About Us

The IT Innovation Centre is an applied research centre specialising in the advancement of innovative information technologies and their deployment in industry and commerce. We work at the forefront of emerging technology, taking cutting-edge research and using it in innovative ways to help solve the big societal challenges that we face in the world today.

We have teams working on secure systems, risk management, cyber security, crisis management, decision support, big data, information discovery, internet of things, social media analysis and social behaviour in complex human machine networks. This range of expertise is applied across industry sectors as diverse as health, media, e-government, oil & gas exploration, marine systems, education, transport and security.

Much of our work is performed within collaborative projects at both national and international level, working with researchers, industry and technology users in a spirit of partnership, developing new ideas and applications that draw on and develop our broad technical expertise.

Our work is made widely available through practical demonstrators, proof-of-principle software systems, publications and technical reports.

Part of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, we are based at the Highfield Campus.

Careers at IT Innovation Centre

The IT Innovation Centre offers positions at a number of levels, from Research Engineer to Senior and Principal Research Engineer levels. Temporary positions for project assistants are also available.

We provide strong support for career progression, with on-the-job learning opportunities helping you deepen your existing skills and gain new expertise. Staff at IT Innovation enjoy sharing their skills in a collaborative environment, whilst formal training in technical and non-technical topics is also available to support personal development.

We are passionate about what we do, and the Centre supports cross-project engagement and learning with a number of Special Interest Groups. These groups focus on technical topics (e.g. artifical intelligence, systems modelling) and the broader picture around IT applications (e.g. socio-economics, codesign). Whilst we collaborate widely across discplines such as social sciences health sciences, environmental sciences and beyond.

We offer a number of employment benefits, which are detailed on our vacancies page.

The IT Innovation Centre is a part of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, complementing campus-based academic research with our targeted applied research portfolio. The University of Southampton, a founding member of the Russell Group, has gained a prestigious recognition for its many successes and its history of world-changing achievements.

Stephen Phillips

Before I joined IT Innovation I had done a maths degree, a chemistry PhD and was doing a Post Doc in chemical physics. Since joining as a Research Engineer I have worked my way up to being a Principal Research Engineer and now coordinate a multi-national project as well as manage the Centre's personnel planning and systems team.

You don't have to be a computer scientist to work here: about half of us are and half come from other disciplines such as physical or social sciences. Half of us have come from academia and half come from industry. This makes for a rich environment with great potential for innovation. I had some software skills when I joined and have extended these over the years learning all aspects of the software development life-cycle, from requirements capture, specification and architecture, through coding, integration, testing and packaging, to writing documentation, training and support.

There are two special things about working here: the variety of projects - we're always learning about new domains and solving new problems - and the freedom to pursue and promote your own ideas. We're large enough to have the variety but small enough for individuals to make a difference. I have promoted dev-ops technologies to improve our software engineering and have been supported to take on senior functions such as the personnel planning.

My highlights:

  • coordinating the GRAVITATE project, building a platform for reuniting and reassembling 3D scanned archaeological fragments in a virtual space, combining computed geometric properties with semantic data such as excavation dates and locations;
  • managing a project of 25 international partners providing an experimentation platform bringing together real-time 3D reconstruction, social media analysis, streaming video and human sensors for professional athletes, museum visitors and tourists all underpinned with monitoring software to evaluate the QoE and QoS of the system (EXPERIMEDIA);
  • analysing the performance of Amazon EC2 instances using the BonFIRE project cloud-computing facility and steering the project to provide low-level monitoring data and control;
  • working with broadcast media companies on the mathematics and tools required to understand the risks in digital preservation strategies (PrestoPRIME);
  • creating a secure distributed workflow system for aerospace and automotive companies (SIMDAT).