Dr Arshad Jhumka from the department’s Artificial Intelligence research theme has been awarded a grant as PI, under the PETRAS SRF programme, to develop and deploy a trusted edge-based Internet of Things (IoT) network. IoT networks are expected to be deployed as solutions to problems in a wide variety of contexts, from non-critical applications such as smart city monitoring to providing support to emergency services such as critical communications. As IoT devices are resource constrained, execution of resource-hungry applications will be offloaded to edge networks for quick response. Such an infrastructure is open to cyber-attacks and needs to be resilient to attack.

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 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.