The Computer Science group at Edinburgh Napier delivers world-class research and enterprise in the areas of artificial intelligence, data science and visualisation, games development and software engineering. The latest UK national research assessment, REF 2021 in Computer Science and Informatics category places us as third best for research power in Scotland. In terms of research impact, we are a top U.K. university with 100% of assessed work from areas of computing achieved the highest rating (4* = rated as world-leading). A recognition achieved only by six other universities in the UK. Based on Times Higher Education Ranking 2023, our computer science is ranked third among CS departments in Scotland.
Our artificial intelligence research focuses on intelligent agents, machine learning, natural language generation and evolutionary robotics. We develop fundamental theory in areas including argumentation and dialogue theory, computer vision, deep learning, evolutionary computation, multi-agent systems, and reinforcement learning. We apply this to a wide range of application areas including conversational AI, industrial scheduling and timetabling problems, malware detection, policy making, robotics, energy, medicine, health, social simulation, and understanding trust between people and AI.
Our data science and visualisation research focuses on data analytics, effective visual representations, explainability, real-time visualisation in virtual reality, and topic modelling. Our key application areas include analysis of biological data, big sensor data, health and social care, real-time computer vision for facial and body tracking, and real-time 3d simulations using GPU programming.
Our software engineering research focuses on empirical software engineering, mining software repositories, compiler design, cloud and edge computing, cyber physical systems, green computing, internet-of-things, micro-service oriented architectures, and secure software development. We are especially interested in the application of artificial intelligence to the above areas.
Our games development research focuses on computer graphics, computer vision, video games, visualisation, and immersive technology. We are especially interested in impact oriented research and have had spin offs acquired by large corporations.
Fully funded PhDs
Adversarial Learning for Industrial Control Systems
Supervisor – Dr Kehinde Babaagba
Defeating complex families of malware using evolutionary based adversarial learning
Supervisor – Dr Kehinde Babaagba
Supervisor – Dr Oluwaseun Bamgboye
Trusted-Edge and Semantic-based Approach for Dependable IoT and Smart Systems
Supervisor – Dr Oluwaseun Bamgboye
Characterising Automatically Generated Text
Supervisor – Dr Peter Barclay
Using Generative AI to Draw Diagrams
Supervisor – Dr Peter Chapman
Supervisor – Dr Peter Chapman
Generative navigation for autonomous robots using active inference
Supervisor – Dr Brian Davison
Locomotion and navigation strategies for quadrupedal robots
Supervisor – Dr Brian Davison
Continual Learning in Black-Box Optimisation
Supervisor – Professor Emma Hart
Adaptive Robot Behaviours in dynamic and outdoor settings
Supervisor – Dr Leni Le Goff
Supervisor – Dr Leni Le Goff
Capture and Contextualisation of Cultural Heritage Data
Supervisor – Dr Babis Koniaris
Supervisor – Dr Saima Rafi
Query Performance Prediction for Neural Information Retrieval: Application to Conversational Search
Supervisor – Dr Md Zia Ullah
Self funded PhDs
Building the next Generation of Smart Grid Infrastructures
Supervisor – Dr Christos Chrysoulas
Gendered perspectives of data science
Supervisor – Dr Khristin Fabian
Natural Language Generation in the Era of Large Language Models
Supervisor – Dr Dimitra Gkatzia
Blockchain Technology and Decentralised Finance (DeFi) : The Bridge to the Future of Finance
Supervisor – Dr Zakwan Jaroucheh
Blockchain-based Ecosystem to Combat Fake News
Supervisor – Dr Zakwan Jaroucheh
Supervisor – Dr Zakwan Jaroucheh
Supervisor – Professor Xiaodong Liu
Automating Software Development with Semantic-based Generative AI
Supervisor – Professor Xiaodong Liu
Data Quality and Cleaning in Big Data
Supervisor – Dr Taoxin Peng
Supervisor – Dr Simon Powers
Advancing Software Development and Maintenance through Foundation Models
Supervisor – Professor Ashkan Sami
Secure Code Generation with Foundation Model
Supervisor – Professor Ashkan Sami
Machine Learning and Hyper-heuristic
Supervisor – Dr Kevin Sim
Understanding the True Nature of Fitness Landscapes in Evolutionary Computation
Supervisor – Dr Sarah Thomson
Supervisor – Dr Amjad Ullah
Architecture for decentralising intelligence in dynamic cloud-fog-edge compute continuum
Supervisor – Dr Amjad Ullah
Supervisor – Dr Amjad Ullah
AI enhanced city and mobility design
Supervisor – Dr Neil Urquhart
Advancing Explainable Artificial Intelligence
Supervisor – Dr Simon Wells
Advancing the state of the art in Argument Mining
Supervisor – Dr Simon Wells
Reliable Guided Conversational AI
Supervisor – Dr Simon Wells