Commercialisation
The Department's strength in pushing the boundaries of technological change is evident in the success of its spin-off companies.
The Department has created eight successful spin-offs since 1996 and the benefits to the Department are not limited to the individuals who created them.
Many of our undergraduates work with these companies as part of their industrial placement year and an even greater number take up full time employment with them following graduation.
Spin-off companies
Cerebra
Cerebra is a Manchester computer science spin-out company that specialises in semantic meta data management technology, developing software solutions that enable knowledge representation within an organisation and across the web.
Their products provide an efficient solution to the challenges presented by the management, sharing and re-use of distributed resources, information and knowledge, and reduce the level and burden of human processing involved in web-based applications.
In August 2006 Cerebra were acquired by Web Methods, a leading business integration and optimisation software company.
Cogniscience
Cogniscience is developing the research work of Steve Furber's group on hardware support for large-scale neural nets, with a view to commercial implementation.
Genemation
Founded in March 2003, Genemation have been developing innovative 'face synthesis' tools and technologies for digital content artists and programmers in the video game, post production, web authoring and other digital content sectors (ie forensics and cosmetics).
We have commercialised patented technology developed over a number of years at The University of Manchester's Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering department (ISBE), which is one of the world's leading academic institutions in 'computer vision' technology. Key members of staff from ISBE are Genemation shareholders and some have become full time employees.
imorphics
imorphics was formed in 2002 to exploit revolutionary image analysis technology developed at the Division of Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering (ISBE), at The University of Manchester.
imorphics is focused exclusively on the medical and life sciences field, and brings together a team of advanced imaging scientists, with experienced business personnel to deliver new products which contribute significantly to the speed and accuracy of clinical trials and diagnosis.
Kestra
Kestra originated from research carried out in the Wolfson Image Analysis Unit within the University's Department of Medical Biophysics, and its technology has been used to inspect printed circuit boards internationally.
Silistix Limited
Silistix was founded by members of the Amulet research group, led by Steve Furber in the Department of Computer Science.
Silistix is applying self-timed (or asynchronous) design principles to control the flow of data between the various modules of a System-on-Chip ('SoC'). The global clock that is currently used in SoC designs is replaced by a self-timed communication system which reduces many of the design problems associated with a global clock.
Transitive
Transitive® Corporation is a pioneer and leader in providing solutions that allow the transportability of software applications across multiple OS and processor pairs. The company's QuickTransit® hardware virtualisation technology allows software applications that have been compiled for one OS/processor pair to run on another without any source code or binary changes and at speeds comparable to native ports. Transitive has since been acquired by IBM.