AEDUS2: Adaptable Environments for Distributed Ubiquitous Systems
Lead Research Organisation:
Imperial College London
Department Name: Computing
Abstract
This is request for renewal for a further 5 years for a Platform Grant to support personnel and travel for the Distributed Software Engineering Group within the Department of Computing, Imperial College London. This is a world-renowned group which combines practical work on building tools for design and implementation of adaptive ubiquitous and distributed systems and networks with more formal software engineering approaches to behaviour modelling, requirements specification and analysis, language semantics and type systems for distributed programming. This proposal will provide support for cohesion and continuity of funding for a number of experienced researchers as well as permitting short-term evaluation of new ideas and experiments. Projects will focus on a sound Software Engineering approach to adaptive software environments for autonomic systems, policy-based trust, privacy and security, as well as requirements engineering for ubiquitous systems. The proposal will also fund an experienced researcher to provide overall project management and help coordinate the effort required for packaging and maintaining experimental software to make it more accessible to external academic and industrial users.
Organisations
Publications
Allwood T
(2011)
High coverage testing of Haskell programs
Alrajeh D
(2013)
Elaborating Requirements Using Model Checking and Inductive Learning
in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Asmare E
(2011)
Self-Management Framework for Mobile Autonomous Systems
in Journal of Network and Systems Management
Bourdenas T
(2010)
Starfish
Craven R
(2010)
Decomposition techniques for policy refinement
Dong C
(2011)
Shared and searchable encrypted data for untrusted servers
in Journal of Computer Security
Huebscher M
(2007)
Context as autonomic intelligence in a ubiquitous computing environment
in International Journal of Internet Protocol Technology
Marinovic S
(2010)
Teleo-Reactive policies for managing human-centric pervasive services
McCann J
(2009)
Beasties in the creative workplace
in Intelligent Buildings International
Mostarda L
(2010)
Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems
| Description | This was a renewal of a Platform Grant for a further 5 years which enabled the group to develop and enhance its activities related to building tools for design and implementation of adaptive and ubiquitous distributed systems and networks. The funding was extremely useful in providing short term bridging for Research Assistants between projects, for initial investigations of new research topics, and to support attendance at international research meet ins and dissemination of results through conference keynotes and paper presentations. In particular, the research covered a broad range of topics, including formal and rigorous software engineering approaches to adaptive behaviour modelling and controller synthesis; automated techniques and tools for requirements specification elaboration and analysis; software testing techniques; and language semantics and type systems for distributed programming. In addition, systems topics included sensor networks; privacy issues for mobile computing; and security in pervasive flows data dissemination and networks. Funding from the project facilitated the refinement of the Ponder2 Policy toolkit used by many academic and industrial research organizations. The project funded work on adaptation strategies for autonomous unmanned vehicle management and learning context aware adaptation rules for mobile systems. The latter uses a new inductive learning system developed by members of the group, which has been further improved through bridging funding of the platform grant. A novel application of machine learning has also been developed for risk-based security decisions and stochastic models of information flow. In the area of requirements engineering, funding from the project supported attendance at the international IFIP 2.9 meetings. This facilitated research collaboration with Prof van Lamsweerde of the University of Louvain, Belgium, on requirements obstacle discovery which was presented at the flagship software engineering conference, ICSE 2012. Collaborative work is continuing on requirements revision. Funding has also facilitated collaboration with Dr. Giannakopoulou from NASA resulting in an EPSRC grant proposal on requirements and software architectures. In the area of adaptive systems and planning, funding has facilitated recent collaboration with NII in Japan. Wireless sensing work carried out using AEDUS funding involved the development of a wireless sensing platform that is being used in the STREAM IDC in the Department of Civil Engineering. This system has been extended to valves that control water flow. An intelligent Water Research Centre has been set up from this which is co-funded by NEC (£1M). Furthermore, WSN work from Yadav, Spyrou and Breza was fundamental in Intel choosing Imperial College to instantiate