Professorial Inaugural Lecture

Professor Yong Xue

Monday 8th December

GCG-08

5.30pm

CultureShock Evening Talk

Wednesday 10th December

TMG-45

6.00—7.30pm

FLSC

Faculty of Life Sciences and Computing

For your Calendar

Issue 24 November 2014

Edited by Preeti Patel

Nepalese graduates

Islington College, Nepal recently held its third Graduation Ceremony for students

who have successfully completed BSc Computing, BSc Computer Networking and

IT Security or BSc Multimedia Technologies. 240 students proudly donned their

London Met gowns and convened at an impressive hotel venue in central Kath-

mandu, accompanied by family and friends. The Ceremony marks another year

of successful partnership between Islington College and the School of Compu-

ting.

Preeti Patel addressed the 800+ strong

audience and conferred degrees and gave

prizes to graduates.

Dr Anoosh Nabijou (Academic Liaison

Tutor for Nepal) and Preeti also conducted

a scheduled course visit covering a range

of activities including yearly review ,

course committee meetings, staff develop-

ment, student inductions and administra-

tive operation – all of which ensure the continuing high standard of the courses

being delivered through this successful partnership.

Editor’s Note

Girls and Robots

Contributions are welcome from all areas of the Faculty—please send to

me by the middle of the month.

Preeti Patel

p.patel@londonmet.ac.uk

School of Computing

2

Mark Campbell, Senior Lecturer, School of Com-

puting recently visited the Sarah Bonnell School

in Newham to give a talk and a demonstration

on robotics and sensors/actuators. The audi-

ence for the first part of the talk and robot demo

was just under 100 girls currently studying for

the new syllabus GCSE Computer Science. The

pupils were a mix of Year 10 and Year 11 of

which 56 thoroughly enjoyed taking part in a practical session designed and

co-ordinated by Mark.

“I think it's of critical importance to try and get more young, and talented, girls focussed on to computing

and engineering at an early stage - the new, stronger GCSE Computer Science syllabus should help” com-

ments Mark.

Animation in BBC Media

3

Nigel Medhurst (Course Leader, BSc Games Modelling, Animation and

Effects) recently participated in the BBC’s World News Global programme

where artificial intelligence, animation and robotics were discussed.

Nigel spoke about the

skills that are needed for

creating the type of ani-

mation pictured below.

Nigel was also asked to

describe the technology

behind initiatives such as

“Sweetie” – a computer-

generated child posing

on video chat rooms

which helped to catch

hundreds of online pred-

ators.

The programme concluded with a look at

how these technologies could shape the

next 5-10 years – with robotic shop assis-

tants being the most popular form of inter-

acting with robots.

Arty the robot has in

the past performed

as a stand-up come-

dian at a comedy club

and he also gives a

great rendition of

“Singing in the Rain”.

Get in the Game

4

Fiona French (Course Leader, BSc Computer Games Programming)

recently organised, for the third consecutive year, a Games career talk

for students. Mark Hope (pictured) from Aardvark Swift, a recruitment

agency dedicated to the Computer Games industry was accompanied by

Josh Taylor from Unity. The features of the new Unity 5 engine were

showcased to students. Unity is a game development environment with

a rendering engine which allows the creation of interactive 3D and 2D

content and multiplatform publishing capability.

London Met IT Security Researchers

Chris Sheridan, student on BSc Games Modelling, Ani-

mation and Effects, was delighted to win the goody

bag which included a PlayStation game.

Transport Security Expo this year includes a cyber securi-

ty showcase for which 4 research groups were selected to

demonstrate to an international audience various

transport and related cyber threat scenarios, and the solu-

tions designed to address them.

Dr. Deepthi Ratnayake and Samson Habte, under the

guidance of Prof. Karim Ouazzane, will be giving a staged

demonstration of an anomaly based Wireless Intruder De-

tection System that can detect fake/spoofed Access-Points

in metro stations on December 2.

The demonstration subject is as follows: Customer de-

vices in metro stations may be connected to the internet

via Access-Points (APs) forming a Wireless Local Area

Network (WLAN). One of the potential vulnerabilities

that exists is the possibility of fake/spoofed APs that lure customers to log into a fake WLAN and steal

information whilst the connection is on. In this Wireless Intruder Detection System (WIDS) project, we

will demonstrate how to detect fake/spoofed APs using the properties of live Medium Access Control

(MAC) frame captures using a monitoring station. This prototype of an anomaly based WIDS employs a

supervised feed forward Neural Network (NN) classifier. It classifies genuine frames from rogue frames,

to detect fake/spoofed APs in a WLAN.

