The group undertakes research across a wide range of topics, typically through substantial collaborative projects involving design, construction and evaluation of a system or platform.
Ongoing
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2023
The goal of EDGELESS is to leverage the serverless concept in all the layers in the edge-cloud continuum to fully benefit from diverse and decentralised computational resources available on-demand close to where data are produced or consumed. In particular, we aim at realising an efficient and transparent horizontal pooling of the resources on edge nodes with constrained capabilities or specialised hardware, smoothly integrated with cloud resources, which is a giant leap forward compared to state-of-the-art vertical offloading solutions where the edge is a mere supplement of the cloud.
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2018
Sub-Saharan Africa depends heavily on agriculture, providing income to almost 80% of its population. Small holder farmers who grow under open irrigation constantly face pests and diseases that cause 50% loss of their yield on average. BUGALERT project develops a smart greenhouse monitoring solution using image recognition to readily pick up pest and disease infestation and alert the farmers. The system uses networked Raspberry Pi computers. Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive, tiny computer and a camera and sensors are installed. The image is being captured remotely and collected image data will be analysed to detect early stage of pest infection using advanced data analysing techniques such as machine learning. The whole operation will be integrated as a pest/disease alert system to proactively communicate with farmers.
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2017
The project investigates Structured Bayesian Optimisation (SBO) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) towards automatic performance tuning of systems, where parameter space is high-dimensional and complex. Modern computer systems often have many tunable parameters to accommodate a range of workloads including dynamic change of parameters. Even for experts, a lengthy trial-and-error process is needed to obtain sufficient understanding of its performance. Tuning complex and high dimensional is a resource extensive task with standard optimisation methods, and individual experiments may take hours. We attempt to alleviate these constraints by injecting additional structural knowledge into the optimisation procedure, thus guiding the model to high performing configuration regions.
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2009
MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels for secure, high-performance network applications across a variety of cloud computing and mobile platforms. Code can be developed on a normal OS such as Linux or MacOS X, and then compiled into a fully-standalone, specialised unikernel that runs under a Xen or KVM hypervisor. This lets your services run more efficiently, securely and with finer control than with a full conventional software stack.
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2009
Horizon applies a user-centered approach to researching, promoting and championing the potential of ubiquitous digital technology, looking at the challenges of providing a new generation of personally meaningful experiences that use the traces we leave behind when we interact with mobile, Internet and other digital technologies.
Completed
This list is inevitably incomplete so may be updated from time-to-time. In the meantime, record of some other past projects may be found in the NetOS > Projects list.
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2020 — 2023
The capabilities of edge computing continue to increase, as does the scale. Enabling efficient and effective use of such large-scale (100M+ nodes) and wide-are distributed (countrywide-scale) resources requires different approaches to orchestration and resource management than datacenter networking. The compute resources themselves, the network interconnecting them, and the customer demands placed upon them need careful and holistic treatment to make the most of the infrastructure capacity. Achieving this will enable a range of new applications, from smart vehicles to Internet-of-Things to more resilient network management.
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2019 — 2023
Combining a unique blend of expertise from the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC), the Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) and the Building Research Establishment (BRE), the Hub is working with industry and Government partners to transform the UK construction sector through manufacturing technologies and digital ways of working that are trusted and secure. In doing so, we want to deliver better outcomes for the economy, for society and the environment.
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2018 — 2022
The Internet of Things (IOT) is underpinned by a range of cloud services with the result that IOT devices rely on connectivity and so are vulnerable to attack and malicious repurposing. Given the ability of many such devices to actuate as well as sense, this raises problems of safety in addition to the long-standing privacy issues. This problem is exacerbated in the domestic context as most users are not inclined to become experts in systems administration and network security. DADA seeks to understand these challenges and to design technologies that can assist in their resolution.
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2017 — 2023
Owl is a dedicated system for scientific and engineering computing designed and implemented in the functional programming language OCaml. Our intent is to push the frontier of high-performance scientific computing, providing developers in both research and industry with a powerful framework to write concise, fast and safe analytical code. Owl aims to serve as the de-facto tool for computation intensive tasks in OCaml.
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2016 — 2020
The Databox platform is an open-source personal networked device, augmented by cloud-hosted services, that collates, curates, and mediates access to an individual’s personal data by verified and audited third-party applications and services. The Databox will form the heart of an individual’s personal data processing ecosystem, providing a platform for managing secure access to data and enabling authorised third parties to provide the owner with authenticated services, including services that may be accessed while roaming outside the home environment.
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2016 — 2019
At the institutional level, concerns arise over the risks associated with personal data access, ownership, privacy and confidentiality. This project investigates whether and how these institutional concerns are reflected in the perceptions of individual users. This proposal will establish a new programme of research in digital economy by understanding how individual subjective perceptions of users with regard to cybersecurity relate to organizational and institutional views on cybersecurity. By gaining this understanding we seek to develop new business models which would allow businesses to minimize individual perceptions of vulnerability with regard to issues of privacy, security, and trust.
