DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATICS - Socrates/Erasmus/Information

The Department

The Director of the Department is Prof. José Bernardo Barros.

The Department of Informatics (DI) is responsible for research and teaching in the areas of Information Technologies and Communications at the University of Minho. The department provides knowledge, expertise and resources in these areas through the teaching of both graduate and undergraduate courses, as well as by carrying out several research projects.

The main fields of interest of the department are Software and Computer Communications. The topics covered by the research and teaching at the department can be grouped into two main categories: rigorous construction of software (namely by using formal methods, software engineering, programming techniques, object oriented systems, operating systems, language processing, and data bases), and computer communication systems (namely, network management and planing, distributed systems and applications, middleware, mobility, and data replication).

Apart from these two main categories, the department is also recognized in a set of fundamental support areas such as computational algebra and logic, cryptography and safety, artificial intelligence, computer engineering, parallel computation and multimedia.

The Department is organised into seven different thematic groups, as follows:

Logic and Formal Methods

Covers the area of Computational Logic, Algebraic Methods/specification in Computer Science, Formal Specification/Derivation of Software, Cryptography, Security, Functional Programming and Categorical Foundations of Computer Science.

Interactive Systems and Multimedia

Covers the area of object-oriented technologies and methodologies, specification of interactive systems, real time 3D and description and prototyping of interfaces for pervasive computing.

Specification of Language Processing

Covers the area of Language Theory: syntax and semantics. Grammatical based programming. Language Processors development: Methods and Tools.

Distributed Systems

Covers the areas of fault-tolerant distributed systems, mobile systems, operating system support and object-oriented techniques for parallel and distributed computing.

Artificial Intelligence

Covers the domains of constraint logic programming, knowledge representation and reasoning, multi-agent systems, natural language processing, neural networks, and genetic algorithms.

Computer Communications

Specification and implementation of computer communication services; data communications and networking; OSI and Internet Application Software Development; OSI and Internet End-to-End Services; Lower Layer Technologies; Modelling of Computer Communication Protocols.

Computer Engineering

Computer architectures, special architectures for specific computer applications; parallel computation; real time; computer vision; scaleable computing; (CBL on Computer Architecture).