Information and Communication Technology

Lancaster University's School of Computing and Communications (SCC) forms a community for over 110 research students and 80 researchers internationally recognised for their work in information and communication technologies (ICT).

This research base is supported by a business partnerships team who facilitate collaborations with external organisations. SCC is part of InfoLab21, an award winning facility which also houses 20 digital businesses ranging from start-ups to teams from international companies.

Download the ICT factsheet

Access Expertise

• Computer systems
• Communications and networking
• Human-computer interaction
• Intelligent systems
• Software engineering

Benefits of Collaboration

• Access specialist knowledge and emerging technologies
• Access to events, conferences, technology demonstrations and specialist technical workshops
• Gain extra resources through student engagement activities
• Tap into our global network
• Work with us to develop new products and processes
• Access InfoLab21's award winning business facilities

Working in Partnership

Since InfoLab21 opened in 2005, we have been successful in securing and delivering 7 European Regional Development Fund business support projects with a combined value of over £12.5m. These projects have assisted 1,700 companies, helping them create 1,300 new jobs, safeguard 3,000 jobs, drive £65m new sales and protect £42m sales.

Our industry facing activity has helped create a partner network of over 900 Northwest small and medium enterprises and generate strong relationships with global organisations such as Microsoft, IBM, BT Labs, Cisco, NEC, Panasonic, Nokia, Ford, BAE Systems, NDS, Simoc, ATG, Intel and Orange.

Our enterprise activities are organised across seven key interdisciplinary themes which build on disciplinary excellence and provide natural points of collaboration:

View our themes

Forming Partnerships

Organisations can access our expertise through five types of collaborative partnership:

• Collaborative research
• Commercialisation of intellectual property
• Professional training
• Student engagement
• Facilities for research and development

Partnership Examples

• Applications software technologies for protecting children in online social networks
• The Wray Broadband Project - bringing broadband to rural and remote areas
• Dynamically evolving systems - landmark recognition by mobile robots in unknown environments
• Firefly project - a new concept in display technology called Emergent Displays
• Hermes - digital office door displays supporting remote messaging to place, i.e. instead of a user remotely sending a message to a particular person
• Designing Smart Streets - exploring how our highways can be digitally enhanced or enabled with InTouch, Carillion, Balfour Beatty and Amey and small and medium enterprises through the Smart Streets Hub
• Proof of concept dashboard to enable a business intelligence company to present large data sets in a variety of different ways for their large commercial clients
• Creating a bespoke tool to produce Flash-based virtual 3D product models for an online shop
• Creating the signage equivalent of web analytics, funded by Google
• Developing the first unified EU-Russia flight data monitoring and analysis system