SCD is a division of the departement of Electrical Engineering (ESAT) of the Faculty of Engineering of the K.U.Leuven and is headed by Joos Vandewalle.

SCD's major research objective is to design and build advanced methods for crucial problems in information processing. It builds on the enormous growth in computer power, communication bandwidth and available data and the various needs in society for effective use of these opportunities. SCD has a number of mutually reinforcing groups that build expertise from the more conceptual and mathematical level downstream until the validation with our partners in practical applications in the field. A major driving force of the research is the diverse use of generic information processing methods based on applied mathematics like linear and multilinear algebra, statistics, discrete mathematics, differential geometry, and optimization.

SCD has built up world recognized expertise in bioinformatics, biomedical data processing, signal (audio, communications) processing, cryptography, embedded systems, data mining, neural networks, identification, control, ...