their Institute for Sustainable and Connected Cities (worth £1.5M). Dr Pietzuch joined the group after Aedus2 was awarded, so was not a named co-investigator Over the course of the project, Pietzuch and his team developed new data-centric security models based on information flow control techniques, which were successfully validated as part of a collaboration with NHS ECRIC, a registry collecting sensitive medical data about cancer cases in England. The results of this research work were published at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference in 2010, which is among the top three publication venues for systems research. Follow-on work enabled by the Aedus2 grant applied these techniques to problems in cloud security, which recently led to a funded project by EPSRC and Dstl and further industrial collaborations with Nexor Ltd and BAE Systems. The group was able to continue with existing industrial collaborations with IBM, British Aerospace, as well as establishing new ones leading to funding from Cisco, Orange, Intel and Nec. |
| Exploitation Route | Various follow on Research projects see http://wp.doc.ic.ac.uk/dse/projects2/ |
| Sectors | Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Environment |
| URL | http://wp.doc.ic.ac.uk/dse/ |
| Description | There were no specific deliverables or direct impact. The platform grant was used to fund RAs between other funded projects and establish research topics leading to further funding. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2013 |
| Sector | Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Environment |
| Impact Types | Economic |
| Description | A Declarative Infrastructure for Agile and Automated Security/Network Management |
| Amount | £267,000 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | MOD/US Army BPP 11 |
| Organisation | IBM |
| Department | IBM UK Ltd |
| Sector | Private |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 05/2011 |
| End | 05/2013 |
| Description | ALLOW: Adaptable Pervasive Flows |
| Amount | £346,000 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | 213339 |
| Organisation | European Commission |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | European Union (EU) |
| Start | 01/2008 |
| End | 07/2011 |
| Description | Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research |
| Amount | £50,000 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | EP/K00414X/1 |
| Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 07/2012 |
| End | 06/2017 |
| Description | BAE Systems |
| Amount | £20,000 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | SEAS DTC |
| Organisation | BAE Systems |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 01/2010 |
| End | 12/2010 |
| Description | Consequence: Context Aware Data Centric Information Sharing |
| Amount | £349,000 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | 214859 |
| Organisation | European Commission |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | European Union (EU) |
| Start | 01/2008 |
| End | 12/2011 |
| Description | FUSE: Floodplain Underground Sensors |
| Amount | £287,000 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | NE/I00694X/1 |
| Organisation | Natural Environment Research Council |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 12/2011 |
| End | 12/2013 |
| Description | Homework: Shaping Future User Centered Domestic Infrastructures |
| Amount | £645,000 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | EP/F064446/1 |
| Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2008 |
| End | 04/2012 |
| Description | Intel Collaborative Research Institute in Sustainable Connected Cities |
| Amount | £1,500,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Intel Corporation |
| Sector | Private |
| Country | United States |
| Start | 10/2012 |
| End | 09/2017 |
| Description | PBM-FIMBSE: Partial Behaviour Modelling: A Foundation for Incremental and Iterative Model- |
| Amount | £1,100,000 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | ERC 204853 |
| Organisation | European Research Council (ERC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | Belgium |
| Start | 09/2009 |
| End | 12/2013 |
| Description | Runtime Verification in Networks |
| Amount | £128,000 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | EP/G059861/1 |
| Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 05/2009 |
| End | 05/2010 |
| Description | Shaping an International Grand Challenge Community for Ubiquitous Computing |
| Amount | £254,321 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | EP/F013442/1 |
| Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 01/2007 |
| End | 12/2009 |
| Description | SmartFlow: Extendable Event Based Middleware |
| Amount | £503,000 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | EP/F042469/1 |
| Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2008 |
| End | 04/2012 |
| Description | iCareNet: Context-aware Pervasive Healthcare |
| Amount | £369,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| Country | Global |
| Start | 10/2011 |
| End | 09/2013 |