Together with colleagues from Canada, the United States, and the Netherlands, the researchers will be developing tools to allow people to work effectively and efficiently with the vast amounts of historic material currently being digitized.

The international partnership has received over £420,000 funding under the prestigious international grant competition Digging into Data Challenge for the project ChartEx (charter excavator). The aim is to develop new ways of exploring European medieval charters that deal with the buying, selling or leasing of property.

Charters record legal transactions of property of all kinds: houses, workshops, fields and meadows and describe the people who lived there. Long before records such as censuses or birth registers existed charters were - and still are - the major resource for researching people, for tracing changes in communities over time and for finding ancestors.

Charters also provide detailed evidence of how and why cities, towns and villages have developed over time, allowing researchers to track the ownership of individual parcels of land over centuries and connect them to the histories of the people who lived there.

The project is particularly exciting for York researchers as 2012 is the 800th anniversary of York becoming a self-governing city. On 9 July, 1212, King John signed a special communal charter allowing York’s citizens, rather than the sheriff, to collect and pay the annual tax to the Crown, to hold their own courts and appoint a mayor.

Professor Helen Petrie, from the Human Computer Interaction Research Group here in the Department of Computer Science at York, said: “ChartEx will allow us to develop new ways of exploring the content of digital historic records using a range of techniques from computer science and computational linguistics.

“Using our expertise in human-computer interaction, we will then build a ‘virtual workbench’ for historians allowing them to work much more easily with digital records than currently.”

The Digging into Data Challenge promotes innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis, creating interdisciplinary and international projects. It is funded by eight international organisations from four countries, including JISC, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from the UK.

Fourteen teams from the UK, the Netherlands, Canada and the United States have been awarded grants totalling more than £3 million to investigate how computational techniques typically applied to the sciences can be applied to change humanities and social science research.

ChartEx is a collaboration between historians and computer scientists from the Universities of York and Brighton, UK, the University of Washington and Columbia University, USA, the Computer Science Institute of Leiden, Netherlands and the University of Toronto, Canada. The ChartEx project is the only project in the current round of funding to include all four countries.

The project was launched at the first meeting of international partners at The National Archives in London. The National Archives are supplying the digital archives in the UK, together with the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York.

See what The Telegraph says about our York courses on their website.

Our employment figures for undergraduates are one of the best in the country, with over 95% of our graduates going into graduate level employment within six months of leaving York. Find out more about where our graduates go.

The six metre high laboratory provides an ideal base to develop and test swarm robotic systems - small, self-repairing robots.

Swarm robotics could potentially play a vital role in future planetary and deep sea exploration, as well as search and rescue operations. For example, groups of small, inexpensive robots could be used to search for aircraft black boxes following a disaster over water, or as part of search and rescue missions following natural disasters. Teams of robots could cover more ground than one large robot, and should one breakdown, the rest of the group could continue the operation.

York’s research into swarm robotics is led by Professor Jon Timmis who has received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award for his research into self-healing swarm robotics systems, with funding for five years.

Researchers from the University’s Departments of Electronics and Computer Science are also collaborating on an EU-funded project, developing underwater swarm robotic systems which are capable of carrying out self-organising search and rescue tasks, and relaying information back to a base station.

The new laboratory is allowing researchers to test ideas in a controlled environment before moving into more challenging environments.

To mark the official launch of the robotics laboratory, Professor Timmis will deliver a public lecture and demonstration of swarm robotics on Wednesday, 25 January.

Professor Timmis said: “Our research is concentrating on developing biologically-inspired control systems for lots of small, inexpensive robots working together in swarms. All the robots behave independently, but like a swarm of insects or our immune systems, the robots interact among themselves and alter their behaviour based upon the behaviour of others.

“Our aim is to develop systems to identify individual and collectively failing robots, diagnose what is wrong and then take corrective action to rectify the failure.”

The large 90 metre² arena can be split into smaller areas for research purposes and features a public viewing area, allowing school parties and visitors to watch experiments and research.

Development of the new £21 million Department of Computer Science building, which was officially opened last March, was supported by investment from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) in Yorkshire and the Humber, part of a major infrastructure project led by Science City York to extend the assets and strategic potential of York as a leading centre for science and innovation.

Professor John McDermid, Head of the Department of Computer Science, said: “The new robotics laboratory provides us with a world-class facility at York, allowing us to foster the highest standards of academic excellence.

“Not only does it supply academics and students with a fantastic resource, but we are sure the robotics laboratory will capture the public’s imagination, inspiring more young people to follow a technical education.”

The free public lecture Can a robot have an immune system? is part of the Department of Computer Science’s Roundhouse Lectures series and will include a demonstration of how the robots work.

Admission to the lecture on Wednesday, 25 January in the Ron Cooke Hub, room RCH/037 at 6.45pm is by free ticket only. Visit www.york.ac.uk/tickets, email publiclectures@york.ac.uk, or phone 01904 324466.

The IBM team is dedicated to the support and development of IBM’s Cognos Financial Performance Management (FPM) software - in particular, new modelling and monitoring tools for the TM1 OLAP database.

TM1 is a multidimensional, in-memory OLAP engine which provides exceptionally fast performance for analysing complex and sophisticated business models, large data sets and also streamed data.

The team, led by Peter Thomas, have been settling in over the last few weeks and are enjoying the new facilities immensely: “Our new environment provides us with all the facilities we need in order to continue our successful research and development projects. Additionally, there now exists an even greater opportunity to extend our working relationship with the University and possibly take our research in new directions.”

