Student working in a lab, looking at monitor image
Car factory with robot welding
Inside the Computational Foundry

About Your Training

The leadership of the Centre are highly experienced in and champions of novel and creative research training methods that can encourage cross-disciplinarity, co-creation and disruptive thinking.

Your experience at our Centre will be far from the “norm”: you will build yourself and others up into something that is not just a “cohort” of students but rather a movement, active, dynamic and empowering that is driven to do excellent science with purpose and impact.

The training will unfold as a 4 year programme – the first year includes an Integrated Masters to help cohorts gain the foundations for their PhD work. This Masters includes modules in human-centred approaches, machine learning, the biases and blessings of data, interactive technologies and visualisations and a range of optional modules that look at the use of AI and data-driven systems in our challenging contexts (e.g. for the Factory of the Future; medicine; and, Law).  

During the first year, we’ll work with you to shape your research project and throughout your 4 years with us, we will use a variety of stimulating and innovative methods to help you extend and apply your thinking. These will include sandpits, retreats, international visits, side projects and secondments. Responsible innovation will be actively explored and promoted in all of our work.

The Computational FoundryCHERISH Digital Economy Centre and the wider regional assets provide the foundations for a rich and supportive training environment. As a student in our CDT, you will be based on the Bay Campus in the cutting-edge Computational Foundry building that offers a rich variety of dedicated labs (maker lab, theory lab, security lab, user experience lab, biometrics and vision lab, visualisation lab, IoT lab). Furthermore, the Foundry has dedicated collaboration and interaction spaces that will be used to bring the cohort(s) together in novel training contexts. The Centre also coordinates the other assets available to cohorts of students, including:

  1. Data Science facility that brings together key health and well-being resources. These initiatives champion ethical and responsible use of data and their experience of doing trusted and trustworthy research is an invaluable resource. The Supercomputing Wales project (of which Swansea is a key partner) provides additional computational resources and collaboration possibilities, together with a team of skilled Research Software Engineers who support the CDT on practical programming techniques and through the provision of user-centred computer programming training.
  2. IMPACT (Innovative Materials Processing and Numerical Technologies), a part EU-ERDF funded operation delivers academically founded and industrially inspired, challenge-led research underpinned by materials and computational engineering core strength areas for future manufacturing technologies.
  3. The Centre for Innovative Ageing carries out participatory and interdisciplinary research into approaches to transform the experience of ageing focused on enhancing fulfilment, capabilities and enjoyment of the ageing population.
  4. The Cyber Threats Intelligence Centre is an international leader in its work to understand the terrorist use of the internet. Swansea is the only UK higher education institution to be part of the Global Internet Forum for Counter-Terrorism16. The Buildings as Power Stations initiative is creating environments that are able to self-power and provide excess energy to other parts of the energy distribution grid. One of these facilities, the active classroom building, is situated close to the Computational Foundry while others are being constructed within the region.