Staff Research InterestsThis list gives details of the research interests of members of staff, thereby giving a more detailed picture of the department's research profile. The Accessibility of Information; The Behavior of Computation of Information Retrieval models (i.e. Behaviorial Computing Science); The study and evaluation of Information Access Systems and their Usage; The development of Peer to Peer and Distributed Information Retrieval systems; Theoretical and Formal Models (in particular Language Models) for Information Retrieval Dr. Leif Azzopardi is currently an RCUK Research Fellow within the Glasgow Information Retrieval Group and a full time academic member of staff within the Department of Computing Science, at the University of Glasgow. His research interests include: distributed information retrieval models and systems, formal models, specifically probabilistic models such as the Language Model, or Convergence to Order Framework, and the Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems. More recently, he has began to apply the concept of “Accessibility” from Transportation Planning to the management and evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems. Auditory interfaces; earcons; auditory icons; three-dimensional sound; the use of sound to improve graphical human-computer interfaces; telephone-based interfaces and the combination of speech and non-speech sounds; interfaces for blind and visually impaired people; haptic, or force-feedback, technology; haptic interaction; haptics for blind people; haptics in visualisation; Tactons, tactile icons and tactile displays; mobile computing and designing the interfaces to mobile telephones, personal digital assistants and other wearable devices; the use of sound and other modalities in mobile computers; gestural interaction. My research is based around multimodal human-computer interaction - using different senses to interact with computers. Much of my work is in non-speech sound and improving interactions by presenting information in different senses. This work has been extended into interfaces to mobile telephones and handheld computers where the limited display makes the devices hard to use. I am also investigating the sense of touch (haptics) and its use in computer interfaces, particularly in desktop interfaces, medical training and the combination of haptics and sound. My group is also investigation the design and use of Tactons, tactile icons, to present information to the skin,particularly in the area of mobile interactions and blind people. I am investigating the use of three-dimensional sound and gestures for interaction on wearable computing devices. Finally, both audio and haptics are being used in interfaces for blind people to allow them to get access to complex visual data that is currently unavailable to them, for example, via visualisations. Process algebras; concurrency; feature interaction analysis in telecommunications services; model-checking; biochemical networks; safety-critical systems; foundations and applications of formal reasoning. My research is concerned with formal design and analysis techniques for complex, communicating software systems. I develop and apply theoretically based-results to challenges from real-world problems, and have a special interest in the design and engineering of telecommunications services and biochemical networks. I use a variety of automated reasoning tools, with a particular interest in model-checkers. Human-computer interaction; ubiquitous computing; 2D and 3D information visualisation; computer supported collaborative work; virtual environments; adaptive interfaces; collaborative filtering; the theory of information representation; computer science's relationship with architecture, semiology and philosophy. My current research aims to take account of social and perceptual issues both in the design of computer systems, in visualisation, recommender systems and ubiquitous computing, and in the theory of computer science, relating contemporary semiology/philosophy to computational representation. I'm trying to understand the similarities and differences between the different fields that deal with the human use and interpretation of information. What I am aiming for, I suppose, is a postmodern informatics that is consistent all the way from abstract theory to system implementation. (No, really, I am.) Data compression; information theory; economic planning; value theory; persistence; image compression; code generation techniques; 3D capture techniques Current Research Projects Programming Language Vectorisation Development of compiler tools to allow full use of parallel instruction-sets of modern PCs. Programming Language Vector –Pascal. Significant speedup achieved compared to conventional PC compilers. Eases expression of matrix problems. Collaboration with Codeplay Econophysics working on monograph/book on this topic Usability of database systems; data modelling; user interfaces for database systems; visualisation; geographic information systems; internet programming; object databases. My work is motivated by the desire to make data intensive systems easier to use, both by end users and by system designers. This leads to attempts to integrate user interface development tools and database systems systematically. Given that the internet is emerging as the dominant environment for data intensive applications, I am increasingly focussing my research on usability issues and the internet, notably in web site design. Semantics of programming languages; type theory; type systems