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Department of Computing

Completed Research Projects within The Department of Computing

This page contains details of all funded research within The Department of Computing with a start date of 01/01/2000 or later where the project has either concluded or has moved to another institution. Earlier funded research is listed where details are available. Funding is listed by Research Group :-

Autonomous Intelligent Systems Group
Music Informatics Group
Programming Languages and Systems Group
Software Engineering Group
Miscellaneous / Bioinformatics Group

AIS (Autonomous Intelligent Systems) Group


Visiting Researcher Grant
Funded member: Kostas Stathis
Total funding: £ 2,921
Funding source: The Royal Academy of Engineering
Duration: 2005


Relational Neural Symbolic Systems
Funded member: Artur Garcez
Total funding: £ 4,899
Funding source: The Nuffield Foundation
Duration: 2003-2006


SOCS: Societies of Computers
Funded member: Kostas Stathis
Total funding: £ 197,322
Funding source: The European Commission
Duration: 2002-2005
Overview: The growing complexity of distributed systems calls for models and technologies that promote system predictability and verification. Formal methods and declarative technologies have recently witnessed a growing interest as a vehicle to address such issues. The SOCS project aims at a providing computational logic model for the description, analysis and verification of global and open societies of heterogeneous computees, intended as abstractions of the entities that populate open and global computing environments.


Agent Cities
Funded member: Michael Schroeder
Total funding: £ 4,710
Funding source: DFKI
Duration: 2002-2003
Overview: Investigating the Control and Management of Agents and Services and developing infrastructure for the AgentCities European Network of Excellence AgentCities by integrating services such as visualisation, termination detection, trading and market-based resource allocation


Neural Information Processing
Funded member: Artur Garcez
Total funding: £ 1,391
Funding source: Royal Society
Duration: 2002


Formalising Role Based Interactions
Funded member: Kostas Stathis
Total funding: £ 4,100
Funding source: The Nuffield Foundation
Duration: 2001-2004


Eureka Initiative
Funded member: Bernie Cohen
Total funding: £ 35,941
Funding source: Boxer Research Ltd.
Duration: 2001


PATIA: Adaptive Management Systems for Distributed Web Services
Funded member: Julie McCann
Total funding: £ 27,067
Funding source: EPSRC
Duration: 2000-2002
Overview: The viability of future Internet applications will depend on their scalability. The Patia project aims to carry out studies into data placement and request scheduling to prototype an adaptive webserver management system.


Revise 3.0
Funded member: Michael Schroeder
Total funding: £ 58,398
Funding source: EPSRC
Duration: 1999-2002
Overview: Model based diagnosis systems working with extended logic programming.


Evaluation of Knowledge Level Framework
Funded member: Andrew Tuson
Total funding: £ 20,376
Funding source: Dera
Duration: 1999-2000


Music Informatics Group


I-MAESTRO: Interactive Multimedia Environment for technology enhanced music education and creative collaborative composition and performance

Principal investigator: Tillman Weyde
Funding: € 214,767.80 (City University London) - € 2,350,000 (Total)
Funding source:EU (F6 Integrated Project)
Duration: 2005-2008
Overview: The I-Maestro project is about researching and developing a comprehensive set of methods and tools for musical e-learning. City's role will be the development of algorithms and tools for the generation of music exercises based on musical and pedagogical models.


Music Informatics Group (whilst The Centre for Computational Creativity)


ECOLM (Electronic Corpus of Lute Music) II
Funded member: Geraint Wiggins
Total funding: £ 294,370
Funding source: AHRB
Duration: 2003-2004
Overview: The principal goal of ECOLM is to store and make accessible to scholars, players and others, full-text encodings of sources of music for the Western-European lute (and other relevant sources), together with graphical images from manuscripts and printed music, such codicological and paleographical detail as is helpful to the potential users, and bibliographical data, including, if possible, the texts of important studies where necessary permissions can be obtained. Relevant ‘other’ sources might include keyboard versions of lute pieces, but would where possible also be full-text encodings. They would typically comprise music for keyboard, wind or string instruments, especially the viola da gamba, or vocal ensemble. The technical resources of ECOLM will include facilities for online searching of the bibliographical and musical material, and complete access via the World Wide Web (with suitable restrictions according to the classes of material and user). Also viewing, playing (via computer sound-system or MIDI) of lute music, and printing (again subject to relevant permissions).


