Prehistory – computing before the department

Computing in British universities really started through a series of funding founds by the University Grants Committee (UGC), the government agency that supported all the universities. In 1961, Aberystwyth won funds from the second round to buy the College's first computer, an IBM 1620. (Swansea also bought an IBM 1620, Cardiff gained a Stantec Zebra, and Bangor had an Elliott 803.)

The Statistics Department pioneered computing at Aberystwyth and organised the purchase and installation of the IBM 1620 and provided educational courses and an advisory service to the whole university. Statistics was established in 1960 by Professor Dennis Lindley who was one of the most distinguished statisticians in Britain. Lindley worked on and promoted Bayesian statistics long before it became ubiquitous in AI and Machine Learning. Bayesian theory was very controversial in those days and when Prof Lindley moved to the top British statistics post at University College London in 1967, it was commented that, "it was as though a Jehovah's Witness had been elected Pope."

The IBM 1620 initially had a memory of 20k decimal digits, paper tape input/output and a 10 characters per second typewriter. Later additions were a disk drive and a punched card reader. 1964 records show machine usage was 6907 hours, or 78%. Courses were given in FORTRAN programming to interested university staff and postgraduates. Sylvia Lutkins (shown with the 1620 on the history front page) undertook the role of advisor and helped a great many people with their problems in using and learning about computers. Sylvia was a rigorous expert, skilled at spotting erroneous statistics, and many staff and students have benefitted from Sylvia's consultations. She continued in this role long after the Statistics Department closed and merged with Maths, and still today helps the university on a part-time basis.

From 1964 users could run large jobs on the Chiltern ATLAS near Oxford, but apparently this involved a personal visit.

The Flowers report in 1965 reviewed the university scene for computing and recommended that every university should have good computing facilities. The government then set up the Computer Board in 1966 to oversee this provision and ensure all universities could run suitable mainframe computers. Flowers also recommended setting up advanced regional computing centres at London, Manchester and Edinburgh.

Following Computer Board advice, the Computer Unit was established in 1966 and took over the formal obligations of running a computer service from the Statistics Department. Peter King was appointed head of the Computer Unit, (It might have been called the 'Computer Centre' before 1970?). For the development and equipment of the Computer Unit see this article.

In 1967 the 1620 computer was superceded by an Elliott 4130 computer, complete with card and paper-tape readers, 4 magnetic tape units, a line-printer and a graph plotter. The 1620 had been installed in the Physical Sciences Building but the Elliott was placed in the top floor of the Llandinam Extension – this building became the home of the Computer Unit (and Computer Science) for many years. Unfortunately, this building had no lift and so the operators had to carry supplies of line-printer paper up two fights of stairs. Electronics cabinets had to follow the same route and larger machines (like the Honeywell 6080 in 1979) were craned in after the second floor windows were removed.

The user service was based on batches of punch cards fed into a single stream operating system. In 1968 400 user jobs per week were being processed. ALGOL was the only programming language. A large data preparation room was available for users to punch programs and data onto 80 column punch cards.

In 1968 the FORTRAN compiler became available, and in 1970 a disc-based operating system was introduced. Also provided was a dedicated slot for the use of eight 110 baud Teletypes under the POP/2 language.

In 1969 the IBM 1620 was closed down and the Elliott was renamed an ICL 4130. Algol & Cobol were available and 700 jobs/week were being run for 50 users. (By 1972 the number of jobs run per week was 1370 and that year over eight hundred thousand cards were punched.)

A report by the University Grants Committee and the Computer Board in 1970 considered "the need to stimulate the teaching of computing is an urgent matter" and recommended that introductory courses for all undergraduates to be made available. They claimed the cost would be modest and estimated £3.525 million for the next three years. They recognised that computing science students "may present a special and perhaps acute problem" in the seventies. This stimulated computer science teaching and the creation of computer science departments across the whole university sector.

In 1970 Peter King left the university and Ifan Moelwyn-Hughes was appointed as Head of the Unit. The other staff were Phillip Brenan, Jeremy Perkins, Mo Jalloq, and Nigel Brown.