for concurrent programming languages; pi calculus and other process calculi; automatic theorem proving; type systems for security; quantum computing and quantum cryptography; linear logic; category theory. My current research has two main strands. The first focuses on the development of type systems which allow the concise specification of complex patterns of communication between components of a concurrent or distributed system. If a program is correctly typed (a property which can be verified at compile-time) then it is guaranteed that, at runtime, all messages are understood. The second topic is the application of process calculus and other formal methods to reasoning about quantum communication and cryptographic systems. Machine Learning, Probabilistic Modelling, Computational & Systems Biology Matching problems; combinatorial algorithms; stringology; graph algorithms; approximation algorithms; complexity theory My research is centred around the design and analysis of algorithms for a wide range of combinatorial problems, and on the study of the computational complexity of such problems. In the recent past, work has been focused on specific problem areas such as matching, particularly stable matching, on various graph problems. and on 'stringology' - the study of problems and algorithms involving strings of characters. I am principal investigator on the EPSRC-funded project entitled 'Matching under Preferences' and other recent EPSRC projects were entitled 'Stable Matching Problems' and 'Tree Structures for Algorithmic Problems on Strings'. The first two of these tie in with a large-scale practical application for which I am responsible, namely the SFAS scheme for matching medical students to hospital posts in Scotland. One offshoot of the latter project is a sophisticated plagiarism detection program that has been used successfully at Glasgow and elsewhere in identifying suspected cases of copying in computer programming assignments. Safety critical systems; accident analysis; security; national infrastructure protection; evacuations; simulation of Improvised Explosive Devices; military risk assessment; contingency planning; Olympic security; safety-critical software; space missions. The relatively good safety record of UK industry is an important advantage in an increasingly competitive market place. Unfortunately, the complexity of modern computer systems makes it difficult for companies to maintain this reputation for safe and successful production. Techniques that were used to design previous generations of control systems are completely inadequate for the challenges that are being posed by today's technology. My research addresses these challenges by providing a pragmatic integration of several different development techniques. Other areas of my research focus on contingency planning. This helps companies and government organisations to prepare for a range of threats and hazards that include pandemics, terrorist attacks, major infrastructure failures etc. I have also worked on the security of several large sporting events. For instance, I have helped to compile a digest of the threats against Olympic events. These range from the well publicised terrorist attacks on the Munich games through to the 'insider' threats against games infrastructure at Turin. Information retrieval; multimedia (image and video) retrieval; adaptive and context-sensitive IR; evaluation in IR (task-oriented); relevance feedback models; information retrieval through mobile devices; Personalised IR; e-learning; Information retrieval, Multimedia/video Information Management, Video summarisation/abstraction, user interaction for information retrieval, new models of relevance feedback,information visualisation and search environments, task-oriented evaluation of IR systems, application of evidence combination approaches to IR, IR over low-bandwidth devices, integration of databases and informaion retrieval systems and reusable software architectures for information retrieval. structured text and XML retrieval and evaluation; aggregated search; bridging the digital divide; formal models; quantum information retrieval. I am working on many aspects related to information retrieval. Between 2002 and 2007 I co-led the INEX initiative, which is the evaluation forum for XML retrieval. I have now started to work on aggregated search and bridging the digital divide. I am currently getting back into theoretical information retrieval where I am looking at the use of quantum theory to model information retrieval. High performance networks; performance modelling; scalable parallel architectures; multicomputers. My interests are in the use of analytical and simulation techniques for performance modelling. Recently my main focus has been on the study of traffic patterns in wormhole-switched regular networks, such as those encountered in multicomputer systems. For example, our group has been looking at the effect of collective communciation components such as those generated by broadcast and multicast operations, on more general point-point traffic in meshes and k-ary n-cubes. Router design, cost-performance, deadlock avoidance and recovery techniques and network scalability have been studied and compared for a variety of topologies and traffic conditions. I am also involved in PGPGrid (The Pepper's Ghost Productions Grid Project), a joint project aimed at using the Grid to provide the processing resources required to convert 3D image capture sequences of real actors into animated sequences involving moving cartoon chracters. This NESC-funded