Academic Marginalia

I dusted the cobwebs off my soldering iron today to build this interface board for my Raspberry Pi.  Designed by Quick2Wire (http://quick2wire.com), the board simplifies the access to the GPIO and I2C pins of the Raspberry Pi, making it possible to integrate sensors and actuators into programs running on the device.  After constructing the board, I wrote a simple bash script to write to a pin (connected to a test LED on the board) and also read the state of another pin (connected to a push button switch).

My next step is to get the Quick2Wire Python API working so that I can try and writing my own programs that interact with the pins.  In the longer term, I am hoping to be able build a version that can be controlled using Sense (http://sense.open.ac.uk).

Last week I had a fun day in London helping out at a special day school organised by the Open University in London to support students studying 'TU100 - My Digital Life'.  The focus of the day was to help students get started with programming activities using Sense.  My colleague Chris Douce has written an extensive blog post about the day, detailing the activities that took place through the day.

In brief, the morning involved a couple of excellent presentations from tutors, Tammy and Leslie, covering an introduction to program design (problem decomposition, basic program constructs, pseudocode specifications, etc) and a walk through of the Sense programming language and IDE.  In the afternoon, the students worked in small groups to build their own projects, which ranged from simple animations involving running stick men and Tom & Jerry, to games with aeroplanes dropping bombs on targets.  One of the teams built a really neat 'Etch-a-Sketch' application that used…

My colleague, Prof. Bashar Nuseibeh, has been recently awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Research grant, as well as a Royal Society-Wolfson Merit Award, to support research in the area of adaptive privacy and security.  As a co-Investigator on some of the previous projects in this area (PRiMMA and Microsoft Research SEIF), I am pleased to be part of the research team that will work on this research with Bashar and others.  To find out more about the research agenda, visit the Adaptive Security and Privacy project website.  On a related note, we are also starting a project on Adaptive Information Security for Cloud Computing, funded by the Qatar National Research Fund, which will involve collaborating with a research team based at Qatar University.

As result of all this activity, we are soon going to be starting the recruitment process for both post-doctoral researchers and PhD students who have an interest in working in the area of adaptive systems for privacy and security.  We exp…