Both the University and IBM have long recognised the value of successful collaboration. For example, here in Computer Science, we collaborate regularly with industry to ensure that our teaching is relevant, as well as providing knowledge transfer to organisations and governments worldwide. Collaboration is a key tenet of IBM’s Smarter Planet vision, literally developing ways to use technology to make the world work in a smarter way.

Professor John McDermid OBE FREng, Head of the Department of Computer Science said, "We are delighted to welcome the IBM Lab into Computer Science. We see this as a major step forward in our strategic relationship with IBM. We look forward to identifying ways in which we can work with the IBM team, benefitting from their world-leading work on analytics and finding opportunities for research collaboration."

You can find out more about IBM at www.ibm.com/uk

Winners were announced at a gala dinner on 24 November at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London. The awards, now in their seventh year, represent a high profile opportunity to celebrate the excellence and achievements of UK higher education institutions. York was named University of the Year in last year’s THE awards ceremony.

The Advanced Computer Architectures group was one of six shortlisted research teams in this category. The award is designed to recognise a team whose innovative research has made or has the potential to make, a far-reaching impact on its field and to catch the public's imagination.

The group is led by Professor Jim Austin. He said: "We are absolutely delighted by the award; it recognises the years of hard work of the team and its collaborators. I am sure that the main factors in winning have been our commitment to solving real problems, in real applications, with an understanding of the commercial constraints.

"We have benefitted from a consistent and talented team over the last 10 years, supported through Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Technology Strategy Board (TSB) grants. This has allowed us to build the deep expertise needed to solve the hard problems industry faces. Being in a successful, supportive Department and University has made all the difference. We are looking forward to a rosy future despite these hard times."

The Advanced Computer Architectures group's work is based on ideas of how the brain works. The team has successfully developed a breakthrough technology – AURA – which mimics the brain's ability to make sense of massive amounts of data.

Professor Austin said: “In basic terms, AURA allows large, complex and unstructured data to be stored and searched. Uniquely it allows textual, image and signal information to be analysed quickly, despite the inherent problems in ‘real’ data – that they are incomplete, badly described and large in quantity.

The team has worked with Rolls-Royce on Aero Engines, where AURA was used to analyse patterns of unusual activities in engines, while teams using AURA in the Department for Transport have improved management of the road system.

Its methods have proved so successful that the team has set up a spin-off company, Cybula Ltd, to further develop the application of these ideas in areas including power generation, wind energy systems and medicine.

Find out more about the work of the Advanced Computer Architecture research group at http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/research/research-groups/aca/

The IEEE is the world's largest technical professional society, and is made up of technical and scientific professionals making the revolutionary engineering advances which are reshaping our world today.

Recognising the achievements of its members is an important part of the mission of the IEEE. Becoming elevated to IEEE Fellow involves a rigorous evaluation procedure, and only a select group of recipients are recommended for one of the Association's most prestigious honours.

Professor Burns, a Professor of Real Time Systems in Computer Science at York, received his fellowship for contributions to fixed-priority scheduling for embedded real-time systems. This work has been applied to embedded systems in industries such as space, avionics and automotive. It results in systems that are appropriately predictable in the timing domain.

Professor Burns said, "I'm delighted to have received this honour from the IEEE. It reflects the work that the Real-Time group, here at York, has been engaged in for many years. I'm very pleased to be the one that get the credit for all this excellent research."

If you would like to find out more about the work of the Real-Time Systems research group, you can do so at http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/research/research-groups/rts/

Are you considering - or just curious about - a doctoral degree? In this series of short talks by academics from the Department of Computer Science, you will discover what doctoral research involves, how a research degree can benefit you, and where our former doctoral students are now.

Funding opportunities and possible research topics will also be discussed, and any questions you have will be answered. This event is open to all students who are considering a doctoral degree in Computer Science, irrespective of their current department.

You can find out more about our PhD programme at http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/postgraduate/research-degrees/ and details of research carried out in the Department of Computer Science at http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/research/

The event will be held on Wednesday 16 November, from 15.15 - 17.15, in the Ron Cooke Hub Lakehouse Room. For more information, please contact Louis Rose on louis@cs.york.ac.uk

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world's largest general scientific society. It is dedicated to advancing science around the world by serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association.

Currently out of the 8,156 fellows of the AAAS, only 350 have addresses outside the USA. Of these, only 40 are based in the UK.

Find out more about Professor Braunstein's recent revolutionary research into black holes.

There will be a keynote talk on "Robot Bodies and How To Evolve Them" by Professor Alan Winfield of UWE, several paper presentations by students in Computer Science and other departments, a second keynote by Lydia Oshlyanski from Google, and finally a poster presentation session with a drinks reception. You can read our full programme here: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/yds/?page_id=10

YDS 2011 promises to be an intense and interesting day and there is also a suitably exciting culinary programme too. Both (a very good) lunch and an evening banquet at York's Olive Garden are included with registration, which this year is free of charge.

All information about YDS including the programme can be found on the website at: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/yds/ and you can register for the conference at http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/yds/?page_id=99

Rashik will be talking about the Global Technology Outlook, a yearly report prepared by IBM and some of the world's top scientists, which identifies significant technology trends five to ten years before they come to realisation.

Find out more about the lecture and how to attend at http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/about-us/public-lectures/