Professor Feng Hao (PI) from the Department of Computer Science and Dr Adrian von Mühlenen (co-I) from the Department of Psychology have been awarded an EPSRC grant on “End to End Authentication of Caller ID in Heterogeneous Telephony Systems”. This project will support a research fellow and a senior research fellow in computer science, each for four years, to explore new ways to stop caller ID spoofing without requiring globally trusted authorities, in collaboration with researchers from the Department of Psychology. This project will also aim to develop impacts by engaging with the telecommunication industry via the project partners: Huawei, Truecall, and RedTone.

The award of this project coincided with the announcement in March 2020 by the Federal Communications Commission (FFC), who proposed mandating the adoption of STIR/SHAKEN for all telecom providers in the US in order to stop the caller ID spoofing scams. However, STIR/SHAKEN requires globally trusted authorities, which have been known to be difficult to manage. As opposed to the top-down approach by the FCC, this EPSRC project aims to take a bottom-up approach to develop more effective and more deployable solutions without relying on any globally trusted third parties.

A University press release on this project can be found here.

Dr Fayyaz Minhas of the Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) lab at the Computer Science department is a co-PI on a £97K grant by Cancer Research UK’s Early Detection Committee to explore machine learning for discovery of pre-neoplastic signature in mesothelioma. He will be working closely with the PI Dr Jan Lukas Robertus, who is a Senior Consultant Cardiothoracic Pathologist at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Dr Minhas will lead on the machine learning and computational pathology side of the project.

We are happy to announce that Dr Yulia Timofeeva from the department's Applied Computing research theme has been awarded a Medical Research Council grant to develop a modelling framework and computational tools for studying synaptic transmitter release in health and disease. The £475K project will run in close collaboration with the laboratory of Professor Kirill Volynski at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology as well as other world-leading experimental laboratories in Europe, USA, Canada and Japan, specialising in state-of-the-art research in synaptic transmission.