2014 Retrospective ...

Highlight from November 2014: Receiving CCT status for Introduction to Cyber Security MOOC
from Chris Ensor (Deputy Director, CESG) and Richard Pharro (CEO, APMG)
2014 has been an eventful year across many spheres of my academic life, complete with research published in major conferences and journals, PhD students graduating and new courses launched.  My final post for the year is a quick review of some of the highlights:

  • January: The year started with the news that two of the papers I co-authored and submitted to the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2014) had been accepted for publication.  Both of these papers were based on the work of my PhD students, one on privacy requirements engineering and the other on adaptive user interfaces.  It turned out to be a pretty successful year for OU research at ICSE overall.
  • February: We got confirmation that the EPSRC would be funding our project, "MonetizeMe: Privacy and the Quantified Self in the Digital Economy", which would involve colleagues from the Faculty of Business and Law as well. The project formally started by late summer and I am looking forward to seeing this work progress in 2015. 
  • April: Together with colleagues from the Adaptive Security and Privacy project I attended a joint NII-OU-Lero workshop on Software Engineering for Smart Cities that was held as the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi.
  • July: Pierre Akiki, a PhD student I jointly supervised with Yijun Yu, successfully defended his PhD on Engineering Adaptive Model-Driven User Interfaces for Enterprise Applications.  His examiners were Prof. Michael Harrison (Newcastle) and Dr. Leonor Barroca (OU).  Pierre is now an assistant professor of computer science at Notre Dame University - Louaize.
  • September: The MOOC Introduction to Cyber Security was launched for registration.  I am the lead educator for the MOOC and the development was supported by the UK National Cyber Security Programme.  I worked with my colleagues in the department to produce the content, most notably Mike Richards, Bashar Nuseibeh and Julie Wright.  We were also supported by an excellent project manager Jane Roberts and Learning Media Developer / Editor, Amy Leon.  
  • October: We started the first presentation of the new post-graduate module in Software Engineering (M814), for which I am the module chair.   This course is based on two older courses on managing software engineering in enterprises and requirements engineering.  It is a core module in our MSc in Computing (Software Engineering).
  • November: The Introduction to Cyber Security MOOC was recognised as a CESG Certified Training course for raising awareness of cyber security skills and technologies.  I had the pleasure of attending the launch event for the CCT programme in London where the official certificate for the MOOC was awarded by Chris Ensor (Deputy Director, CESG) and Richard Pharro (CEO, APMG).
  • December: We completed the first presentation of the Introduction to Cyber Security MOOC, which had over 15K learners, and ~25% of these completed the 8-week course.
Hopefully the coming year will be equally eventful and exciting!

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