and best practices can be shared, and collaborations can be formed. The Centre is highly multidisciplinary and will organise a number of workshops, build R&D networks and carry out collaborative projects with partners. The Centre’s three industrial networks (focusing on optimisation, data analysis and data mining, and design) will primarily be on solving non-trivial real-world problems. The Centre is actively seeking both academic and industrial partners in exploring mutually beneficial collaborations, from joint R&D projects to consultancy, from technology exploitation to CPD courses.

For more information about the Centre, contact Ms. Padma Reddy at (0121) 414 2216 or P.Reddy@cs.bham.ac.uk

For more information about the people and the research strength behind CERCIA, please visit www.cercia.ac.uk/