Short Bio

I am an Honorary Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick and I am Professor of Distributed Systems in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds. While at Warwick, I led the Reliability and Fault Tolerance group, which is part of the AI theme. My group currently has 6 PhD students. I was previously a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute.

Research Interests

The central theme of my research is dependability. A system is said to be dependable if trust can be justifiably placed in its correct operation, even in the presence of undesired events (e.g., network failures, malicious behaviours). My current interest lies at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems (e.g., wireless sensor networks, cluster systems), embedded and/or cyberphysical systems and dependability. My work has both an experimental and a formal flavour. I have been increasingly looking at the application of artificial intelligence techniques to the design of dependability.

I have several current research projects in the following areas:

• Reliability and Fault Tolerance
  • Global predicate detection in fault-prone distributed systems
  • Reliable mobile ad-hoc and sensor networks
  • Self-stabilization in distributed systems, including sensor networks and MANETs
  • Design of dependable software systems
  • Dependability in high performance systems
  • Fair exchange
  • Mechanism design
• Application of Machine Learning
  • Error detection/failure prediction in cluster systems
  • Root cause analysis
  • Design of dependable software
• Computer Security
  • Trusted mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs)
  • Security issues in sensor networks
  • Computer/digital forensics

• Data Science/ support system
  • Dependability-driven design and analysis of large-scale systems
  • Data driven design and analysis of dependable/secure systems and software
  • Data driven design of network protocols for (sensor) networks
  • (Computer/digital) forensics

Publications

A list of my publications (in chronological order) can be found here.

You might also like to visit my profile on DBLP, ACM Portal and Google Scholar.

Students

• Current Team

  Matthew Bradbury (Research Fellow) (03.20 - 08.21)

  Internet of Things/Edge Computing - Security at the Edge (Moved to Lancaster, April 2021)

  Abdullah AlHajri (Oct 2018 - )	Security in Database systems
  Ali Meree (Mar 2019)	Edge/fog computing
  Khalid Alharthi (Mar 2019)	Error detection in HPC systems using sentiment analysis
  Jawaher Alharbi (Jan 2020)	Distributed systems
  Sahrish Khan (June 2021)	Sentiment analysis
  Sara Alosaime (Nov 2021)	Federated Learning
  Alya Alhazmi	Edge Computing, IoT
  Majed AlBarrak	Computer Security, AI

• Graduated Students (Sole supervisor)

  Matthew Leeke (2008-2011)	Towards the design of efficient error detection mechanisms
  Sain Saginbekov (2010-2015)	Efficient and reliable data dissemination and convergecast in Wireless Sensor Networks
  Nentawe Gurumdimma (2012-2016)	Towards efficient error detection in large-scale HPC systems
  Fatimah Adamu-Fika (2012-2017)	LnCm fault model: complexity and validation
  Chen Gu (2014-2018)	Source location privacy in wireless sensor networks under practical scenarios: routing protocols, parameterisations and trade-offs
  Matthew Bradbury (2014-2018)	Near Optimal Routing Protocols for Source Location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks: Modelling, Design and Evaluation
  Denys Flores (2015-2019)	Theory and Practice of Proactive Database Forensics
  Jack Kirton (2016-2020)	Source Location Privacy-Aware Data Aggregation Scheduling for Wireless Sensor Networks
  Edward Chuah (2016-2020)	Features Correlation-based Workflows for Error Propagation and Recovery Diagnosis in HPC Systems
  Farrukh Qazi	Towards Automating SLA Enforcement in Cloud Environments
  Mohammed Maray	Computational offloading of Dependent Tasks in Mobile Edge Networks
  Alwaleed Alharbi	Towards Efficient Predicate Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks
  Jasmine Grosso	Reliable many-to-many routing in wireless sensor networks using ant colony optimisation
  Mansour Aldawood	Secure virtual machines allocation in cloud computing environments
  Sara Alhajaili	Towards Reliable Logging in Internet of Things Network

• Graduated Students (co-supervised)

  Adam Chester (2007-2011)	Towards effective dynamic resource allocation for enterprise applications
  Henry Franks (2009-2013)	Supporting cooperation and coordination in open multi-agent systems

• PostDoctoral Research Assistants (Completed)

  Fred Huang (10.09 - 09.10)	Mobile Adhoc Networks
  Matthew Bradbury (03.20 - 03.21)	IoT Networks

Others

• MSc students - > 10
• MEng students - > 60
• BSc students - > 100

Professional Activities (not maintained)

I am a full member of IEEE and ACM.

I have been a member of several TPCs, including:

• International Symposium on Mobility Management and Wireless Access (Mobiwac)
• International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS)
• International Symposium on Pervasive Computing and Ad Hoc Communications (PCAC)
• DEPEND

I regularly review papers for journals, including:

• IEEE Transactions Software Engineering (TSE)
• IEEE Transactions on Computers (ToC)
• IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
• IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
• IEEE Transactions on Reliability

I also regularly review papers for conferences, including:

• International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)
• International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)

I also regularly review proposals for EPSRC.