The University of Essex is one of the UK’s leading academic institutions. In the 2008 national assessment Essex was ranked the 9th out of 159 universities and colleges for the quality of its research – and top in the social sciences – while the quality of teaching was ranked eighth in the UK in the 2008 Sunday Times University Guide. The School of Computer Science & Electronic Engineering has over 50 academic staff and a further 50 support, research and technical staff. Its particular strengths include mobile robotics, embedded systems, computational finance, intelligent environments, computer networking, telecommunications, and multimedia & video. Embedded & Intelligent Systems research concentrates on novel computer and embedded systems architectures, including embedded microcontroller processor cores with novel architectures combining high performance with full signal processing capabilities. The Robotics research at Essex is to develop various kinds of intelligent robots that are used in unstructured environments in order to improve the quality of life and security for everyone. The research activities include swam robotics, human-robot interaction, Flying/underwater robots, AI and expert systems, distributed control architectures, data fusion algorithms, navigation and localization, SLAM, multi-robot collaboration, GA, Fuzzy and NN for robot control.
Ten facts about the University
Ten facts about the University
- Essex has launched a £200 million-plus five-year capital investment plan to provide modern, sustainable student facilities on its three campuses at Colchester, Southend and Loughton.
- Forty per cent of the University’s students come from overseas, with nearly 130 different countries represented.
- In 2009, Essex won the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for its pioneering role in advancing the legal and broader practice of international human rights.
- Essex is home to Europe’s only public collection of modern and contemporary art from Latin America which includes more than 600 works.
- In 2009, the University was awarded Best University Halls in the National Student Housing Survey. Essex provides on-campus accommodation for more than half of its students, and in 2010 a new 561-room block will open in Southend.
- The world’s largest long-term longitudinal survey of 40,000 UK households is being led by the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University.
- Essex is the only university other than Oxford, to have conducted the UK’s top political science research study, the British Election Study.
- Computer scientists at the University developed the world’s first autonomous robotic fish, which took to the water at the London Aquarium in 2005.
- The University is worth more than £200 million annually to the local economy.
- The eighteenth century landscape painter John Constable painted Wivenhoe Park, the site of the Colchester Campus. His painting was exhibited at the University Gallery in 2000.