Algorithms For Musical Pattern Recognition & Extraction
Funded member: Geraint Wiggins
Total funding: £ 99,669
Funding source: EPSRC
Duration: 2003-2004
Overview: The recent explosive increase in the electronic storage of music as computer files, especially on the Internet, gives rise to the need to design new computer methods to answer questions like: How can we retrieve a specific tune among a large number of musical scores? What is the test way of identifying a melody? How can we find musical works that contain a certain motivic pattern or theme? How can significant, recurring musical patterns be automatically extracted from a score and then used for indexing purposes? We are aiming to design and implement efficient algorithms for several variants of monophonic and polyphonic motif matching in musical sequences. In particular we will design new methods for multi-dimensional approximate motif matching, in order to deal with the presence of errors in musical sequences, compact motif matching in order to deal with temporal gaps, and in order to improve the "quality" of matches we will develop special methods for rhythmic similarity motif matching, metrical congruity motif matching, salient motif matching and harmonic progression motif matching.


Electronic Music Performance Interfaces That Learn From Their Users
Funded member: Geraint Wiggins
Total funding: £ 34,911
Funding source: AHRB
Duration: 2003-2004
Overview: John Drever is an electro-acoustic composer and performer whose live works are limited by the number of actions he can simultaneously carry out as a solo performer. Working with John we will investigate the possibilities of using AI engines that can learn compositional / performance styles and thus further the scope of live performances.


OMRAS (Online Music Recognition and Searching)
Funded member: Geraint Wiggins
Total funding: £ 9,435
Funding source: Kings College
Duration: 2002-2003
Overview: OMRAS is a system for the efficient content-based searching and retrieval of musical information from online databases stored in a variety of formats ranging from encoded scores to digital audio. The system will be easily operated by users with a wide range of musical ability and understanding and will be controlled by a simple-to-use graphical 'musical' interface, both for search queries and for the presentation of results. The musical databases might range from a modest collection of score-files stored on a single hard disk for an individual research project, to the 'collection' of the countless MIDI- or audio-files accessible via the Internet.


Pattern Matching in Musical Databases
Funded member: Geraint Wiggins
Total funding: £ 16,167
Funding source: EPSRC
Duration: 2001
Overview: Continuing our existing successful collaboration on the study of algorithms for pattern matching and pattern discovery in musical databases. We have, for the past 8 months, been engaged in a programme of work based around the PhD thesis of Kjell Lemstroem, investigating the use of string-based pattern matching techniques for musical database search and access. This has linked in with developments on EPSRC grant GR/M65007, where non-string-based techniques for similar applications have been developed. This work has proven very successful, and the value added to the work of both parties has been considerable. This application is to allow Mr Lemstroem to extend his stay by five months and thus let the work fulfil its potential, which has turned out to be greater than originally expected.


Programming Languages and Systems (PLAS) Group


QIF - Quantitative Information Flow

Principal investigator: Sebastian Hunt
Funding: £96,357 (City University London) - £272,734 (Total)
Funding source: EPSRC
Duration: 2005-2009
Overview: The project is concerned with the analysis of information flow in software. In particular, it aims to develop techniques adapted from Shannon's information theory to quantify the amount of information which may flow from one part of a software system to another. This is foundational work. The most immediate applications are likely to be security related, particularly with regard to the protection of confidential data (eg the spyware problem).


SYMNET
Principal investigator: Jacob Howe
Total funding: £62496 Network Grant
Funding source: EPSRC
Duration: 2004-2007
Overview: The focus of this network is the topic of combinatorial search and its applications in problems such as design problems, hardware verification, constraint satisfaction, planning, and theorem proving. In all of these, symmetry is a ubiquitous problem. In each research area we mentioned, the problem of symmetry has been addressed in a number of ways and the network brings together researchers in these areas.


LOGIC BASED PROGRAM ANALYSIS
Principal investigator: Jacob Howe
Total funding: £ 5400
Funding source: Nuffield Foundation
Duration: 2002-2005
Overview: This project developed the application logical techniques to program analysis (in particular to logic programming) and domain algorithms for these analyses.


Software Engineering Group


Automatic Scheduling for Critical Multi-Core Embedded Systems

Principal investigator: Christos Kloukinas
Funding: £ 2610 (Total)
Funding source:EU Royal Society)
Duration: 2009
Overview: Funded short visit to the Verimag research laboratory in Grenoble, France, to collaborate with Dr Sergio Yovine and Dr Joseph Sifakis. The research was on the automatic scheduling of real-time tasks in embedded systems.


SERENITY - System Engineering for Security and Dependability

Principal investigator: George Spanoudakis
Funding: € 587,232 (City University London) - € 7.25m (Total)
Funding source:EU (F6 Integrated Project)
Duration: 2006 - 2009
Overview: The project is concerned with the development of a framework supporting the automated integration, configuration, monitoring and adaptation of security and dependability mechanisms for AmI ecosystems. Own work focuses on development of mechanisms for monitoring and diagnosis of threats and violations of security requirements and recovery from such violations.