project involves the 3Dmatic lab at Glasgow, EPCC at the University of Edinburgh and Pepper's Ghost Productions Ltd, a company specialising in computer generated animation. My more general interests here are in the performance aspects of real-world Grid computing and in the practicality of harnassing Grid-based processing resources on-demand to accelerate CPU-intensive tasks such as this. Matching problems, including stable matching; Algorithmic graph theory, including colouring, independence and domination in graphs; Complexity and approximability of optimisation problems. I am interested in the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for optimisation problems. In particular, my research has recently focused on the class of stable matching problems, having applications to the annual assignment of graduating medical students to their first hospital appointments in several countries. Additionally, I have been interested in so-called "minimaximal" and "maximinimal" optimisation problems - a family of problem related by a partial-order concept. Several problems within the realm of algorithmic graph theory have been studied under this heading. model checking; inductive reasoning; group theoretic search reduction; GAP; probabilistic model checking. I use mathematical reasoning to generalise model checking results. Am currently investigating the use of probabilistic techniques for modelling protocols. Also the use of symmetry reduction in model checking, planning, constraints satisfaction and protocol analysis. dynamics & interaction; mobile computing; location-aware interaction; mathematical modelling;gesture/behaviour recognition; Gaussian process priors; machine learning; manual control systems; nonparametric statistical modelling; I'm interested in research at the interface of computing, statistics and systems theory. This includes statistical approaches to machine learning, and probabilistic modelling approaches to Intelligent Systems design. Modelling Human control behaviour (this includes gesture/behaviour recognition), and the use of human models in cooperative (man-machine) control systems is an example of the application of this work. probabilistic model checking; quantitative abstraction & refinement; probabilistic real-time systems; computational modelling and analysis of biological systems; concurrency theory; process algebras; performance modelling My research is within the field of formal verification with particular emphasis on the analysis of systems exhibiting probabilistic and or stochastic behaviour. My interests within this field includes its application to software, security protocols and biological systems, as well as techniques for abstraction, refinement and the analysis of real-time and hybrid systems. Functional programming, digital circuit design and computer systems, formal methods, parallel programming. I'm working on applications of functional programming to two areas: (1) Designing and reasoning about computer systems, especially digital circuit design and computer architecture. I have developed a computer hardware description language, Hydra, which allows the designer to specify circuits in a clear, intuitive fashion, and these specifications can be executed directly in order to simulate the circuit. In addition, it's possible to use formal methods to derive circuits from specifications and to prove properties, such as correctness, that are hard to establish informally. The implementation of Hydra uses several techniques which are active areas of research in programming languages. It is implemented as a Domain Specific Language, via embedding in Haskell, and the embedding uses metaprogramming. (2) Parallel programming, especially programming "Massively Parallel" systems. My work here focuses on two models of parallelism: the data parallel model, and the SPMD model. This work is a collaboration with colleagues in Germany at Chemnitz, Halle, and Passau. We're looking at improved parallel programming methodologies, and also at challenging case studies (such as the Hierarchical Radiosity Method). I'm also interested in functional programming in general, and have worked on topics such as interactive functional programming, debugging tools, and nondeterministic programs. Web search; Information retrieval in Intranet/Enterprise settings; Blog search; Distributed information retrieval; Large-scale text retrieval system building; Probabilistic IR models; Evaluation and scalability of search engines; Hyperlink structure analysis; Methods of combination/fusion; Text mining; Multilingual retrieval; NLP for textual IR; Study of Users's query and browsing logs; Desktop search; Semantic Web; Terrier IR platform I am interested in developing large-scale and high performance text retrieval systems, tackling topics such as Web/Enterprise/Blog search, Distributed retrieval systems, and evaluation and scalability of search engines. I coordinate the evaluation efforts of the Blog track at TREC, aiming to explore information seeking behavior in the blogosphere. Our work feeds directly into the high performance and scalable Terrier (Terabyte Retriever) information retrieval platform. Terrier allows for the rapid development of large-scale retrieval applications, and was deployed in various industrial applications. It is the underlying search engine of the University of Glasgow's successful participation in various tracks of the TREC evaluation forum (NIST, USA), since 2001. Networked multimedia, voice-over-IP, adaptive network protocols, peer-to-peer and multicast communication, large-scale