Samson Habte, Andy Williams (Transport Security Expo

Cyber security demonstration co-ordinator), Dr. Deepthi

Ratnayake & Prof. Karim Ouazzane.

5

QAA calling

As the School of Computing has a well-established partnership with the School of Accounting and Manage-

ment in Trinidad with the delivery of a top-up BSc Business Computing, the QAA included London Metro-

politan University in this review, as well as 9 other UK universities and their local partners in Trinidad.

Dr Vince Hargy and Preeti Patel prepared and supported the SoC partner prior to and during the

QAA review visit. The review team held several meetings with senior management, academic staff, admin-

istrative staff and students. SAM and FLSC colleagues worked extremely well together to make prepara-

tions for all these meetings, which were held in the newly constructed SMART facility at SAM, Trinidad,

pictured below.

The QAA review will culminate in an overview report, providing a statistical analysis of UK TNE in the Car-

ibbean, and reports on individual partnerships in Trinidad which will all be published in March 2015.

The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher

Education (QAA) is currently conducting a

review of Transnational Education (TNE)

in the Caribbean.

'Trinidad and Tobago is the tenth most popular country for students studying for UK TNE awards….Our reviewers will be looking at the arrangements that UK insti-tutions have with their local centre part-ners to assure the quality of support pro-vided …….' said Rozina Hashmi, who is leading the review for QAA. [from 14/11/2014 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/Newsroom/Pages/Trinidad-QAA-TNE-review.aspx].

Nigel Fulchan (Vice President, Academics, Teaching and Learning), Dr

Asaf Pirali (Founder/President, SAM), Preeti Patel, Dr Vince Hargy

6

5G for Internet of Things explained…..

The use of smart phones and tablets is soaring. These devices are used to browse the Web, stream videos, and share photos on the go. In fact, we are moving more mobile data over the airwaves than ever before. Mobile traffic worldwide is doubling each year, according to reports from Cisco and Ericsson. The exponential growth in mobile traffic will continue for the foresee-able future with the advent of Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine Communications. This means by 2020, the average mobile user could be downloading a whopping 1 terabyte of data annually, which is equivalent to accessing more than 1,000 feature-length films. To cope with the growth in traffic a number of clever fixes have been introduced to the existing 4G LTE cellular networks. But none of these solutions will sustain the oncoming traffic surge for more than the next four to six years. We need a new technology that can offer a hundred times the data capacity of 4G LTE systems, enabling download rates of tens of Gbps while keeping con-sumer prices relatively low. This technology is 5G. The 5G Technology Workshop organised by Professor Bal Virdee at IET Austin Court, Birmingham on 30th October 2014 attracted over 150 delegates from Industry and Academia. The renowned speakers gave an insight on the 5G Technology and the R&D work they are conducting to bring this technology to fruition.

This is a typical feedback from the delegates, “I thought it was a really good event – great speakers especially the first two speakers, great venue, and excellent organization. In particular, the morning breakfast, great bacon sand-wiches. It was great for me – providing me with an enthusiastic outlook about thinking broadly about 5G and the future developments. I felt the day was well organized, you had attracted a good range of delegates and the themes of the day clearly struck a chord. Many thanks for inviting me to be part of what was a very thought pro-voking symposium. An excellent event! Well done to yourself and the IET Technical Professional Network.” G Dubb, Birmingham City University.

Speakers (right to left): Dr Chris Mann (Chair -Technical Professional Network), Mr David Houssein (IET), Dr Li-Ke Huang (Aerolex), Dr Meik Kottkamp (Rohde & Schwarz, Munich), Prof Cheng-Xiang Wang, (Heriot Watt University), Ian Hayes (Pera Technologies), Dr Kafil Ahmed (Pera Technologies), Prof Bal Virdee (London Met)

Prof Bal Virdee Dr Mike Short (Vice

President – Telefonica, Europe)

Prof Mischa Dohler

The 5G Technology presentations are now available for viewing online via IET.tv: http://mycommunity.theiet.org/groups/blogpost/view/41/168/1830#.VG3yYh3JR1o

7

ASK again!

The Faculty has recently been successful in their Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) applica-

tion in partnership with ASK Electronics in the area of Business Intelligence to develop a solution

which helps identify trends and facilitate optimum stock management. The partners have received

a grant of £130K for the duration of two years.

The academic team includes Prof. Karim Ouazzane, Preeti Patel and Dr. Qicheng Yu. This is a

significant achievement as the grant will forge our relationship with ASK further; ASK and London-

met have previously been involved in a KTP programme and worked on developing an efficient

Customer Relation Management system which has doubled the company’s sales, trebled its profits

and made them expand nationally and nternationally. Since the successful completion of the first

KTP (in 2012), ASK and Londonmet have maintained a good business relationship and worked

together through consultancy work and the WoW agency projects.

