Full Project Details

Neural Insights is a leading strategic management consulting firm. It combines deep industry knowledge with specialised expertise in strategy, technology, operations, risk management, and applied business intelligence.

The project will combine research with practical implementation. It will require research into methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies for modeling and interpreting data related to a firm’s GRC, its internal operating model processes and the external risk profile. It will also require practical work on integration, visualization and implementation using industry standard platforms.

Academic Supervisor: Professor Richard Paige

Project: MODELLING GEOGRAPHIC CHANGES USING COMPUTER SCIENCE AND SOFTWARE ENGINEERING TECHNIQUES, Ordnance Survey,

Full Project Details

The research will involve investigating the manner in which geographic objects (with particular reference to settlements, roads and buildings) change over time and how this may be modelled. The challenge, as will be the case even more so with historical objects, is that the extents of settlements in particular are often ill determined and where there is a well defined official boundary the social boundaries may be quite different.

Furthermore the Research needs to consider the relationship between places through time. For example what is the relationship between Winchester and Venta Belgarum the Roman town that occupied the area now called Winchester. Is this Winchester by another name or something different ? In modern times similar issues exist, what for example is the relationship between localities that are either absorbed or displaced by the construction of a new town or estate ? The focus of the research is not to necessarily resolve the issues of how these relationships change, but rather how to represent them.

Academic Supervisor: Professor Helen Petrie and Dr Chris Power

Project: INTERFACES FOR OPHTHALMOLOGICAL HEALTH CARE PERSONNEL, Moorfields Eye Hospital, NHS

Full Project Details

This project will explore how to design and implement interfaces for medical personnel to use in the diagnosis and referral of patients. Key areas of interest are how to collect requirements from ophthalmologists and other relevant personnel from different hospitals, health care trusts or even countries, all of whom, have similar skills and knowledge but differ in their practices and procedures. Emphasis will be on how to use these requirements to create interfaces that support specific roles in the health care context in a flexible way and then evolve those interfaces to better support the work of specialists in different contexts.

Academic Supervisor: Professor Helen Petrie and Dr Chris Power

The industrial supervisor at Moorfields is Mr Bill Aylward, MD

Project: REAL-TIME EMBEDDED SYSTEMS SCHEDULING, VERIFICATION AND VISUALISATION, Rapita Systems Ltd

Full Project Details

This project focuses on scheduling and timing behaviour verification and visualisation for large scale complex real-time embedded systems.

The project combines research into theory, algorithms and mechanisms for the scheduling of multiprocessor (multicore) and multi-criticality systems, with practical work on implementation, tracing, verifying, and visualising timing behaviour.

The project will involve the design and development of prototype tools building upon Rapita Systems’ existing technology for trace data capture, measurement-based worst-case execution time analysis, code-coverage analysis, and visualisation. (see www.rapitasystems.com).

Academic Supervisor: Dr Robert Davis

Project: ACCESS CONTROL & TIME MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS, Mitrefinch Ltd

Full Project Details

One of Mitrefinch’s key products is an access control and time management terminal. The existing terminal has been developed and maintained over a period of years, and work is underway on developing the next generation terminal that will be a flagship product for the next ten years. The project will involve collaboration with the core development team for this terminal. Particular focus will be given to one of a number of areas : novel and distinctive user interface design and implementation ; research and development into biometric matching algorithms (our main focus is fingerprint but research into 2D/3D facial and finger-vein recognition is planned) with emphasis on implementation and optimisation ; research and development of biometric enrolment techniques to best capture data for matching ; optimisation of network latency and performance. The particular directions and emphases taken in the project will depend on the focus of Mitrefinch and the expertise of the successful candidate. An overall objective is to have the best “time management” and access control hardware device on the market (while working within a controlled budget).

Academic Supervisor: Professor Richard Paige

Project: TESTING AND CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION, Mitrefinch Ltd

Full Project Details

Mitrefinch carries out substantial software development, particularly on the Windows, ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. They make use of continuous build technology that links to an automated test suite and unit test framework. This project will investigate the extent to which state-of-the-art automated and semi-automated testing techniques, from Computer Science literature, can be exploited within this infrastructure to make substantial improvements in automatically detecting and reducing error rates. At the same time, exploitation of novel software testing techniques can be used to help improve the continuous build technology, as well as a key target to integrate with change management systems and code repositories in use throughout the company.

Academic Supervisor: Professor Richard Paige

Project: INTERFACE DRIVEN SECURITY AND PRIVACY, Moorfields Eye Hospital, NHS

Full Project Details

This project will explore the development of interactive systems in an environment where security and privacy issues drive the way in which data can be accessed through the interface. In the current NHS data access scheme, all patient records are accessed through a single data service. The project will investigate how to provide access to this service in such a way that interface designers and developers need not know about the complexity of the data security scheme. In addition, the student will investigate how user task descriptions could be used to automatically configure data access to the secure data service.

Academic Supervisor: Professor Helen Petrie and Dr Chris Power

The industrial supervisor at Moorfields is Mr Bill Aylward, MD

Project: SECURITY EVENT CORRELATION & VISUALISATION USING MACHINE LEARNING TECHNIQUES, BT

The proposed topic is to capture the knowledge and analytical capabilities of human security experts for the development of an intelligent system that performs event correlation from the logs and alerts of multiple security technologies. The objectives of the research are to develop a holistic view of security related logs from different sources to raise early warnings of possible attacks/threats, to assist human experts to identify and analyse root causes of attacks/threats, and to prioritise risk protections.

Academic Supervisor: Professor John Clark

Apply here.