The First Ten Years

Computer Science was established as an academic department, in the then University College of Wales (UCW), in September 1970 with the appointment of Professor Glyn Emery. Starting from scratch, there was much to be done: staff to be appointed, lecture courses to be planned, syllabuses to be designed, library texts to be ordered, and students to be recruited.

At that time UCW had thirty-five departments organised into four faculties: Arts, Science, Education, and Economic and Social Sciences. Computer Science became the fourth department in the School of Mathematics, joining Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Statistics.

Horst Holstein and Brian Rudling were the first lecturers, appointed in early 1971. Short courses were given to first year School of Maths students and the major task was preparing a Joint Honours course for the next session. In 1972 Mike Tedd was appointed as a lecturer.

The computing resources consisted of the Computer Unit's Elliot 4130 operating as a central university service. Jobs were prepared on punch cards and entered into a single user queue. Output was issued in batches of line printer paper. Algol 60 and BASIC were the programming languages used in teaching although Fortran IV was also available. The BASIC system was created by Nigel Brown in the Computer Unit. For machine code programming the Physics Department provided access to their PDP12.

In August 1973 the Department's first computer was installed, a DEC PDP-11/40, together with the appointment of a Computer Assistant, Ron Harper. Mike Tedd wrote a screen-based editor for the PDP, known as Tedit, which became a valued part of the system.

In 1973 the first degrees were awarded: eleven Joint Honours in Statistics and Computer Science. One student gained a first class degree, as did David Price in the 1974 graduation. In 1974, Mark Lee was appointed as a lecturer.

The department was successful in recruiting overseas postgraduates and the first Masters degree was awarded to Lamia Khalid in 1974. Seventeen MSc degrees were awarded in this decade and a diploma scheme was started in 1976.

1974 saw several key developments, particularly the start of a single honours scheme for Computer Science. The School of Maths introduced a system of modules, called "Units", which allowed students to mix their choice of courses across the four departments. This flexibility proved very popular. According to their selection of units, students could graduate with either Joint or Single Honours. An industrial scheme was also introduced, giving a four-year degree option.

In 1976 the first Single Honours students graduated. Owing to the department's accreditation, they also gained exemption from both parts of the British Computer Society examinations, leading on to professional and chartered qualifications.

In 1979 Pascal became the department's main teaching language. All students would be expected to learn to program in the main language, in addition to experiencing a various range of others.

In 1980 the staff consisted of a professor and four lecturers. Frank Bott had joined while Mike Tedd was on two years job leave. (Mike returned in 1981 and Frank's post was made permanent.) A computer assistant was still employed and David Price had been appointed as a Tutor. A smaller PDP 11 machine helped the loading of the PDP 11/40 which was very heavily used by both staff and students. A robot and vision system had also been acquired.

At the end of the department's first decade all the components of a well-functioning academic department had been established. In particular, degree schemes in Computer Science had been created with the software engineering emphasis that established the department's reputation and were so popular and valued by employers. The number of students graduating was stable at around ten per year, and a new scheme, joint with the Physics Department, entitled Microelectronics and Computing (MEC), had been planned and organised. This was the decade that established the department's teaching direction and ultimate reputation.

The Research Decade

The early 1980s saw considerable expansion and development of the department. This was a decade of research; the first research grants were won, bringing in contract research staff and equipment, and the number of research publications went up from twelve for the previous decade to 121 by 1989.

In 1982 the department's first large research grant was won from the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). This funded the department's first Research Associates: Dave Barnes and Nigel Hardy. A series of grants then followed from the SERC and from the ALVEY initiative, a government response to Japan's Fifth Generation Programme. By the end of this decade there were ten Research Associates employed on grants, a number that has remained as a good average.

Aberystwyth had an excellent reputation for pure science. Data from SRC shows research grant totals for 1975-80 for Wales, with engineering subjects removed for comparison as follows: Aberystwyth £3.2m, Bangor £1.3m, Swansea £2.2m, Cardiff £2.3m. Many medium sized UK universities were below this level.