distributed systems, congestion control, real-time systems. My research and publications have been in several areas relating to robust, scalable, multimedia teleconferencing over IP networks. I developed one of the earliest voice-over-IP applications, and have since worked on forward error correction and media playout algorithms for voice-over-IP; distributed watermarking for multicast video streaming; systems, protocols and architectures for large-scale video conferencing; protocols and architectures for high speed networking (including the first gigabit-rate high definition video conferencing system running on commodity hardware); and congestion control for real-time media. Information Security; Chaos Theory; Bioinformatics. I am interested in the human factors side of information security, especially authentication. Recent work has investigated using doodles as passwords. My work in chaos theory involves examining dynamical systems to detect when chaos may be an issues and working out how to control it. My work in bioinformatics involves visualising large molecules and the way they interact. An underlying technical theme in this work is the use of graphics. A key part of my bioinformatics and chaos theory work is visualisation, while my security work with doodles involves image analysis. Constraint satisfaction; constraint programming; combinatorial search; meta-heuristics; behaviour of algorithms; problem representation I am interested in combinatorial problems, such as scheduling, vehicle routing, timetabling, design, and resource allocation in general. Most of my research involves the emerging technology of constraint programming. In a more abstract sense, I am interested in the behaviour of algorithms and the nature of hard problems. For example, some problems are easy and some problems are hard. Are there features of problems that allow us to identify when they will be hard or easy? Can we exploit these features when we attept to solve them? I am currently investigating the effect problem representation can have on our ability to solve a problem. For example, we can make fine grained changes in the way we represent a problem, maybe by simply interchanging the roles of variables and values (e.g. rather than decide what value a variable has, we determine what variable a value is assigned to). A more coarse grained example might be a reformulation of vehicle routing problems as job shop scheduling problems! When we do that we can solve one problem with technology from another domain. Graph layout aesthetics, empirical studies, visualisation, computer science education. My research is concerned with empirical studies of visualisation, specifically the depiction of relational information in node-arc diagrams (graphs). I have been interested in investigating the aesthetics underlying the design of common automatic graph layout algorithms (for example, maximising orthogonality, or minimising the number of edge bends) from a human comprehension point of view, and have run experiments using abstract graphs, social networks, as well as UML class and collaboration diagrams. I am keen on extending this work to take into account the human visual percaption process, and other information visualisation methods. Supplemenatary research includes studies of online help and computer science education, and I have supervised PhD students in the areas of Natural Language Processing and Tactile Programming for Primary Education. Human factors and information security issues, Alternative Authentication techniques, Email: use and abuse, accessibility of mobile phones and other technologies by the elderly, e-voting I am interested in human aspects of information security, specifically authentication mechanisms. I have also been working with researchers at other Universities on understanding the effects of email on workers. On the authentication front we have been experimenting with alternatives to traditional passwords, mostly aimed at the web domain. In the software engineering area my interest is in enterprise systems, architectures for these systems, enterprise patterns, best practice and application integration. Machine Learning; Kernel Methods; Bioinformatics Computer vision; vision science; image processing; metric 3D imaging; 3D imaging applications: whole human body 3D capture and anatomy modelling, skin imaging (visible and infrared), skin modelling, soft tissue modelling and haptic interaction, 3D surgery planning tools, forensic facial reconstruction, realistic virtual actors & personal avatars. Robot vision; anthropomorphic vision approaches; active vision & visuo-motor behaviours; space variant imaging (foveated vision), Retino-Cortical transform (complex-log & log-polar transforms); visual attention, scale-space representations and appearance-based imaging. Clinical 3D Imaging: My principal area of research has centred on developing photogrammetry-based 3D imaging systems for clinical, media and robotics applications. Clinical research, in collaboration with the Department of Statistics and Glasgow Dental Hospital, includes the development of tools for assessing 3D human (and animal) surface anatomy. My current focus is the development of an entirely new approach to representing, manipulating and analysing 3D data that exploits 2.5D range maps directly, without the need for intermediate polygonisation and its associated computational inefficiencies and two of my PhD students are investigating topics in this area.I am currently a co-investigator in Wellcome Trust funded project led by the Department