School of Computing and Mathematics

I undertook my BSc (London) in Electronic Engineering (EE) specialising in computer architectures and digital systems design. After graduation, I have worked there as an RA  (sponsored by CLCC/Plessey Ltd.) before joining the Computing Laboratory at the University of Kent (UKC) under the UK High Performance Distributed Systems Initiative, where I also received my research doctorate in 1994. I was admitted as an IEE corporate member and a Chartered Engineer (CEng) in 1995.

I took up a lectureship (EE) at Keele in autumn 1994 and, after receiving my SEDA HE teacher training award (Excellent), I moved to Computer Science (CS) during 1997/98. My teaching interests have spanned the two subject disciplines from the traditional teaching of signal processing, through telecommunications and computer vision, to the more recent developments in advanced computer architectures, networks and distributed systems, graphics and programming, digital multimedia (including digital security).

Since joining CS at Keele, my work on hardware/software co-design has been extended to algorithmic development for high-performance applications in computational sciences, with emphasis on practical visualisation for computer vision and machine learning, using particularly but not exclusively concurrent and distributed architectures.

In recent years, much of my research/work is funded externally and exemplified in the following strands:

• In visualisation, a principal focus is on gaining a better understanding of large, unstructured, multi-dimensional data sets. At Keele, this has applications in several areas and research projects relevant to security/digital forensic and biomedical sciences.
• In security/digital forenics, we have been working on identifying specific chemical elements present in broad-spectrum x-ray photography which may help to detect illicit materials conveyed through airport security systems (EPSRC/2005-07). The research has led to a further industry sponsored CASE award (2008-2012) involving the characterisation of sensor pattern noise (SPN) for the source camera identification and classification of digital photography.
• In biomedical sciences, we have attracted fundings to automatically classify and measure the extent and quality of tissue regeneration produced by stem-cell treatments of damaged cartilage cells, using advanced computational vision technologies for live cell imaging developed in collaboration with the industry. This cross-cutting research, initially funded by the EPSRC/Keele 3ME Initiatives in 2008 and 2010, seeks to address the need for large-scale exploratory analysis of dynamic cell-level properties and phenomena, and entails the development of advanced automation technologies that can accurately capture and describe the heterogeneity uncovered within in vitro cellular systems over an extended time period. The work has recently attracted funding from the BBSRC(2012-2016).
• In distributed computing, my work is focused primarily on privacy and security issues in the wide-scale distribution of processing and data across global networks. For example, we have developed a unique graphically based biometric authentication system which can be used on mobile devices. In conjunction with a conmputing colleague, we have received major supports from the EU/AWM Proof of Concept Award (3.2009-10.2009), and a further CASE/PhD studentship award from the EPSRC.
• In pervasive computing, we have developed and piloted protocols (as proof of concept) for securely delivering medical applications to mobile devices and a prototype system for utilising web-services as an overlay on ad-hoc peer to peer networks for performing robust and efficient metadata queries. As on-going research and development, our more recent work is addressing the many security and privacy concerns raised by the increasing adoption of cloud computing. To this end, I have served as the Editor-in-chief of a new Journal of Cloud Computing (from 2011)

Earlier work including my PhD/research at UKC

• Parallelisation of machine vision algorithms (vision cone model), including the adaptation of pattern matching and similarity comparison techniques (Smith-Waterman) for protein and DNA sequence database analysis on massively parallel platforms in collaboration with Edinburgh university and the AFRC (now BBSRC).
• Prototypes development of high performance concurrent computational architectures for document imaging & analysis (2-D symbologies) funded under the UK/DTI AXON Initiative jointly with the Royal Mail (Future Technologies Group).
• Overseas travel grants (jointly by the Royal Society and RAE) for work on the SPIE conference series in Parallel & Distributed Methods in Image Processing I-IV; c.f. Special Issues in Parallel Computing, Vol 7-8, 2003, Elsevier Science.

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