News from the Department: frontpage
Researchers receive funding to explore ambitious new ways of improving AI security
7 October 2026
At a time when concerns about AI safety are hitting the headlines, and even some AI leaders themselves are urgently warning we need to develop the technology more carefully, three researchers here are receiving funding from a £50m UK government programme to explore ambitious new ways of improving AI security. More …
Undergraduates' work is presented at major conference
6 October 2026
Among the presenters at a major ACM conference today will be an undergraduate from this Department, sharing research on ways to improve bias and accuracy in new AI tools that are being developed to assess patients' mental health. More …
Professor becomes new head of Royal Meteorological Society
1 October 2026
Professor Emily Shuckburgh CBE has today (1 October 2026) become the President of the Royal Meteorological Society. Emily is Professor of Environmental Data Science in this Department. More …
National Cyber Award for our Professor of Emergent Harms
29 September 2026
Many congratulations to our colleague Prof Alice Hutchings, who was honoured with The Alan Turing Cyber Leadership Award yesterday (28 September) at the National Cyber Awards 2026. More …
How new AI tool could help efforts to improve food security in the Global South
29 September 2026
Tessera, an AI tool that can map crops from satellite images, could offer valuable help to those working to improve food security in the Global South, new research suggests. More …
Wheeler Lecture 2026: 'Mind the Gap in Quantum Computing'
16 September 2026
The 2026 Wheeler Lecture will focus on the 'Challenges & Opportunities in Closing the Algorithms-to-Devices Gap in Quantum Computing'. More …
Sleep app tracks link between air pollution and a bad night’s sleep
15 September 2026
Daytime pollution is strongly linked to higher levels of coughing at night, even where local pollution levels are below the World Health Organization's (WHO) recommended daily exposure limit. More …
'Why we should amend copyright licences to halt AI misuse and reassert human control'
27 August 2026
Three leading researchers in human-computer interaction have told the journal Nature about their concerns over the failure of current copyright licences to protect their work from misuse by AI. More …
Learning about student life on our Women in Computer Science residential
18 August 2026
Going to lectures on quantum computing and wearable technology, watching a mock admissions interview, doing a programming workshop and touring Cambridge colleges. These were among the activities sampled by the prospective undergraduates who came to our Women in Computer Science residential course last week. More …
Stayin' Alive: How Global Stolen Data Markets Thrive on Telegram
17 August 2026
Though law enforcement agencies are closing down an increasing number of cybercrime marketplaces, bad actors are not just giving up and going away. Instead, they’re reconvening on other platforms, most notably the messaging app Telegram, as a researcher told the USENIX Security conference last week. More …
The Red Queen hypothesis - a new way forward for self-improving AI
21 July 2026
At a time when there's keen public interest in AI that can make itself better, researchers here have tackled one of the central challenges affecting its development. More …
Meet the researcher teaching AI drones to count trees
21 July 2026
A drone swoops low over an alpine forest. It climbs suddenly to follow the contours of the sharply rising landscape. Pulses from its lidar (light detection and ranging) instrument – a laser mapping tool – rapidly scan the trees below. More …
Welcoming students at our 2026 Open Days
14 July 2026
We held Open Days here on 9 – 10 July for prospective undergraduate students. More …
How AI could bring satellite crop monitoring to the world's most vulnerable farms
2 July 2026
Small farms grow much of the world's food, but from space they are nearly invisible. Their fields are tiny and ill-defined, and the satellite tools built to track crops were designed for the large uniform fields of industrial agriculture, not the small sub-hectare plots that feed many of the world's poorest people. More …
Cambridge's history of pioneering computer science inspires generous gift from alumnus
30 June 2026
An entrepreneurial alumnus whose time at Cambridge helped him develop his fascination with computers into a string of successful businesses is endowing a professorship and a PhD studentship in this Department. More …
Joining the Science of Fundamental AI Research Lab, a major national initiative
23 June 2026
This Department is delighted to be part of the newly announced Science of Fundamental AI Research (SOFAIR) Lab, a major national research initiative led by Professor David Barber and hosted at UCL, working in collaboration with Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. More …
A Blue Plaque for EDSAC – Cambridge University’s pioneering first computer
23 June 2026
A blue plaque was unveiled in this Department today, 23 June 2026, to commemorate the development of EDSAC, a landmark event in the history of modern computing. (See a video of the full unveiling ceremony here.) More …
OBE for leader in computing education
13 June 2026
Many congratulations to our colleague Professor Sue Sentance who has been awarded an OBE in the 2026 King’s Birthday Honours! She is recognised for her services to education. More …
