Who we are

My background is in Public Health, Health Promotion and Health Services Research. My research interests include sexual health, digital health interventions at the interface with patients and the public (i.e. for the delivery of healthcare and for health promotion), and the development and evaluation of complex interventions.

I use a wide range of methods and methdological approaches in my research. I enjoy inter-disciplinary and collaborative research, and I'm experienced in co-ordinating multi-institutional research projects.

Current and recent projects include:

Health Systems Analysis of barriers and readiness of Sexual and Reproductive Health services in COVID-19 affected areas. I'm a collaborator on this WHO-funded international study. To find out more about what we're doing in the UK part of the study, click here

Partnerships in the pandemic, and Pilot Evaluation of the Paired app - with collaborators at the Open University

Living Well with Frailty Experiences (LiFE) Study (Co-designing person-centred frailty interventions with community-dwelling older people and health professionals), led by the University of Brighton's Prof. Kate Galvin, with collaborators at De Montfort University and Birmingham City University - funded by the Burdett Trust for Nursing

Experiences of living with Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and receiving services in Sussex

Systematic reviews of interactive digital interventions for sexual health promotion and HIV prevention (at UCL)

An investigation of the use of simulated training to enhance clinical leadership skills within the residential care sector (funded by the Burdett Trust for Nursing - completed)

Investigating ethnic inequalities in sexually transmitted infections (at the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit for Blood-Borne and Sexually Transmitted Infections, at UCL and Public Health England)

Sustainable healthcare practice

Heather is particularly interested in researching the sustainability of critical care practice to generate a more robust evidence-based to inform how to maintain quality critical care while sufficing within the limits of available environmental, financial and social resources.  Her PhD thesis presented a conceptual framework of sustainability in critical care based on qualitative grounded theory research which explored the subjective perspective of people working in critical care.  The PhD research findings are now being used to develop further studies focused on environmental sustainability under the umbrella title of the GREEN-ICU research project (GREeater ENvironmental sustainability in Intensive Care Units).  Heather is leading the GREEN-ICU research studies as a collaborative project, with the first phase currently in the proposal stage.

Heather is an active member of the School of Health Sciences Sustainability Special Interest Group which includes planning and delivering the annual SHARE conference to provide researchers, clinicians, academics and students an opportunity to disseminate research and enterprise outputs related to sustainability and health or healthcare practice.

In addition to research about reducing the carbon footprint of healthcare, Heather is also interested in the interlinks between financial and social sustainability of critical care.  Social sustainability includes sustaining staff as a people resource, and she recognises the need for further research about the resilience, agility and durability of staff to promote a healthy and flourishing workforce of healthcare practitioners. 

Critical care clinical practice and education

Heather has further research interests in clinical practice and education related to critical care nursing, drawing from her previous experience as a clinical nurse and her current role leading the Intensive Care Pathway at the University of Brighton.  She is interested in collaborating with other critical care researchers on projects addressing clinical outcomes, as well as patient and family experiences during the intensive care unit, rehabilitation and recovery stages of critical illness or injury.

Research interests include visualizing complex data, automated data visualization, theoretical techniques for visualizing data, visualizing social networks.

Expertise in the following areas:

• Software Development
• Game Development
• Computer Science
• Data Visualization

My curriculum interests encompass the theories and principles that underpin the discipline of user experience design, UXD. To this end, I am the course leader of the University of Brighton's MSc in UXD. Primarily, this course equips students with the practical skills to work as effective UXD practitioners within the interactive / digital industries. Further, students are encouraged to critically reflect upon and question the effectiveness of contemporary thinking that underpins UXD best practice.  

My research interests focus upon the efficacy of diagrams. My PhD explores the impact of graphical choices on diagram comprehension. Presently, I am collaborating with colleagues from Cambridge University on a project entitled ‘Accessible Reasoning with Diagrams’; the project is funded by The Leverhulme Trust https://sites.google.com/site/myardproject/ . I am also collaborating with colleagues from Jadavpur University charting the cognitive processes active when interpreting diagrams.

My research focuses on logical diagrams (e.g. Euler and Venn diagrams, existential graphs). This includes formalising graphical languages for problems such as software specification and ontology egineering, testing their effectiveness and analysing the way that such notations communicate information. The latter analysis uses results from empirical studies but also cognitive science, semiotics and the philosophy of notation.

My practice led research is in human centred design for complex technical scenarios; the cognitive and behavioural affordances of the designed image and human agency. This concern sits within 'computational media aesthetics' (IBM 2001) as my work investigates specifically how models based upon established visual languages might close the semantic gap in diverse forms of sentiment analysis for complex human/machine convergence.