GREDIA - Grid Enabled Access to Rich Media Content

Principal investigator:Andrea Zisman
Co-investigator:George Spanoudakis, Bill Karakostas
Funding: € 330,000 (City University London) - € 2.4m (Total)
Funding source: EU (F6 STREP Project)
Duration:2006-2009
Overview: The main goal of GREDIA is to design, implement and validate a reliable platform for the design, development and operational deployment of secure Grid business applications. This platform will support services allowing mobile devices to participate in the Grid applications in a secure way supported by the existence of a dedicated security framework.


PEPERS - Mobile Peer-to-Peer Security Infrastructure

Principal investigator: George Spanoudakis
Co-investigator: Andrea Zisman
Funding: € 323,164 (City University London) - € 1.9m (Total)
Funding source: EU (F6 STREP Project)
Duration:2006-2008
Overview: PEPERS is aimed at designing, implementing and validating a reliable platform with high-level support for the design, development and operational deployment of secure mobile peer-to-peer applications.


SeCSE - Service Centric Systems Engineering

Principal investigators: George Spanoudakis (Computing) and Neil Maiden (HCID)
Co-Investigator: Andrea Zisman (Computing)
Funding: € 387,500 (Computing) and € 387,500 (HCID) (€ 8.5m for the entire project)
Funding source: EU (F6 Intergrated Project)
Duration: 2004 - 2008
Overview:Development of methods, tools and techniques for developing and deploying web service based systems. The group focuses on run-time monitoring of service based systems and service discovery driven by architectural models and run-time violations of functional and quality-of-service requirements. It is also looking at mechanisms for context aware run time service discovery and service composition.


Monitoring Security Requirements and Solutions (PhD studenship)

Principal investigator(s): George Spanoudakis
PhD Student: Theoharis Tsigritis
Total funding: £ 40,000
Funding source: City University London
Duration: 2004 - 2007
Overview:Applying a run-time monitoring architecture on a system, to check whether the security requirements of the system can be met effectively. In case of a security violation, the monitoring results are processed and analysed for serving diagnostic purposes. The diagnostic task highlights the system part (component or group of components), which has displayed unexpected behaviour. By these means, the cause of the security violation can be spotted. .


NEVIS
Principal investigator: Andrea Zisman
Co-Investigator: George Spanoudakis
Total funding: £ 15,000
Funding source: CSW Informatics Ltd
Duration: 2004
Overview: Evaluation of architectures and performance of XML-based healthcare applications .


Software Traceability for Product Family Systems (PhD studentship)
Principal investigator(s): Andrea Zisman
PhD Student: Waraporn Jirapanthong
Total funding: £ 50,300
Funding source: Madihol University - Thailand
Duration: 2002 - 2006
Overview: Developing a traceability metamodel for product family systems and a tool to support automatic generation of traceability relations for software artefacts generated during the development of product family systems


Monitoring requirements for web-services (PhD studentship)
Principal investigator(s): George Spanoudakis
PhD Student: Khaled Mahbub
Total funding: £ 40,000
Funding source: City University London
Duration: 2002 - 2005
Overview: Designing a framework for monitoring the compliance of systems composed of web-services with requirements set for them at run-time. The proposed framework assumes systems composed of web-services which are co-coordinated by a service composition process expressed in BPEL and uses event calculus to specify the requirements to be monitored. These requirements may include behavioural properties of a system which are automatically extracted from the specification of its composition process in BPEL and/or assumptions that system providers can specify in terms of events extracted from this specification.


Traceability for agent-oriented systems (PhD studentship)
Principal investigator(s): Andrea Zisman
PhD Student: Gilberto Cysneiros
Total funding: £ 40,000
Funding source: City University London
Duration: 2002 - 2005
Overview: Development of a rule-based approach to support automatic generation of traceability relations for agent-oriented software artefacts and assist with the checking of completeness of those artefacts. Concentrating on goals and business models represented in i* and design models represented in Prometheus and code implemented in JADEX and JACK..



Handling Inconsistencies in Distributed Software Engineering Documents
Principal investigator(s): Andrea Zisman
Total funding: £ 64,449
Funding source: EPSRC
Duration: 2001-2002
Overview: Developing methods and tools to allow inconsistency handling of distributed software engineering documents, in particular documents related to UML models.


WAICENT Information Bus
Principal investigator(s): Andrea Zisman
Total funding: £ 33,000
Funding source: United Nations - Food and Agricultural Organisation
Duration: 2002
Overview: Applying Web Services technology to support multilingual access of data stored in various data sources, handle metadata in a generic way, and enable metadata to be used as exchange models throughout FAO.


