Imperial College London, UK (Imperial)

Imperial College London embodies and delivers world class scholarship, education and research in science, engineering and medicine, with particular regard to their application in industry, commerce and healthcare. It fosters interdisciplinary working internally and collaborates widely externally, especially in Europe. The work for this proposal would be performed by a team of researchers from the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering (EEE), which has several world class research groups. In particular, for this proposal, the Intelligent Systems & Networks group and the Communications & Signal Processing group would be represented. Members of the Intelligent Systems & Networks (ISN) group in EEE have made pioneering contributions to communication networks, fuzzy logic, multi-agent systems, networked media, and affective computing. Much of this research has been sponsored has been sponsored by the European Union through the Esprit, ACTS, RACE, 5th, and 6th Framework research programmes. Members of the Communications & Signal Processing group have made significant contributions to the fields extraction and information fusion, multimodal audiovosual processing and source separation, and is centred around the SmartEnvironments Lab, a newly established 250,000 GBP facility. The primary responsibility of the Imperial College team in the technical work programme is with tasks concerned with rule-based reasoning, policy-based computing, audiovisual data fusion and machine learning. The team has strong expertise and competence to undertake this task, having been involved in the logical formalisation of rules, regulations, contracts, and policies. The project also builds on recent research in intelligent adaptation of policy-based pervasive computing environments embedded in public collections; and data acquisition and processing in noisy environment and state of the art recording facilities. We have a wealth of expertise to perform this research, starting from the data level (detection, estimation, feature extraction) through to the decision making process. Imperial College are also Workpackage Leader for SMART. With a strong track record of innovation, participation and leadership in successful European projects, and proven expertise in intelligent systems engineering, the institution is well-placed to participate in this project in this capacity.

Role in the Project: IMPERIAL will be actively involved in WP4 of the project, where it will be responsible for the intelligent delivery content in the SMART edge server. To this end, it will undertake research on rules and policies for delivery of environment generated content. Furthermore, it will investigate algorithms for augmented smart with social search, as well as in learning schemes for ranking SMART query results.

Dr. Jeremy Pitt is Reader in Intelligent Systems in the ISN Group. He was awarded his PhD in Computing from Imperial College in 1991, and took up a lectureship in EEE in 1996. He is well-known (h-index 18, g-index 29) for his contribution to the theory, technology, and standardisation of Agent Communication Languages, and in addition for his original work in agent societies, affective computing and organised adaptation. He has worked as Principal Investigator, Workpackage or Partner leader in a significant number of national and European projects, as well as being Project Manager of the highly successful FET project ALFEBIITE. Of particular relevance to the current proposal are the project LiMe (Esprit 25621: intelligent systems for community-based knowledge elicitation and management), DANAE (IST 507113: multimedia content delivery in context-aware environments) and ongoing work in PANORAMA (pervasive adaptation).

Moez Draief is a Lecturer in Mathematics of Networks and Systems, Intelligent Systems and Networks Group, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London. He was awarded a PhD from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University Paris VI in 2005. From October 2004 to January 2007, he held a Marie Curie Research Fellowship in the Statistical Laboratory, Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, Cambridge University. He has published a number research papers in major international journals and conferences on diverse topics including the modelling of stochastic networks, epidemic spreading in complex networks and dissemination of information and cascading behaviours in social networks. He has also co-authored a book Spread of Epidemics and Rumours in Complex Networks, London Mathematical Society Series, Cambridge University Press. More recently he has been working on algorithmic game theoretic problems in the context of resource allocation and network optimisation in distributed systems. He was the recipient of a prestigious Marie Curie research fellowship, with the topic ‘Interaction Networks’. He is currently co-Investigator in the UKIERI project ‘Adaptive Security Network Schemes’. He recently was co-recipient of the IBM Faculty Award for research into micro-meso-macro simulation for intelligent urban transport management. He is a member of the ACM and Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). He is also an associate member of the Institute of Mathematics, Imperial College London and the Social Networking group at Microsoft Research Cambridge.