Florin Ciucu has been successful with a 491K EPSRC grant application ‘Practical Analysis of Parallel and Networked Queueing Systems’. The project will run for 4 years and will address some fundamental queueing problems at the core of modern computing and communication systems with parallel or network structures. The technical objective is to develop novel martingale-based models and techniques circumventing the historical Poisson assumption on the systems’ input, which has been convincingly shown to be highly misleading for practical purposes. The proposal was supported by IBM Research, Microsoft Research, and VMware.

Dr Criseida Zamora has joined the department to work together with Dr Yulia Timofeeva, Prof Kirill Volynski (UCL) and a number of other world-leading experimental laboratories on an MRC-funded project "Virtual presynaptic nerve terminal". This project aims to develop a unified computational modelling framework which will allow the neuroscience community to explore mechanisms of synaptic transmitter release that cannot be directly determined experimentally.

Criseida is a Bionic engineer working in the Systems Biology field. She received a PhD degree in Biomedical Engineering and Physics working on the analysis of biochemical noise in synthetic genetic circuits at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico. Her academic background and research experience have focused hitherto on building in silico models to study emergent properties of molecular systems to answer physiological questions. She has also worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan and the University of Bristol.

Dr Victor Sanchez (PI) from the department's Artificial Intelligence research theme and Prof. Carsten Maple (Co-I) from Warwick Manufacturing Group have been further awarded a research grant by the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA), which is part of the Ministry of Defence, to continue with Phase 2 of the project R-DIPS - "Real-time Detection of Concealment of Intent for Passenger Screening." The project, which began on October 2019 and ends on February 2021, aims at developing a machine learning and computer vision solution to track, in real-time, multiple individuals across a set of non-overlapping surveillance cameras to detect those with suspicious behaviours and movements within an airport. The project will improve the screening process of passengers to detect those attempting to mask nefarious intent. The R-DIPS project is an international collaboration with Prof. Chang-Tsun Li who is also affiliated with Deakin University, Australia.