Networked and Ubiquitous Systems Engineering
We equip engineers with software tools and techniques to design and operate systems.
The group, newly created in 2019, is building a global reputation for leading research in distributed systems, working on emergent paradigms including IoT and Game Engineering. Contributions to distributed system security and dependability include the development of a novel hybrid smart contract (on and off-blockchain, in collaboration with Cambridge University) architecture for monitoring and enforcing contracted interactions in distributed applications such as IoT. The group’s work with the global video games industry includes carrying out over 15 industry-based projects a year on commercial games that have generated £5B revenue.
Collaboration
Working with NU’s Urban Observatory co-located in the USB, the group made significant advancements in open source technologies (IoTSim-Edge, IoTSim-Stream, BigDataSDNSim, and IoTSim-Osmosis) enabling the creation, simulation and testing of scalable computing environments as well as supporting the rapid development of IoT and Big Data analytics applications. IoTSim-X technologies leverage CloudSim as the baseline simulation framework and one of the world’s most adopted Cloud Computing simulators (with nearly 3000 citations a key publication on CloudSim is the fifth most cited (Scopus, top 0.007%) of 78,864 papers published in Distributed Systems between 1960 and 2020).
Successful collaboration with NU’s Schools of Engineering and Business resulted in four major UKRI research grants with combined funding over £6M that build on the group’s advances in developing analytical methods and software systems for processing the “big data” generated by IoT infrastructures that address societal challenges (e.g., flooding, landslide, air quality, and GDPR compliance). For example, IEEE TPDS selected our paper on remote sensing applications in Digital Earth as the ‘Spotlight Paper’. Also, our collaborative G-Hadoop paper was selected as ‘high quality research paper’ by Future Generation Computing Systems to celebrate the Chinese Computer Science research landscape in 2012-2017. G-Hadoop successfully integrated, managed, and processed 2.36PB of remote sensing data across 8 satellite data centres. G-Hadoop holds the current world record for remote sensing “big data” management and processing.
NUSE has collaborated with medical professionals on diagnosis of eye disorders (Health Innovation Challenge Fund). Working with NU’s Biomedical Engineering, we pioneered the use of artificial intelligence combined with image analysis to demonstrate how robotic prosthetic limbs can grab and hold items without human control. Recent collaborations with NU’s Civil Engineering applies our real-time simulation expertise to aid in managing water security in developing nations while utilising gamification to spread knowledge and know-how across partner organisations (UKRI GCRF Water Security and Sustainable Development Hub).
Future Plans
NUSE will continue to pioneer the fundamental resource and data management principles for orchestrating cross disciplinary (e.g., smart cities, healthcare, and industry4.0) IoT application workflows. The group will investigate new theoretical models to address performance modelling, workload modelling, and data fusion in the context of orchestrating IoT workflows in a hybrid environment with both cloud and edge data centres. We plan to strengthen collaboration with the NHS on blockchain storage technologies for managing personal healthcare data generated by IoT technologies such as wearables. We will continue repurposing projects developed in collaboration with the video games industry into other settings, employing our recently developed streamed gaming platform to effect global-scale interactive simulations. With industry partners and NU’s School of Engineering, we will seek to create highly precise simulations for river erosion, autonomous flight navigation, and carbon-neutral landscape.