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IET Innovation Awards Finalist! Winner!

Update (16 Nov 2017): I am very pleased to announce that the Privacy Band was chosen as the winner of the Cyber Security category of the IET Innovation Awards. Vikram Mehta and I were presented the award which is a fantasic recognition of our invention.

"Privacy Band", our novel privacy management interface device, was a finalist in the Cyber Security category of the IET Innovation Awards. The above video shows me discussing and demonstrating the device, which embodies a metaphor of "Privacy Itch" and "Privacy Scratch" as a mechanism for privacy awareness and control.

The IET Innovation Awards were announced on 15 November 2017.

Visual programming for 'wiring' the Internet of Things

There is a proliferation of devices being developed to form the building blocks of the Internet of Things (IoT), from Internet-connected power sockets and light bulbs to kettles, toasters and washing machines. However, to realise the full potential of the IoT, it will be necessary to allow these devices to interconnect and share data with each other to deliver the functionalities required by end-users. In recent research on end-user programming for the IoT, my colleagues Pierre Akiki, Yijun Yu and myself have proposed the notion of Visual Simple Transformations (ViSiT), that provides a visual programming paradigm for users to wire together IoT devices. The video above shows a demonstration of the ViSiT solution and full details of the approach will appear in an upcoming special issue of the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI).

This work is highlighted in a recent IEEE Software Blog: Empowering Users to Build IoT Software with a Puzzle-like Environment and full deta…

2017: Looking back, and ahead ...

The past year has been one of many significant milestones across many aspects of my life in academia - culminating in my appointment as Professor of Software Engineering at The Open University and stepping up to be Head of the School Computing & Communications. This blog hasn't received as much attention in the past, and not sure if this will change in the coming year, but for my final post of the year let me reflect on some of the significant events in my working life:

January: Formally started production of a new course, "Introduction to Computing Technologies", which forms part of the core for the Open University's Digital & Technology Solutions Professional Degree Apprenticeship scheme. The course is now being presented with our first cohort of apprenticeship students.

February: Presented Social-Lift, our tool for digital evidence collection from Facebook timelines, at the Social Media Conference organised by the OU's Centre for Policing Research &am…

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