In 1981 the number of students graduating doubled and the first MEC students graduated in 1982. In this decade the department's first six PhDs were awarded.

In 1982 the department's PDP-11 was replaced by a VAX 11/750 and in 1984 a second Vax 11/750 was installed. The infrastructure of computers and networking hardware became so demanding that the Systems Support group was established with technicians and computer officers, under the capable management of Dave Price.

The Microprocessor Development Laboratory (MDL) had been set up by Physics and Computer Science to support the MEC degree and train students in digital electronics. Martin Lawton was appointed as MDL manager and tutor. Extra staff help for the department was gained from Mathematics with Fred Long and Keith Lucas transferred half-time.

In 1988 ADA replaced Pascal as the main teaching language. We had been teaching ADA for a while and became the first UK university to adopt ADA as our main language. For several years our students had won prizes in the ADA UK competition, in 1988 they took first and second place. Our students also regularly won prizes in the WINtech competitions. WINtech was a government agency promoting links between industry and scientific centres – it was the precursor to the Welsh Development Agency (WDA).

A government White Paper in 1985 proposed two major changes for the universities: a quality assessment system and a reduction in the size of the HE sector. Quality assessment was started in 1986 with a pilot Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). A more effective scheme was used in the 1989 RAE where departments were graded numerically from 1 to 5. Aberystwyth was given a weighted average of 2.74. In 1990 the Principal wrote to all staff urging them to " improve the quality and quantity of their research".

This was a time of great expansion and shortage of space. The university's conservative rooms allocation process was not used to "upstart" departments requesting more space quite so often. A crisis came in the summer of 1985 when a robot was due to be delivered but no lab space was available. Eventually the existing robot lab (previously converted from ex female toilets) was expanded into a more suitable operating space with two linked areas.

In summary, the Department's second decade was a period of exciting growth and expansion. The student numbers increased threefold, there were more degree schemes offered, and the lecturing staff doubled. Two main research groups: Software Engineering; and Robotics Research, were created and firmly established, each with significant funding streams, full-time research staff, and extensive industrial collaboration. Software Engineering became the core discipline of the department and recognised the graduates' achievements as engineers.

The 1990s - Further Expansion in Difficult Times

In this decade, the student intake trebled, the external research income more than doubled (from £2.1m to £5.1m), and the number of published papers increased to 413.

The university and the department had been successful in winning funding from the European Social Fund (ESF) for an MSc conversion course. This took graduates from almost any discipline, except Computing, and 'converted' them into software engineers. Previously most of our MSc students were from overseas but the conversion idea attracted many home graduates with the promise of highly paid jobs in industry. This was a great success and produced a huge boom in Masters numbers, from 17 graduating in the previous decade to 245 in the 1990s. Special topics and teaching programmes were devised especially for this course.

New first-degree schemes were approved for BEng/MEng and for MSc in Software Engineering, this was a natural progression to recognise our key theme and proved very popular. Our first students on the five-year MEng degree graduated in 1996. A new joint degree with Cardiff University was started entitled 'AI with Engineering Applications'. This used the University of Wales Videoconferencing facility – a series of lecture studios linking all the colleges on a BT leased network.

In 1991 a 'Women into Computing' short course was held with 350 attendees. It has always been difficult to recruit women students and these initiatives continue as an important and positive activity.

The government opened its Student Loans company in 1991.

In 1993 a new modularisation scheme for courses was started. This was rather like the units scheme in the School of Maths rolled out over the whole university. It had the advantage of more flexibility in degree content but also replaced the three-term system with two semesters per year, which was somewhat controversial. As the MEC degree had closed the Microprocessor Development Laboratory (MDL) was moved to solely CS management and renamed the Digital Systems Laboratory (DSL).

Weekend team-building courses at places like Aberdyfi were introduced in 1993 and these became a widely esteemed feature of the first-year programme. Students continued to win WDA and ADA UK prizes throughout the 90s.

