Published today, the tables look at staff:student ratio, student satisfaction and employability statistics. York fares well in these areas - our links with industry ensure that our graduates leave us with the skills to go directly into the workplace.

Check out the Computer Sciences and IT table for yourself.

Find out more about our undergraduate programmes at http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/undergraduate

Would you trust a computer to run a chemical plant or oil platform? You might not, but as a society we do trust computers to work for us on similar, safety-critical situations, all the time. Modern society is almost totally reliant on software-based infrastructure.

This demands modelling and programming languages and techniques that facilitate and ensure quality. The reality of industry, however, is that various modern programming features found useful in other sectors of the software industry are often left out on the grounds of safety.

An international effort from industry and academia has addressed this issue by producing a high-integrity real-time version of perhaps one of the most popular programming languages ever: Java. Safety-critical Java achieves a compromise between safety and an ambitious novel intake on a programming model: it combines a safe use of object orientation and real-time programming.

It lacks, however, the support for program development and verification now widely available for Java. At York, we have been tackling this problem for a while, but have restricted ourselves to a subset of Safety-Critical Java that restricts the use of parallelism. While this is a useful step, getting rid of restrictions is our goal. We want to provide techniques to support programming in a more comprehensive set of Safety-Critical Java, and fully support industry in this bold step: using Java in a novel domain of application.

We don't have a solution to this problem, but we do have a fully-funded PhD studentship that could support you while you attack it.

You'll be supported in your work by two experienced academics at York (Ana Cavalcanti and Andy Wellings). You'll be put through York's established programme of PhD training. The start date for project is flexible 1 October, 2012, and you'll receive a tax-free stipend of £13,590 p.a. for 3 years. You'll come out of the project with excellent software engineering skills in area that is becoming more and more relevant every day: real-time systems and program verification.

The successful applicant will have a 1st or 2.1 in computer science or a strongly related discipline, along with a keen interest in programming and a proven ability to write and present. Good social skills, genuine sympathy for the difficulties faced by computer users, and a rigorous engineering mindset will be very valuable. Standard EPSRC eligibility criteria apply (see EPSRC's eligibility conditions for more details)

If you have any questions about this studentship, contact Ana Cavalcanti. To apply, go to http://www.york.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/apply/ (in the "Funding Information" section of the form, please state "AOS CASE Studentship"). The deadline for applications is 29 June 2012.

The tables, which are based on factors such as student satisfaction and graduate prospects, rank both subjects (departments) and universities as a whole.

According to Complete Guide, the University of York has the highest average score for teaching quality in the British university sector. It is also ranked eighth for the quality of its research.

You can find out more about the rankings at The Complete University Guide.

The awards recognise the commitment of institutions and science, engineering and technology (SET) departments to addressing gender inequalities, to tackling the unequal representation of women in science and to improving career progression for female academics.

Professor John McDermid, Head of Computer Science, said: ““Women are very under-represented in computer science across the UK, with typically only 10% of academic staff being female. We have many excellent female staff in the Department, and I am delighted that our efforts to support them, and to encourage others into the discipline, have been recognised in this way.

“We offer flexibility, eg through part-time working, flexible hours, which are of benefit to all staff, and seek to help research staff in career development. We are also pleased that we have significantly increased the number of female undergraduates in recent years, as they will, in time, form the core of the profession. Few computer science departments have received Athena Swan awards; we hope that our success will both encourage staff in York, and in the wider academic community.”

The Athena SWAN Charter is supported by the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET and by the Equality Challenge Unit.

You can find out more about the award at: http://www.athenaswan.org.uk/html/athena-swan/news/?news_id=721

The article first appeared in New Journal of Physics, the journal of the Institute of Physics, in November 2011. The paper explores the maximum amount of data which can be stored on and read from an optical disc, according to the laws of physics.

It is one of only five papers for the whole field of quantum physics to be included in the Highlights of 2011 collection. Articles were chosen on the basis of referee endorsement, impact and broad appeal, to collectively showcase the quality and diversity of the coverage in the New Journal of Physics in 2011.

You can read the paper at http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/13/11/113012 and view the rest of the Highlights at http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/page/Highlights%20of%202011

Both academics are members of the Non-Standard Computation research group in the Department. You can find out more about the work of this group at http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/research/research-groups/nsc/

The Department of Computer Science has a number of EPSRC Doctoral Training Grant (DTG) studentships to award to good UK/EU candidates who are starting on the PhD programme in October 2012. The studentship includes fees (at Home/EU rate) as well as an annual stipend of £13,590.

The deadline for applications is 30 April 2012. For more information about the grants, and how to apply, visit http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/postgraduate/research-degrees/research-studentships/phd-studentships/

You can find out what the research interests of the Department are at http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/research/research-groups/ to help you decide what you would like to study.

The BCS Academy of Computing Symposium, held in association with the UK Computing Research Committee, will bring together computing science researchers from across the UK to talk about research challenges, policy and strategy.

Speakers at the event from 10 to 12 April include Professor Steve Furber, ICL Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester, who will discuss building computer models of the brain. Frank Meyer, Vice-President of Research & Development at Unilever, will discuss “Making sense of Big Data” giving the industry perspective on the challenges facing R&D and data management while moving towards globally applicable products.

Other speakers include Liam Blackwell, Information and Communications Technology Theme Leader at Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Counci (EPSRC), Professor Carlo Ghezzi of the Politecnico di Milano and Tom Rodden, from the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham.

Workshops will advise participants on writing grant applications and Research Excellence Framework (REF) impact case studies.

The event, held in the University’s superb Ron Cooke Hub which sits at the heart of the University's £750 million campus expansion at Heslington East, will be hosted by Professor John McDermid, Head of the Department of Computer Science at York. Professor McDermid will also close the conference with Professor Muffy Calder, Chief Scientific Adviser for Scotland.

Professor McDermid said: “The Symposium offers a forum for researchers in Computer Science to get together and discuss issues such as the upcoming Research Excellence Framework, as well as a chance to learn more about each other’s research.

“We’re very pleased to host the conference here at York. Previous events have been very informative and the involvement of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT and the EPSRC, as well as the good line-up of speakers should give everyone attending some interesting insights into the future of computing science research.”

The Symposium is held alongside the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing Conference, and also incorporates this year’s BCS Karen Spärck Jones Lecture, sponsored by IBM, honouring women in computing research. Carole Goble, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, will give this year’s lecture on “Work with Scientists: Fun, Profit and the e in e-Science”.

There will be a Symposium dinner for delegates at the National Railway Museum in York. For more information and to register for the event visit www.bcs.org/academy/symposium2012

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.