2014 (click to expand)

• Many thanks to Prof. Jon Crowcroft for his excellent distinguished seminar for the Networks group, and guitar playing for the Christmas party! (December).

• The School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science has been ranked very highly in the Research Excellence Framework. We are ranked 9th for research in EE, and 11th for research in CS nationally. Overall, 91% of our research has been ranked as either world leading or internationally excellent (December).

• Paper “Deploying Large-Scale Data Sets on-Demand in the Cloud: Treats and Tricks on Data Distribution” by Dr. Felix Cuadrado has been accepted in IEEE Transactions in Cloud Computing. This is a premier journal in the emerging field of cloud computing (November).

• Prof. Steve Uhlig and Dr. Felix Cuadrado have been awarded €922K as part of the Horizon 2020 ENDEAVOUR project. Queen Mary will coordinate the 3-year project, worth €4.2M, focusing on the use of software defined networking technologies within Internet Exchange Points (September).

• Queen Mary has, once again, jumped up in the QS World University Rankings, entering the global Top 100. We are now 98th in the world (September).

• Paper “Trace-Driven Analysis of ICN Caching Algorithms on Video-on-Demand Workloads” by Prof. Steve Uhlig has been accepted at the ACM CoNEXT conference. This is one of the premier conferences in the field (August).

• Paper “Energy-Efficient Real-Time Human Mobility State Classification Using Smartphones” by Thomas Oshin, Dr. Stefan Poslad and Zelun Zhang has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Computers. This is a premier journal, ranked A* by CORE (July).

• Zelun Zhang has successfully defended his PhD thesis, “Use of Foot Force Sensors Combined with Mobile Phone GPS for Improved Mobility Detection“. He has now taken a position at HSBC bank in the UK (June).

• Thomas Oshin has successfully defended his PhD thesis, “Energy-Efficient Location Determination for Human Mobility Analysis and Monitoring Using Smart Mobile Devices” (June).

• Paper “Optimum Use of Foot Force Sensors and Mobile Phone GPS for Mobility Activity Recognition” by Zelun Zhang and Dr. Stefan Poslad has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Sensors Journal. This is one of the premier journals in the area, with an impact factor of 1.48 (June).

• Prof. Jonathan Pitts has won the annual Bruce Dickinson Award for the best Queen Mary Enterprise Activity. This was for his involvement in co-founding the spin-out company Actual Experience (May).

• Dr. Michael Chai and Dr. Yue Chen have been awarded €340k as part of a 5-partner €1.2M European project “IRENE: Improving the Robustness of Urban Electricity Networks“. This project is focusing on making future energy generation more resilient, as well as minimising the impact of power failures on critical infrastructure for smart city scenarios (May).

• Paper “A Multi-Modal Incompleteness Ontology Model (MMIO) to Enhance Information Fusion for Image Retrieval” by Dr. Stefan Poslad has been published in the Information Fusion Journal. The Microsoft Academic Rankings places this as the 8th highest impact information retrieval journal, with an impact factor of 2.8 (May).

• Networks group spin-out, Actual Experience plc, co-founded by Prof. Jonathan Pitts, has been chosen as a 2014 Red Herring Top 100 Europe award winner, and has been described by Money Week online as “the Navy SEALs of the IT world” (May).

• Dr. John Schormans has won a new EPSRC CASE studentship award, working alongside Intergence (May).

• The Networks group has hosted the 6th International Workshop on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis (TMA)! It was attended by over 60 participants from around the world, with a fantastic set of papers and posters (30% acceptance rate).  Prof. Steve Uhlig was the local chair, with help from several other group members (April).

• The Networks group have had two papers by Prof. Steve Uhlig and Dr. Felix Cuadrado accepted at the premier International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS). The Microsoft Academic Rankings ranks this as the highest impact distributed computing conference, with an acceptance rate of only 13% (March).

• The Networks group have had two papers by Prof. Steve Uhlig and Dr. Gareth Tyson accepted at the IFIP Networking Conference. This is one of the premier venues for networking research, with an acceptance rate of 25% (March).

• Paper “Beyond Content Delivery: Can ICNs Help Emergency Scenarios?” by Dr. Gareth Tyson, Dr. Eliane Bodanese and Dr. John Bigham has been accepted to IEEE Network. The Microsoft Academic Rankings ranks this as the 8th highest impact networks journal, with an impact factor of 2.85 (March).

• Networks group spin-out, Actual Experience, co-founded by Prof. Jonathan Pitts, saw its shares jump to more than four times its float price on the first day listed on the Alternative Investment Market, having been originally valued at £15.5 million. Full story can be found here (February).

• Paper “A Survey of Mobility in Information-Centric Networks”  by Dr. Gareth Tyson has been published in Communications of the ACM. The Microsoft Academic Rankings ranks this as as the highest impact Computer Science journal in the world (January).

• The Networks group is organising the 2015 SIGCOMM Conference in London! Prof. Steve Uhlig is general co-chair, Dr. Hamed Haddadi is the local organisation co-chair and Dr. Felix Cuadrado is the web chair (January).

• Dr. Iftekharul Mobin, who finished his PhD in November 2013, is now working in NatterBox. Congratulations! (January).