ULEICES

The University of Leicester is one of the UK s leading research and teaching universities. The University was founded as a University College in 1921 and granted a Royal Charter in 1957. The University has 18,568 students including 10,327 at postgraduate level. There are 42 academic departments and 35 special divisions and centres located in six faculties: Arts, Education and Continuing Studies, Law, Medicine and Biological Sciences, Science and Social Sciences. There is a University-wide Graduate School and an Institute of Lifelong Learning. The University employs approximately 3,000 staff. The University was ranked in the UK s top twenty universities by the Sunday Times and the Financial Times in 2001 and 2002. It was placed in the top 20 UK universities for research grant and contract income. The University had 25 ratings of 5*, 5 or 4 in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise when 84% of the staff were in units of assessment of national and international excellence. In the Teaching Quality Assessment four units achieved a grade of excellent before 1995 and since then 15 units have received a score of 22 or more out of 24. The University is committed to producing research and teaching of the highest quality, to promoting undergraduate and postgraduate studies through campus-based and distancelearning programmes and to developing close collaboration with the local and regional community.

The Department of Computer Science has 16 academic staff in Computer Science: three Professors, one Senior Lecturer and twelve Lecturers. In addition to the secretarial and computer support staff, there are also four full-time staff (demonstrators) who assist with teaching. The Department runs undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and contributes to a large number of other degree programmes. At postgraduate level the Department will run an MSc in Bioinformatics with the School of Biological Sciences, with the first intake in January 2003. An MSc in Advanced Scientific Computation (to be run jointly with the Applied Mathematics Group) has also been approved and will start in September 2003. The Department also aims to mount one or more MSc programmes in Computer Science in the near future. There is an active PhD programme; in particular, the Department is part of the Midlands Graduate School in Computer Science, which is a consortium of local universities that offer short courses aimed at PhD students.

The University has as an aim to establish Computer Science at Leicester as a research unit of the highest quality, and progress towards this goal has been rapid. The quality of Computer Science research was awarded grade 4 (on a scale of 1-2-3b-3a-4-5-5*, with 5* being the highest) in the nationwide Research Assessment Exercise held in 2001. This continued a trend of significant improvement over the previous exercises in 1992 and 1996. The strength of the research activity of the Department has been, traditionally, in the areas of Algorithms and Complexity, and Semantics. More recently, it decided to extend its activity to the area of Software Specification and Design, with a particular emphasis on methodologies and technologies for developing and evolving systems within their application domain: domain modelling, software architectures, service-oriented development, formal methods, model driven approaches, inter-alia. This new research group (SoftSD) is under the coordination of Prof. J L Fiadeiro, who moved from the University of Lisbon, and will constitute the core of Leicester s contribution to AGILE.

Key personnel:

Jos� Luiz Fiadeiro

Part of Partners

Hubert Baumeister (baumeist@informatik.uni-muenchen.de)

April 29, 2005