The work of this group is focused on understanding and leveraging the impact of digital technology on industry and society. Our research is intensely interdisciplinary and covers a number of themes including: 

• Digital and industrial ecosystems as complex  adaptive systems
• Use of ICT to support sustainable living and social change
• Social-constructivist approaches to education and professional development
• Formal models of interactive computing 
• The use of machine learning to support knowledge discovery in the connected age Our work currently finds application in the cloud computing and future Internet domains, but is not limited to them..

Research in the Formal Methods and Security Group is concerned with the development and verification of high-integrity systems. In particular, the focus is on developing mathematically well-founded techniques and approaches to software and hardware systems design and development, especially with respect to concurrent and embedded systems. This includes integration of formal approaches, particularly CSP with the B-Method and Event-B, and practical techniques into systems development. Our security activities are currently focused on trustworthy voting systems. We are playing a leading role in the design and development of the prize-winning Prêt à Voter end-to-end verifiable voting system, and in more general aspects of voting systems design and verification. Other interests include the formal modelling and analysis of security protocols, and the analysis of information flow in concurrent systems.

The Multimedia Security and Forensics Group focuses on the development of multimedia security technologies using digital watermarking and authentication, steganography and steganalysis and their deployment for image, video, audio and binary content. Research into digital watermarking was recently recognised by winning the IET Innovation in Engineering Award 2006 for digital watermarking under the security category. Research within the group encompasses the following areas:

• Digital watermarking and authentication of audio, image and video content
• Image and video forensics for forgery detection
• Imaging device identification and forensics
• Binary watermarking for printing and scanning
• Digital steganography and steganalysis techniques and applications

The Nature Inspired Computing and Engineering (NICE) Group aims to understand natural and biological systems through analysis and synthesis, using computational models of these systems. We investigate, in computational environments, natural intelligent systems at different levels, ranging from populations and societies to nervous systems and brains, and to genes, proteins and metabolites. We are particularly interested in neural information processing in the brain and the organising principles of neural development from the evolutionary perspective. Examples of engineering applications include medical image analysis, human behaviour detection, brain machine interfacing, data mining  and knowledge extraction, modelling and analysis of genetic and metabolic networks for drug design and disease analysis, aerodynamic structure design, multi-criterion decision making and self-organisation of collective systems.