Royal Society Fellowships honour two Computer Scientists
26 May 2026
A Royal Society Fellowship is an accolade awarded to pioneers and leaders in their scientific fields. Anuj is a theoretician who has developed new methods to study computational complexity. Keshav is a researcher passionate about using our computational capabilities to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss. More …
GitHub celebrates open source compiler project here
25 May 2026
Throughout May, code-hosting platform GitHub is celebrating maintainer month, "a month for open source maintainers to gather, share, and be celebrated." As Computer Science research at Cambridge has a long history in open source, we're very glad to see our project xDSL being celebrated as part of GitHub's maintainer month. More …
TESSERA - the AI model helping to protect hedgehogs from space
19 May 2026
Hedgehogs are under threat in this country. Government surveys suggest their numbers have fallen by up to 75% in rural areas since the turn of the century, and sightings of them in our gardens are rare. But now these much-loved animals are getting help from an unlikely new ally: AI. More …
'Test of Time' Award for research into why we can't do without passwords
18 May 2026
Passwords are irritating to manage and can be a weak link in security. Yet they still play a key role in protecting our online identities. Now, research explaining why we're still using them and why they're so difficult to replace has won a prestigious award... 14 years after it was first published. More …
A School for Scoundrels: how cybercriminals learn their trade
12 May 2026
Why cybercriminals get involved with ideological hacking; how restricting customer data sharing by firms can reduce financial fraud; and 'A School for Scoundrels: How Newbies learn in the Cybercrime Ecosystem'. More …
Carbon credits have enabled vital protection of tropical forests, despite being oversold
30 April 2026
Carbon credits have enabled the vital protection of tropical forests despite being hugely oversold, a major analysis led by Cambridge University researchers has found. More …
Gambling ads on social media reach more than twice as many men as women
28 April 2026
Gambling companies advertising on social media are reaching young men – the group most likely to exhibit problem gambling behaviour – at more than double the rate of women, a study has found. More …
Celebrating a 'culture of innovation' at our Hall of Fame Awards
16 April 2026
A semiconductor company distinguished for its rapid growth and the important role it plays in the open hardware movement; a research team turning ordinary earbuds into health sensors; an advance in the field of AI-assisted drug discovery; and a tool used by millions of developers to build, share and run software stacks. More …
Programming a robot car and making music with code at our Cambridge Festival Open Day
24 March 2026
Meet researchers working in robotics, and try programming your own mini robot car. Take a virtual tour of the Dawn supercomputer or make music with Sonic Pi code. More …
Landmark birthday for pioneering computer security research project
24 March 2026
A research project that has developed from an ambitious research idea into a transformative approach to computer security will celebrate a landmark birthday this week. More …
Student-designed technology aids beekeepers and blind learners
18 March 2026
An app that assists beekeepers in identifying sick bees, and an open-source tool to help blind people learn how to program from scratch, were two of the winning Group Design Projects created by second-year students this year. More …
Can we trust AI to use our computers?
16 March 2026
AI makes our world more useful and convenient, saving time – and possibly even our lives. But simultaneously, it creates new levels of risk to things we completely depend on like hospitals, banks, and energy and food supplies. How can we reconcile these tensions between the usefulness and the danger of AI? That’s a question that researcher Hanna Foerster will be addressing this Saturday, 21 March, when she gives a series of talks here on 'Can We Trust AI to Use Our Computers?' More …
Celebrating A Decade of Docker Containers
25 February 2026
A transformative software developer tool that was created through years of work by researchers here, and is now used by organisations from NASA to Netflix, is being celebrated this month by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). More …
How using AI to analyse body sounds can help doctors diagnose heart and lung disease
26 January 2026
Artificial intelligence (AI) models can help doctors make faster and more accurate diagnoses when they’re trained to analyse medical images, such as scans of tumours or photos of skin growths. Now a researcher is investigating if AI can diagnose diseases just as effectively from analysing body sounds like heartbeats, speaking, coughing and breathing. More …
The start-up using AI to predict climate hazards
13 January 2026
Finding a memorable name for your start-up can be inspired by many things – including, it turns out, the discovery of a human corpse in a melting glacier. More …
Summer research placements to support a more diverse AI research community
5 January 2026
Students from backgrounds under-represented in AI are invited to apply for paid AI research placements here this summer. Applications are open until 16 February 2026. More …