The KTP programmes are managed by the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK), repre-

sented by Terry Corner for this project, who ensure that standards and practices are in line with the

ethos of the programme for the entire duration. This new project will now follow a stringent process

of development which started with the LMC0 meeting (on 5th November) at which key members

(pictured above) planned for the activities ahead—in particular the recruiting of the KTP associate.

Karim said ‘’We have always been interested in strategic and sustainable partnerships rather than

transactional partnerships which is in line with the university’s strategic plan (e.g. graduate employ-

ment, student recruitment and developing courses which reflect demand with the help of industry)

and we are very happy ASK is becoming one of our key partners’’.

Prof. Karim Ouazzane, Kaushik C. Patel (Director ASK), Sandip Patel (Director ASK), Terry Corner (Innovate UK), Preeti Patel

8

British Computer Society accreditation

The School of Computing is pleased to have secured accredi-tation from the British Computer Society - The Chartered In-

stitute for IT, for an overwhelming number of courses. The accreditation covers courses ranging from BSc, BEng, MEng

and MSc and has been backdated so that most current final year students will benefit. Two out of the eleven courses have

a much sought after dual accreditation – as they are already accredited by IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) – which only very few institutions currently have.

Dr Stan Zakrzewski, who led the process

states, “Getting BCS accreditation means so

much to the students and staff. The students

will have graduated from a BCS accredited

course which will enhance their employability

and career prospects. They will be able to “fast

track” membership of the BCS The Chartered

Institute for IT, gain access to all the resources

the institute can offer and network with oth-

ers with the same academic interests. For the

School of Computing it means that we have

received recognition from the BCS The Char-

tered Institute for IT for the programmes that

we offer as those that stand up to the BCS cri-

teria for excellence.”

The course and accreditation details are as follows:

Accredited as fully meeting the educational requirement for CITP registration:

BSc (Hons) Business Information Technology

BEng (Hons) Computer Networking

BSc (Hons) Computer Science

BSc (Hons) Computing

BSc (Hons) Computer Forensics and IT Security

Accredited as meeting the educational requirement for CITP Further Learning registration and partially meeting the

educational requirement for CEng registration:

MSc Computer Networking

MSc Computer Forensics and IT Security

MSc Software Development

MSc Computer Science

Accredited as meeting the educational requirement for CITP Further Learning registration:

MSc Information Technology

MSc Information Technology (Distance Learning)

9

Lloyds Bank—an ongoing collaboration

The ongoing collaboration between Londonmet and Lloyds on issues related to fraud and data ana-lytics in the area of security of banking operations is progressing well. The first project has just suc-cessfully ended,. The London Met team conducted research into a number of behavioural and bio-metric security methods. The team also managed secondary authentication, exploring the logical vulnerability of the banking operations and assisting with the analysis of the results of the joint proof of concept project between IBM and Lloyds. The project was completed by former PhD stu-dent of Londonmet Dr. Khurram Majeed who is currently employed as a research fellow under the supervision of Prof. Karim Ouazzane and Dr. Vassil Vassilev from the School of Computing.

Based on the success of this project the team is about to start a follow-up project for formulation of the requirements and preparation of the business case for the purpose of introducing a Big Data platform at Lloyds. It is an intermediate step towards the next stage as part of the strategic collabo-ration with Lloyds, which will be entirely dedicated to deploying Big Data platform for online data analysis at Lloyds. Dr. Vassilev has already started working on technological prototypes with students from the MSc Software Development, experimenting with different technologies for incorporating non-standard databases and RESTful Web Services to fast-track the online data analysis. It is expected that this intermediate project will finish in 6 months just before the official start of the next step towards Big Data at Lloyds in which Londonmet will again be a key player. As Prof. Ouazzane, who is also Chairing the EU Cybersecurity Board at Brussels, summarized, “Londonmet is becoming a strategic partner of Lloyds to help keep the money safe in the vaults ...”

