About

A Reader in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Surrey.

Chartered IT Professional Fellow (FBCS CITP)  - February 2009 to June 2024 (lapsed member), with CITP from August 2008. 

Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College.

Research interests span Continuum Computing (Cloud, Edge, Things, etc.), Intelligent Transportation Systems, Information Retrieval, Information Extraction and Ontology Learning. Current research activities - see Publications also - address:

Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Springer Journal of Cloud Computing Advances, Systems and Applications (JoCCASA), serving as EiC from up to 2021, an editor of a Springer book on Cloud Computing with 2 editions published, and past member of the Cloud Pro expert panel.

Co-founder and co-director of:

CI on the EPSRC and Jaguar Land Rover funded CARMA project, and an EIT funded collaboration involving Amey. Previously, PI on the successfully completed Innovate UK/TSB project (IPCRESS), collaborative with Jaguar Land Rover, to create a private search capability. PI on an EPSRC Project about Fair Benchmarking for Cloud Computing Systems, a co-author of two reports for EPSRC/JISC on Cloud Computing (Research Use Cases, and Costs) and a keen user and proponent of various Cloud infrastructures with several small grants received in support of this work. A key line of investigation in this work relates to service level agreement (SLA) driven Cloud brokerage.

Involved with securing 4th place in the External Plagiarism Detection Task of the 2011 Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Social Software Misuse (PAN) competition, with software running on Amazon EC2, and in various tasks of the 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2016 PAN and FIRE actvities. The novelty of the approach to Plagiarism  resulted in the filing of two patent applications (U.S. Patent filing US13/307,428, filed 30th November 2011; PCT/GB2012/000883, filed 30th November 2012). Participation in PAN has covered author identification, author profiling, and predator detection, through to 2016, and most recently in the related FIRE activity involving Persian plagiarism detection.

Previous responsibilities for software architectures for a number of systems developed for research projects supported by the EU's IT Research and Development programmes - TRANSTERM, POINTER, INTERVAL, ACE, SALT , GIDA, PI on the eContent project LIRICS - and in the UK EPSRC and ESRC - SAFE-DIS, SOCIS and FINGRID.

Developed, directed, and marketed the, now very much legacy, System Quirk set of applications, involving development of applications using C, C++, Prolog, Java, Oracle (OCI), XML, CORBA and a variety of integrations of these technologies. Also knows a bit of Perl, shell scripting, Unix and Windows administration, networking protocols and various other hints, tips and tools.

A number of years ago now, he designed and helped build the Department of Computer Science's Wireless Computing network - the first fully operational wireless network in the University - and developed a Laptop Scheme for students within the Department. Set up the Department's Grid Computing resource using a cluster of machines, RedHat Linux, Globus and OGSA-DAI, Condor (a 100+ processor pool) and the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) with its metadata catalog (MCAT). This was expanded through a bid he authored for SRIF-3 funding to incorporate a further 100+ processors and 40+TB disk storage, and which included an Access Grid Node (AGN). Was involved with activities relating to Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), particularly IET.tv. Instrumental around this time in launching the Department's Masters programme in Internet Computing and its Introductory Grid Computing module.

In 2000, became a member of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) Technical Committee 37 (ISO TC 37) through the British Standards Institution (BSI) and has represented BSI on subcommittee 3 (SC3) as a Principal UK Expert, and headed the UK delegation to SC4. TC37 is concerned with standards for "Terminology and other language resources". Contributed to ISO 16642 (Terminological markup framework), revisions of ISO 12620 (Data Categories) and ISO 12615 (Bibliographic References), further parts of ISO 639 (Language Codes), BS 8430 (Terminology fundamentals), the forthcoming ISO 24610-1 (Feature Structure Representation) and other standards. Many of these are available here. Was a Liaison member between TS/1 and ICT/-, the Information and Communications Technology Co-ordination and Strategy Committee. Stepped away from ISO/BSI in 2018. 

Also previously chair of the Surrey Research Staff Forum (RSF) and representative of RSF on the University Research and Enterprise Committee (UREC).

He does have personal interests and aims to keep them that way.