Research continued apace with increased grant income and active academic and industrial collaborators. Sun computers became the first choice for research and a significant departmental network of Sun workstations and servers was created. Sun Micro Systems was founded in 1982 and their machines rapidly became popular in universities. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, for example: Unix, RISC processors (SPARC), thin client computing, JAVA, and virtual-machine processing. A Beowulf cluster of 25 PCs for bioinformatics research added to our computational resources and during this period the university was the most concentrated centre of computing power in Wales.

This decade was also a period of change. The research councils were remodelled – the SERC became the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and the BBSRC and PPARC were created, (Biotechnology and Biological and Particle Physics and Astronomy research councils respectively; PPARC later became part of STFC). 1998 introduced university tuition fees across the UK.

Following the 1985 White Paper, the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992 made major changes in the funding of the universities. This replaced the UGC with separate regional funding agencies for England and Wales, HEFCE and HEFCW respectively, and allowed thirty-five polytechnics to become universities (often referred to as the "new universities" or "post-1992 universities"). The university sector found this change had many consequences but a reduction in size did not occur, quite the opposite.

The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) continued. There were two assessments in the 1990s, in 1992 and 1996. In 1992 there were six grades: 1 to 5 and 5*. Computer Science was graded 4 (Cardiff was 2 and Swansea was 3).

In 1996 there were seven grades: 1, 2, 3b, 3a, 4, 5 and 5*. All three Computer Science Departments in the University of Wales were graded 4. All volume-based evaluation was removed to account for the criticism that volume rather than quality was being rewarded. The 1992 exercise had also stipulated that the staff submitted for assessment had to be in post by a specific date (the "census date") in order to counter the criticisms that the staff that had moved on were still counted in the assessment. This led to the phenomenon of "poaching" of highly qualified staff by other Universities ahead of the census date.

In 1996 the federal university rationalised the college names and UCW became UWA (University of Wales, Aberystwyth). With hindsight we can now see that the federal structure was on a path that would lead to it breaking up (completed in 2007).

2000 - The New Millennium

The department continued to grow. Research income nearly doubled again to £9.9m, the number of published papers increased to 560, and 12% more PhDs graduated (37).

The ESF conversion MSc course passed its peak but still graduated 131 students in this decade. More degree schemes were designed and offered, including Business Information Technology, Space Science, Graphics, Vision and Games, AI and Robotics, and Open Source Computing.

In 2003 the department became part of the newly created Institute of Mathematics and Physical Sciences (IMAPS). New staff were recruited included Profs Qiang Shen and Reyer Zwiggelaar in 2004.

In 2009 a team of students won the Silver award in the Microsoft Imagine Cup, Software Design Challenge, supported by Chris Loftus and Sandy Spence.

Several international conferences were hosted by the department, including AISB'03, TAROS, and QR07. For details of AISB'03 see this article.

Laboratory space increased with the new Intelligent Systems Lab (housing various large robot systems and the Vicon motion capture system), a new lab for the Robot Scientist project in the Bioinformatics group, and a space robotics lab especially built to simulate the terrain on Mars. These developments helped to raise the media awareness of the department, as did the new building for the Visualisation Centre, planned by Physics with help from the department, and also the many excursions of robot sailing boats and autonomous land vehicles, see the article about robot boats.

There were another two national research assessments (RAE) in the 2000s, in 2001 and 2008. In 2001 there were seven grades: 1,2,3a,3b,4,5,5*, but in 2008 this was reduced to four: 1*,2*,3*,4*. Sharing of staff was abolished. Submission required four research outputs, published from each full-time member of staff. Each assessment unit had a quality profile (of proportions in these grades), instead of a single grade for an entire subject area. This was done to counter the criticism that large departments were able to hide a "very long tail" of lesser work and still get high ratings and, conversely, excellent staff in low-graded departments were unable to receive adequate funding.

In 2008 the department was top in Wales with 100% of the research deemed international quality, and 70% world leading or internationally excellent. This department was one of the top 20 Computer Science departments in the UK and the best in Wales, (quality profile: 25% 4*, 45% 3*, 30% 2* - GPA 2.95).

