Research

An international reputation

Informatics Research Centre defines informatics as ‘the study of the creation, management and utilisation of information in scientific and economic activities.’

Informatics research in IRC covers a wide range of research themes from information management to information processing within the information lifecycle. One of the key aims of our research is to help organisations to maximise their added-value and enhance their business competitiveness by the effective management of information resources.

IRC research activities can be found in domains of business and management, IT for strategic management, enterprise information systems, financial modelling and prognostics, bio-computing, construction management, intelligent buildings, pervasive intelligent spaces, and IT supported collaborative work. IRC attracts researchers and students from around the world. Our current research outcomes are actively disseminated to the research communities and industries.

Research themes and topics

• Applied informatics and semiotics – analysing and modelling organisations and their requirements as communication and information systems, business and IT architecture, autonomic systems, agent systems, ontology engineering for knowledge management.
• Business diagnosis and decision support – benchmarking, logistics, supply-chain management, virtual and distributed organisations, business and IT strategy, adaptive information architecture, service-oriented architecture, content management.
• Social informatics and collaborative systems – computer-supported cooperative work, community systems, social networks, human-computer interaction, information retrieval, data mining, business intelligence, media informatics.

• Perceptual, Usability and Information Acquisition - A user will not continue to pay for a system or device that they perceive to be of low quality, irrespective of its intrinsic appeal. Consequently, commercial development should not ignore user-centric design or else will risk alienating or excluding the end-user. Research includes quantifying the perceptual impact of emerging technologies; human-centric data manipulation; eye-tracking and attentive displays, as well as intelligent systems and human-computer interaction.

These themes reflect the research expertise and focus of current IRC researchers. There are common issues and methods that span across these themes. IRC maintains a close-knit community of researchers working together as a team to carry out research in one or more of the research themes.

Common reference application domains include e-business, e-enterprise, e-learning, and intelligent buildings. Recent projects include autonomic computing, intelligent buildings and pervasive spaces, agent-based distributed systems, ICT for public safety, collaborative information retrieval, and enterprise modelling, funded through government, EU and industrial grants.

Associated labs

There are four labs associated with the IRC:

• Futures Forum Research Group (FFR)
• Intelligent Buildings Research Group
• Bio-diversity Informatics Lab (BDI)
• Innovative Construction Research Centre
• Technologies for Sustainable Built Environment (TSBE)

Please see further information.