Prof. Karim Ouazzane, Dr Khurram Majeed, Dr Rupert Parson (Online Banking and Fraud team, Lloyds Bank), Dr Vassil Vassilev

10

On the 8th of November 2014 a small team from School of Psychology at London Met participat-ed in a Hackathlon event organised by UniTu. This one-day event gave a wonderful opportunity to enhance academic experience for both students and staff through great technological develop-ments. Our team comprised of Bianca (3rd year BSc Psychology student London Met), Florence (MSc Business Psychology student London Met), Josh (3rd year student, Kings College) and Dr. Jekaterina Rogaten (Academic Mentor, School of Psychology). There were 9 teams in total with students and staff from variety of disciplines and universities across London. Most teams were formed based on the commonalities in ideas or problems stu-dents and staff wanted to solve. Our team was called e-science and we aimed to solve a longitudi-nal data collection problem that is widely known in psychology and other disciplines where self-reported longitudinal data is collected. At the end of the day all projects were presented to the panel of judges. Judges were academic staff who were largely unfamiliar with programming. Thus, they judged the presented solutions based on their impact and feasibility. Our team did not finish the development of the app, however we gave a presentation of our idea and also a short demo on how the app works and would look like when finished. We took the 4th place, but our team was unexpectedly awarded a price for the idea and presenta-tion of the project. We have also won the best tweeted picture from the event. Now, we are all ready and waiting for the next UniTuHack event!

UniTuHack —we hacked education

SAM Graduation and 30th Anniversary

11

The School of Accounting and Management (SAM) Trinidad celebrated its 30th Anniversary this year with a lavish graduation ceremony held at the Trinidad Hilton on 9th November. SAM has been at the forefront of education in Trinidad for 30 years and has had a long association with London Metropolitan Universi-ty via the NCC and more recently from 2009, via a partnership agreement in-volving the running of a validated degree. The relationship between SAM and London Metropolitan University was maintained by Dr Fang Fang Cai, and in September 2014, Stephen Breen (Senior Lecturer, Course Leader for BSc Busi-ness Information Technology, BSc Business Computer Systems ) took over as liaison tutor. This No-vember, Dr Vince Hargy and Stephen visited Trinidad to meet the staff, for course committee meetings and to attend the graduation ceremony of the London Met students there. During the ceremony, Dr Vince Hargy conferred degrees on the London Metropolitan University stu-dents who studied for their BSc Business Computing (Top-up) degrees. This year saw a high number of

1st Class Honors Degrees, the majority of which were awarded to 12 London Metropolitan University students. This year 74 London Metropolitan University graduated with a degree in BSc Business Computing (Top up). It is a one-year top up degree that attracts large numbers of students preparing them for employ-ment within the IT sector in Trinidad and beyond. SAM are hoping that in the coming years, the intake for BSc Business Computing (Top up) will increase due the high demand for it graduates in this sector and because of the high quality of teaching and students that it is at-tracting.

On 6th November the Faculty hosted a free all-day event called Career Fit

to enable our recent graduates find the right fit for their career choices.

Getting graduates Career Fit

School of Psychology colleagues Shara

Lochun (Principal Lecturer, Faculty

Learning & Teaching Coordinator) and

Gary Pheiffer (Principal Lecturer) de-

signed and delivered a packed agenda of

presentations, activities, discussions and

feedback. The psychometric testing pro-

cess that was used for the event was

found to be very valuable. Attendees

were asked to attempt the online test

prior to the event and were then given

feedback during the day to aid action

planning. Participants commented on

the direct relevance to their personal

employment circumstances of the day’s

presentations and activities.

M is for Movember

Islington College, Nepal—an update

12

The partnership between Islington College, Nepal and the Faculty

of Life Sciences and Computing is now entering its fourth year.

Student recruitment is healthy, with a significant number of

freshers starting recently; many of whom this year are female

and whose popular choice of transport is either a motorbike or

scooter. The College has just completed construction of a new

building, named Nepal Block, to house the delivery of Postgradu-

ate courses.

All Computer Networking students are

participating in Movember, some mous-

taches maybe photoshopped but their

hearts are in the right place. Please sup-

port them in their effort by joining in or

donating at http://moteam.co/london-

metropolitan-university

13

Faculty Enterprise Development Associate Professor Yanguo Jing (Academic Leader Faculty Enterprise Development) reports:

New project at WOW Agency

BSc Computer Science student - Boris Bonev who is currently studying the Work Related Learning

module has secured a work placement provided by Premier IT – an IT solution and training company

based in London. Associate Professor Yanguo Jing visited Boris and his work supervisor recently at the

company and introduced a number of enterprise development initiatives from the faculty. Boris is

highly complementary of the opportunities to gain work experience as part of his work-related learn-

ing module. The company is very pleased with Boris’s performance, and they welcomed the opportuni-

ty to effectively trial the student before offering formal employment. As a result of his work placement,

Boris has been offered a permanent position at the company. Congratulations, Boris!

Student makes most of work placement

The WOW agency has been commissioned to provide web maintenance support for a London-based

fashion jewellery shop - Katherine Alexander. Associate Professor Yanguo Jing said: “I welcome the op-

portunity provided to the WOW agency to support this local business. This partnership brings the facul-

ty closer to the business and also provides our students and graduates with valuable work opportuni-

ties much needed to boost their career prospects”.