page_title: School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
section_title: Research
hierarchical_section_title: School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh / Research
caption_attribution_description: English: Gordon Plotkin, Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics 21, Birmingham, May 2005
context_page_description: The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in informatics. It was created in 1998 from the former Department of Artificial Intelligence, the Centre for Cognitive Science and the Department of Computer Science, along with the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute and the Human Communication Research Centre.
  Research in the School of Informatics draws on multiple disciplines. The school is particularly known for research in the areas of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, systems biology, mathematical logic and theoretical computer science; but also contributes to many other areas of informatics.
  The school was ranked 15th in the World in the latest 2014 Research Excellence Framework, successor to Research Assessment Exercise, ranking. The School of Informatics was ranked 12th in the world by the QS World University Rankings 2014.
context_section_description: The School of Informatics was awarded a 5*A in the UK HEFCE's 2001 RAE, the only computer science department in the country to achieve this highest possible rating.  In the 2008 RAE, the School's "Quality Profile" was 35/50/15/0/0, which means that of the over 100 Full-time equivalent (FTE) staff research outputs evaluated, 35% were found "world-leading (4*)" and 50% "internationally excellent (3*)".  These figures can be interpreted in a number of ways, but place the School first by volume and tied for second (following Cambridge with 45/45/10/0/0) by percentage of research rated 3* or 4*.  The School is generally considered world-leading, standing with the foremost U.S. institutes, particularly in areas such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine translation, and theoretical computer science.
  The School has a number of research Institutes:
caption: Professor Gordon Plotkin
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