Research Interests

I started my research career looking at transport protocols for high speed networks, moved on to congestion control for packetised video, designed programming languages and runtime environments for user defined processing within the network and lately have been thinking about how to utilise trust in the building of networks and pervasive computing systems. If there is a theme running through my research interests, its about ensuring that technology provides the user with control over how the network meets their needs.

If you're interested in applying for a PhD, email me with your interests, and we'll discuss what can be done.

Research Students

I'm happy to supervise students studying questions across the areas of networks, distributed systems and pervasive computing. Example PhD topics I would consider are:
  • Pervasive computing systems in the future will be composed of a dynamic set of independent located services. How can we develop aggregate services that are both amenable to configuration by users, and are capable of self-organising? One approach is to build a rigorous formal model based on Milner's notion of bigraphs, and to provide a policy language that can map into feasible reaction rules in such a model, and to provide ways of learning the reaction rules that the systems can undertake.
  • The Internet was designed to be an open network. Can we re-engineer the design of networked servers so as to utilise a generalised reputation framework, so that servers can offer service levels commensurate with the likelihood that the client will behave? How can we build a system that is itself distributed and robust against attack?
  • Online social networks provide strong evidence of the trust relationships between individuals. Can we build overlay networks that take advantage of these trust relationships to build distributed systems that facilitate secure services between user, such as automated backup and SIP calls?

Current Research Students

  • Renan Krishna is working on the use of bigraphs in service composition in pervasive computing
  • Danny Matthews is working on the use of context in data delivery
  • Morteza Kheirkhah is looking at MPTCP for data centres

Past Students

  • Ann Light
  • Nick Sharples
  • Rory Graves
  • Jon Rimmer
  • David Ellis
  • Stephen Cogdon
  • Adnan Al-Bar
  • Jon Robinson
  • Richard Gold
  • Anirban Basu
  • Roya Feizy
  • Lachhman Dhomeja
  • Yasir Malkani
  • Stephen Naicken
  • Simon Fleming
  • Aeshah Alsiyami

Examined Students

I've enjoyed the privilege of being the external PhD examiner for the following people and their theses:
  • Panos Gevros, UCL CS, "Congestion Control Mechanisms for Scalable Bandwidth Sharing", 2001
  • Antonio Liotta, UCL CS, "Towards Flexible and Scalable Distributed Monitoring with Mobile Agents", 2001
  • Dimitrios Miras, UCL CS, "On Quality Aware Adaptation of Internet Video", 2004
  • Terence Song, Bristol University, "A CORBA-Based Graph and Layout Service for Network Visualisation, Control and Management in Distributed Virtual Worlds", 2005
  • Evangelos Kotsovinos, Cambridge University Computer Lab, "Public Distributed Computing", 2005
  • Ioannis Liabotis, UCL EE, "Resource Management for Active Networks", 2005
  • Alfarez Abdul-Rahman, UCL CS, "A Framework for Decentralised Trust Reasoning" 2005
  • Anil Madhavapeddy, Cambridge University Computer Lab, "Creating High-Performance Statically Type-Safe Network Applications", 2006 "
  • David Hudson, Sydney University IT, "Walkabout: An Asynchronous Messaging Architecture for Mobile Devices", 2008
  • Evangelia Kalyvianaki, Cambridge University Computer Lab, "Resource Provisioning for Virtualized Server Applications", 2008
  • Daniele Quercia, UCL CS, "Trust Models for Mobile Content-Sharing Applications", 2009
  • Francisco Duron, Lancaster University Computing, "Design and Analysis of a New Distributed IP Router Framework", 2009
  • Arvind Bhusate, Imperial College, "Intelligent Communication Technologies for Interactive Museum Exhibits", 2009
  • Ajab Khan, Leicester University, "Stochastic Simulation of P2P VoIP Reconfiguration using Graph Transformation", 2011
  • JaeSeung Song, Imperial College, "SymbexNet: Checking Network Protocol Implementations using Symbolic Execution",2013