In 2007 the federal structure finally closed and UWA became Aberystwyth University and started awarding its own degrees. In this year tuition fees were allowed to rise to a cap of £3,000pa.

(The university stopped publishing graduation lists and annual reports in 2007 so less data are available. Current members of the department are asked to supply any additional information for these recent years.)

The 2010s

Research continued to grow with 66 PhDs graduating, up 78% on the previous decade.

Important funding from EPSRC helps in the recruitment of postgraduate students. A Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Advanced Computing was awarded to Swansea University in partnership with four others: Aberystwyth, Bangor, Bristol, and Cardiff universities.

Tuition fees rose to a maximum of £9,000pa in 2012. Maintenance grants (for lower income families) were scrapped in 2016. Welsh students could apply for grants of up to £5,190, plus a £3,810 loan to cover fees of £9,000.

In 2012 a college-wide consultation was carried out on the academic structure. Afterwards, the 17 departments in 3 faculties were restructured into 7 institutes, with reduced administrative posts. The structure has now returned to 3 faculties, with Computer Science in the Faculty of Business and Physical Sciences, together with Maths, Physics, Information Studies, and the Business School.

A robotic orchestra from the department, created and organised by Dave Price was featured in the 2014 December Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution. A video extract is available on the BBC News website for Mid-Wales.

Researcher James Law made a successful bid for the department to be a 2012 Olympic torchbearer in the UK Torch Relay as celebration of Alan Turing's centennial, see the article about the Olympic Torch.

The project Software Alliance Wales was funded by the European Social Fund for almost exactly £1million. Chris Price led the AU component for this 5 year project.

In 2014, REF, the Research Excellence Framework, replaced the RAE. Five grades were used 1*,2*,3*,4* and unclassified. The impact of research is now a major component of the assessment, but this is difficult to measure. Impact has been defined as meaning impact outside the academy, in other words, the effects which are often only manifest decades after the original work is done. This might create a bias towards "applied research", which has a more immediate impact, but this argument is exactly why "applied" work was removed from the early assessment schemes.

In the REF 2014 evaluation, the Department was ranked 11th in the UK with 75% of its research outputs and 100% of impact case studies were recognized as world leading (four-star) or internationally excellent (three-star). The department also holds the first place in Wales for research intensity in Computer Science and Informatics.

The department houses one of the UK’s best research groups with strong emphasis on digital medicine, smart agriculture and intelligent decision support. The department has a long track record in research including publications in high impact journals and collaborations with top academic and industry partners worldwide.

The department is part of the Supercomputing Wales consortium and currently receives funding from Cancer Research UK, EU’s Horizon 2020 program, EPSRC, Health and Care Research Wales, Stroke Research, Innovation and Education Fund, Welsh Government’s Sêr Cymru and Knowledge Economy Exchange Scholarship programs.

There are currently 30 active research members including four Professors (one REF panel member for Computer Science and Informatics since 2014), two Readers, four senior lecturers, 13 lecturers, seven Research Fellows and six Sêr Cymru Cofund fellows.

It seems extraordinary that the department has grown to the extent that it is now offering twenty-two separate Single Honours degrees, five Joint degrees, and six Masters.

In 2019, the department achieved the Bronze Award for Athena Swan, recognising the department's work to support and transform gender equality for staff and students in higher education.

Reaching 2020 – The Department's Half-Century

Reaching its fiftieth year, the Computer Science Department has been one of the most successful departments in Aberystwyth University.

The themes developed in the early decades continue, with software engineering as the core of the department's teaching programme. Graduating students find they are in great demand for their skills in the software industry. This is because the department treats computing as an engineering discipline and this permeates all the degree schemes. Similarly the other early theme, artificial intelligence, is still a major thread running through all four of the current research groups.

Many of our graduates are now holding important senior posts in industry and many of our students, postgraduate students and research assistants have gone on to lead highly successful academic careers elsewhere - including a significant number of professors.

The department has also been well managed, consistently attracting large numbers of applicants, regularly winning valuable external funding, and efficiently operating under varying budgetary regimes.