of Statistics that seeks to automate fully the measurement and analysis of 3D face scans. Media Related Research: I have been involved in a number of media-related projects, for example, 3D whole body imaging (SHEFC RDG), developing 3D imaging approaches based on high resolution passive capture that does not require active illumination (EPSRC) but can provide very high quality photorealistic 3D models (EPSRC) and also combined thermal-3D imaging (EPSRC). The most significant media work I have supervised is in human character animation based on the conformation of a generic deformable mesh to 3D scan data (EPSRC). This work was developed to pre-production quality in collaboration with Edinburgh University Informatics Division to demonstrate the concept of “cloning” 3D scanned individuals such that they can be animated within virtual media productions (Scottish Enterprise). Robot Vision: From the outset of my research in 3D imaging I have been interested in active binocular vision systems, and have investigated semi-autonomous 3D vision systems to provide automatic vergence control for telepresence systems and systems capable of automatic 3D scene recovery. In this latter case, a foveated imaging approach has been adopted in combination with a gaze control strategy based on detecting interest points on the foveated 2.5D range surface topology (EPSRC Industrial CASE). A visual search strategy driven by these interest points is used to cause the binocular camera system to saccade and thereby explore the scene, capturing 2.5D range maps which are integrated into a 3D model “on the fly”. I am currently supervising ongoing research work in robot vision that adopts a biologically motivated, space variant vision model, currently based on a randomly sampled retina. We have now constructed a complete foveated vision system that is being applied to indexing and annotation of digital moving image sequences, though this system is equally well suited to binocular robot vision applications. A longstanding goal in the vision community is to build a robot vision system that is capable of autonomously exploring its environment and a binocular robot head has been developed in CV&G that can find known objects under cluttered and partially occluded conditions with a high degree of reliability. dependability, dependable socio-technical systems, aspect oriented software engineering, software visualisation Keywords programmable networks; embedded systems; closed-loop network management; communication systems; distributed system architectures; environmental sensor networks My primary research interest is the automated management of large-scale communication networks. This area encompasses innovative, low-level measurement techniques, novel mechanisms for determining network context, exploitation of policy, and informed utilization of myriad analysis technologies. Work in this area necessarily requires deep knowledge of programmable network, embedded system, and closed-loop techniques, as well as insights into large-scale distributed system architectural concepts. I am primarily applying these concepts to environmental sensor networks. Applied Logic; reasoning under uncertainty; formal models for information retrieval; quantum logic for IR; cognitive neuroscience. Since about 1969 my research has been devoted to information retrieval, covering both theoretical and experimental aspects. I have specified several theoretical models for IR and seen some of them from the specification and prototype stage through to production. My current research is concerned with the design of appropriate logics to model the flow of information. Service-based SoC architectures, On-chip networks, systems-on-chip, reconfigurable logic circuits, service-based architectures, heterogeneous multicore systems, FPGAs My research currently focuses on the Gannet project. This project aims at creating a novel System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture for heterogeneous multicore systems that is reconfigurable at task level and programmable at a high level of abstractions. The architecure combines Networks-on-Chip, reconfigurable logic and concepts from coarse-grain dataflow machines and functional programming languages into a service-based SoC. Other research interests * FPGA computing, the use of FPGAs to accelerate computing and high-level programming of FPGAs * Wireless Sensor Networks: in general, these are resource-constrained computational nodes froming an ad-hoc network. I am interested in particular in the heterogeneuous case were different nodes in the network can perform different tasks. * Self–aware Networks: this is a special type of ad–hoc networking, in which the networks organisation and management is carried out using "smart" packets, i.e. packet which contain all necessary intelligence. * Asynchronous logic: future SoC architectures will rely on a locally synchronous/globally asynchronous paradigm. Asynchronous logic will be an essential part of the interfacing blocks between the "global" network infrastructure and the "local" IP's. Programming language design; programming language specification; programming language implementation. My research encompasses programming language design, specification, and implementation. Currently I am focusing on the application of array programming languages to spreadsheet design. Software engineering; software development methods; tools to support software development; software engineering environments; cultural heritage computing.
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