This has involved a long term investigation into the social semiotics of the constructed image in an algorithmic and networked context, informing novel methods in design for complexity, human factors and machine learning.

These methods have thus far helped define workable human centred morphologies of, and topographies for, User Experience Design (UXD) vectors, grammars and architectures of digital artefacts, products and services by means of natural language analogies for corpus and systematic algorithmic formalisms.

Contributing to research in

• behavioural analytics
• attribution metrics
• cognitive modelling
• hybrid AI
• neural networks

My work is applied in transformational, parametric and/or generative systems in

• eCommerce
• computer games
• digital health
• psychometrics
• neuro-marketing
• cognitive, emotional, social and cultural computing
• next generation wearables such as Brain Computer Interfaces

I have always been interested in the technicities of material culture : 

• how visual meaning, values and affordances are designed, transacted and maintained through media technologies
• how iconography, belief, ideology, narrative and mythology are designed, commodified and transacted in representational systems
• the technical performativity of cultural capital
• the relationship between asset, affordance, agency, end user engagement, behaviour and social impact

Specifically over the last 25 years, this has been in relation to digital transformation of values and complex human factors engineering. 

My first neuro-game & dementia tech in 2009 led to breakthrough cognitive UX design patterns. From that work, I developed “RhizoMetrics” TM (2014), a parametric design method that supports the development, monitoring and recalibration of behavioural affordances in any computational context.

 Using RhizoMetrics, I am developing cognitive UXD paradigms for

• ‘nudge mechanics'
• 'neuro-navigation'
• 'neuro-transformation'

to guide valuable and ethical singularities in IoT, robotics & immersive environments for Industry4.0 and beyond, as core to a fundamental Human / Machine Operating System - HM/OSS www.rhizometricdesign.com

My work has always generated personal, behavioural and socio-cultural data and insights, putting me at the fore of ethical debates over many years, and defining ethical parameters for designed User Experiences is a primary objective of my research. 

My current research is in the area of machine learning, including both mathematical foundations and applications. Prediction with expert advice and topological data analysis are my main topics of interest. 

Prediction with expert advice is a paradigm for sequential forecasting that studies how one can merge predictions from different sources when reliability of these sources needs to be inferred from the predictions themselves. This paradigm is close to online bandits and related to many other machine learning techniques, from ridge regression to boosting. I am particularly interested in direct applications for prediction with expert advice algorithms.

Topological data analysis is a relatively recent but already mature area of machine learning that tries to apply notions from topology, a highly abstract branch of pure mathematics, to finding patterns in point clouds. Currently, I am working mostly on expressing topological data analysis ideas in the form of kernels inducing a reproducing kernel Hilbert space structure on data.

I am also remaining interested in the developments in both of my original research areas: algorithmic information theory / Kolmogorov complexity and constructive logical semantics.

Natalie combines epidemiological methods for health services research with a critical approach and qualitative methods. Her interests include the interface between sexual and reproductive health with psychosocial issues, public health, community delivery of sexual health interventions, Point of Care Testing for STIs, problematic substance use and anti-microbial resistance (AMR). Methodologically she is interested in screening tool development, clinical prediction modelling, development and evaluation of complex interventions, the evaluation of public involvement in research, and researching disenfranchised populations. Natalie has been developing a critical epidemiology approach to sexual health research and more recently Trauma and Resilience Informed Reearch Principles and Practice (TRIRPP). You can read more about TRIRPP here http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/trirpp/.

Applications of computer technology (knowledge representation, advanced algorithms, machine learning, software engineering), particularly to problems which involve the use of natural (human) languages and with a specific focus on lexicalist approaches.

• Natural language processing: text analytics, information extraction, text mining, sentiment and genre analysis, natural language generation, recommender systems;
• Computational lingusitics: morphology, lexicography, lexicology;
• Knowledge representation, especially as it relates to language: lexicons, ontologies, semantic web, semantic metadata, multilingual representation, distributed representations;
• Architectures and tools for language processing systems and language-based user interfaces.

Recent projects have focused on text mining and semantic metadata in Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics, including the AHRC-funded projects TRI-PACT, DFAP and Traces Through Time, the Digging into Data project ChartEx, and the EC large-scale Integrating Project, 3D-COFORM.   Recent PhD student topics include computational lexicography, text analytics, sentiment analysis, semantic metadata, recommender systems and microservice software architectures.