Requirements Traceability
Principal investigator(s): George Spanoudakis and Andrea Zisman
Total funding: £ 5,000
Funding source: Philips Research Labs - UK
Duration: 2001
Overview: The automatic generation of of traceability relationships between early software life-cycle artefacts


Intereference Management in Object Oriented Software Development (IMOOSD)
Principal investigator(s): George Spanoudakis
Total funding: £ 49,000
Funding source: EPSRC
Duration: 1999 - 2000
Overview: The development of techniques to support the management of inconsistencies in partial, object-oriented static and behavioural models of software systems. The project generated a tool-supported method, called Reconciliation+, that supports the detection of overlaps and inconsistencies in object-oriented software models, and the diagnosis and handling of the latter.


Requirements Engineering Network Of International cooperating Research groups (RENOIR)
Funded member: George Spanoudakis
Total funding: £ 5,000
Funding source: EU Framework IV - Network of Excellence
Duration: 1996 - 2000
Overview: RENOIR was a network of excellence funded by the European Union that included the main European groups involved in requirements engineering research. Our research within the network was concerned with the development of techniques to support the management of inconsistencies in requirements specifications.


Miscellaneous / Bioinformatics (research carried out prior to the Departments current Research Group structure)


Biogrid
Funded member: Michael Schroeder
Total funding: £ 98,217
Funding source: The European Commision
Duration: 2002-2004
Overview: Development of a knowledge and information grid for the integrated exploration of protein interactions, gene expression data, and ontology-based literature search.


Genestream
Funded member: Michael Schroeder
Total funding: £ 100,185
Funding source: The European Commision
Duration: 2002-2003
Overview: Providing input for BioGrid by examining how to use ontologies for unstructured and semi-structured biological data analysis. Part of this effort saw the development of GoPubmed, a service whiche uses GeneOntology to structure large searchr esults of Pubmed queries.


Structural Patterns In Composite Reglarity Regions of Genomes
Funded member: David Gilbert
Total funding: £ 57,553
Funding source: The European Commission
Duration: 2001
Overview: The project addresses the challenge of developing tractable methods to analyse transcriptional regulatory regions in higher organisms, where strictly sequence based approaches are less likely to succeed due to the complex interaction of several regulatory elements. We propose to use a topological representation of regulatory sites in order to take advantage of the reduced level of complexity of algorithms that can be developed at this level of abstraction. Topological approaches to the representation and analysis of complex structures in bioinformatics have so far been mostly developed in the field of protein structure. We propose to adapt the work on TOPS diagrams carried out by the host scientist, David Gilbert, to describe and analyse transcriptional regulatory regions in genomes.


Patterns, Functions & Structures in Protein Topology Databases
Funded member: David Gilbert
Total funding: £ 41,328
Funding source: BBSRC
Duration: 2001
Overview: The aims of this project are to enhance the TOPS system, search and learning algorithms, to build a topologically based structure search and comparison method rivalling those based on atomic co-ordinates in terms of accuracy, and excelling them in terms of computational speed and memory requirements. Improved facilities for the visualization of ligand binding sites on TOPS cartoons will also be developed. Machine learning algorithms will be extended to discover discriminatory topological patterns in sets of positive and negative examples. Further developments of the machine learning methods will aim to discover patterns relating the topological description of structures to characteristics of the sequence, and to functional characteristics of the protein (for instance, ligand binding sites), for use in prediction of protein structure and function.


Automatic Extraction of Patterns and Rules for Protein Classification
Funded member: David Gilbert
Total funding: £ 26,679
Funding source: The Wellcome Trust
Duration: 2000-2001
Overview: The aim of the research is to find patterns and rules for protein classification from extended TOPS descriptions and to develop fast methods and algorithms for protein comparison/classification based on automatic discovery of these patterns and rules. We also plan to use these methods to characterise structured databases of protein structures, and in the first instance will apply this technique to the CATH database at UCL. We hope that this approach could be applied to characterise other databases of protein structures, for example SCOP, and will permit comparisons between them. Also, it is expected that this work will enhance our ability to relate protein structure to function.


Pattern Discovery for Protein Classification
Funded member: David Gilbert
Total funding: £ 13,865
Funding source: The Leverhulme Trust
Duration: 2000-2001
Overview: Development of a method to automatically extract topological patterns characterising protein families and sub-families in the CATH protein structure classification at UCL (Orengo et al, 1997), based on the initial approach developed by Dr. Gilbert., and to investigate the use of these patterns both to chart evolutionary relationships amongst the proteins and as a classification method in their own right.