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Cloud computing is now used ubiquitously in consumer and commerce domains yielding unprecedented access to computing and data handling at affordable prices.
Work in this field was pioneered at the University of Southampton (UoS) from 1998 onwards and commercialised from 2008 through Dezineforce to enable companies to exploit cloud computing in engineering:
Throughout this period the team has also engaged in outreach to inspire and educate the next generation of scientists and engineers about High Performance and Cloud computing including a YouTube video with 485,000 hits and over 300 articles in media.
Department of Information Studies (DIS) researchers (Judith Broady-Preston, Nicole Convery (née Schulz), Kirsten Ferguson-Boucher, Allen Foster, Sarah Higgins) contribute to the preservation and long-term accessibility of digital assets across the heritage, public, private and commercial sectors. They have developed, and widely disseminated, a series of toolkits and models which are helping government, professionals and organisations adapt to the changing technical landscape. Their research informs and influences data management policy and practice; provides guidance on operational and lifecycle management of digital information; and underpins the relevant sections of professional guidance documents by high profile international and national organisations. Knowledge is contributed to both: information practice and policy advancement; and practitioner continuing professional development (CPD), through participation in international and national training events, working groups and practical workshops.
The Network & Information Security Technology Lab (NISTL) at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) conducts research in securing networked systems against the growing threat of cyber crime. The research has generated a correlated set of new security protocols, novel system composition methods and efficient digital forensic analysis schemes for more effective layered security protection. Their main impacts for the period 01/2008 - 07/2013 are highlighted below:
In addition to the above direct impacts, our work is also beneficial to other organisations and even the general public, as they all require security techniques for information protection.
The research in this case study has pioneered knowledge management technology. It has had major impact on drug discovery and translational medicine and is widely adopted in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. The impacts are:
Low-cost wireless solutions beyond the technologies available previously and developed at Loughborough University since 2005 are used by IDC, and Sure, who integrate these technologies in several products and services so generating impacts in terms of:
The technologies have been deployed in a logistics distribution centre (ToysRUs), an automotive manufacturing process (Toyota), and a safety and security system (Sure).
Technology developed at UoM on clouds and aerosols proved vital in deriving ash mass concentrations during the 2010 eruption of the Iceland volcano, verifying the Met Office model that was defining the airspace exclusion zone and predict ash loadings for the Civil Aviation Authority. The shutdown of airspace cost the airline industry worldwide an estimated $1.7bn, reaching $400m per day on April 19th. Reassurance provided by our verification allowed lifting of flight restrictions which had the immediate effect of re-opening airspace, relieving the impact on hundreds of thousands of people globally, leading to an estimated global saving to the industry of $10bn The approach has resulted in new long term airborne response capability at the Met Office.
PERMIS is a suite of open source security software, written mostly in Java, which provides an application-independent, standards-based, authorisation infrastructure that enables software developers to incorporate state of the art authorisation functionality into their systems with a minimum of effort.
PERMIS has been integrated into a wide variety of environments including grids, clouds and more specialised domains, leading to more secure systems for end users at a reduced cost of implementation; for example, the Swiss Ministry of Defence has adapted PERMIS for use in an air force application. It consistently gets more than 1000 downloads per year, with over 100 new users registering annually.
Research undertaken between 2002 and 2012 at Birkbeck has helped establish a participatory approach to cyber-physical computing as the predominant methodology for the construction of mobile and pervasive computing systems. Cyber-physical systems intimately interlink material entities and their information representations as existing on the Internet. Our specific research contributions in systems architecture, privacy protection and human dynamics have demonstrated how the user's activity can be exploited as the core ingredient in building such systems. Our research has resulted in the implementation of applications that are used to monitor biodiversity across the globe, to assess and support Parkinson's disease patients in the UK, to improve the well-being of office workers in London, to engage the public in a debate about the costs and benefits of pervasive computing, and to inform legislatures in the UK and the US.