Sanaz's research interests include human-centred development of new technologies that incorporate studies of user's experiences, cognition and collaboration in designing a novel intelligent systems delivered via multiple platforms: mobile devices, interactive television, tag-based technologies, wearable technologies, and robotic interactions. Some related themes of her research include Human Computer Interaction, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), User’s Modelling and Adaptation, Human Robotic Interactions, Intelligent Interaction Modelling, Data Analytic and Sentiment Analysis, Artificial Intelligence Ethics for Development of Human Centred AI-based Systems.

Key Research Themes:

• Human Computer Interaction (HCI),
• Artificial Intelligence (AI),
• User Experience (UX),
• Machine Learning (ML)

Current Research & Development Projects:

•  Artificial Intelligence Ethics:  Development of Evidence-based, Empirical-based Ethical Guidelines for Design and Development of AI-based Systems.

• Evaluation and testing of Sport Technologies, factor including usability and beyond usability, including brain/cognitive performance using EEG devices. The project aims to develop a set of guidelines for sport tech industry to incorporate in design of human centred technologies, to maximise usability, and beyond usability, i.e. efficiency, effectiveness, user satisfaction, and cognitive performance. 

• Research project with University of São Paulo, Universito of Chile, Es el Senor Vagner de Sousa Beserra. Colaboración Internacional para el desarrollo de la Televisión Digital Terrestre Educativa en Chile - to develop an International consortium to explore a potential of educational application for digital television (DTV).

• Sentiment Analysis and Data Mining of Educational Application from Twitter, University of Portsmouth, and Edge Hill University.

• Empirical study to investigate and evaluate Human Robotic Interaction, mainly aspects of usability in terms of, technology acceptances, efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfaction.

• User-centred development of Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT), in collaboration of Brighton and Sussex Medical School.

• Smart ambient – development of location based informal learning through mobile and ubiquitous technologies in collaboration of University of Portsmouth and University of Al-Mustansiriyah.

• Brain Computer Interface (BCI): Experimental study to evaluate cognitive loads and performances of users using technologies in edutainment and digital well-being (in particular, mobile apps and wearable technologies)

Visual representations and their applications in Mathematics and Computer Science, but with developing connections in Engineering and to the Arts. Research areas of (collaborative) research interests include:

• Topology (e.g. Combinatorial and Computational Knot Theory)
• Discrete Mathematics (e.g. Algebraic formalisms, Graph Theory, Algorithms)
• Visual Languages and Interfaces
• Information and Data Visualization
• Automated Reasoning
• Machine Learning
• Security & Privacy
• Industrial Informatics
• Applied Statistics.

My research interests focus on the integration of technology in teaching and learning, particularly in the use and pedagogic potential of games, escape rooms, and virtual/augmented environments in educational settings. A representative list of my research interests is the following:

• Educational Escape Rooms
• Game-Based Learning / Gamification / Location-based Games / Alternate Reality Games
• Augmented / Virtual Reality
• Cybersecurity
• User Experience (UX) / Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
• Internet of Things

Digital Health technologies are promising to have a profound effect on how health services are delivered, allowing people to manage their health more effectively, providing effective ways of diagnosing disease, monitoring the impact of policies on population health, resulting in improved accessibility, affordability, and quality of health care. Still, the introduction of these technologies comes with challenges and experience resistance and slow adaptation.

Theo’s specialising on Digital Nursing and Digital Health.

His research interests lie in the intersection of Health Care and Digital Technologies and his focus is on the field of co-producing and evaluating Digital Health Technologies through Digital Health Living Labs and accelerating innovation.

In particular, his research focuses on the following areas:

• Digital Health Living Labs. The work in this area is concerned with the development of Living Labs as ecosystems of open innovation through co-production with citizens.

• Evaluation of Digital Health Technologies. I am interested in developing new approaches and tools for the trialing and evaluating new technologies such as wearables and sensors and their use as health care tools.

• Digital Ready Healthcare Workforce. Based on the Digital Nursing term I coined in 2015, the aim of the work is to utilise the Living Labs as spaces for undergraduate and postgraduate health care students to work side by side with citizens on developing innovation skills and conduct research.

• IoT, Cyber-Physical, and Cloud Computing Security in Health Care. I am interested in exploring the role of the end-users as vulnerable actors in security attacks, threat discovery and response, and their educational requirements.        

Recent and ongoing projects include:

• EMPOWERCARE involving 13 cross border European partners. It is part of the Interreg VA 2Seas Mers Zeeën and has been awarded more than 4 million euros in funding by the European Regional Development Fund. The project involves partners coming together to co-create and test social innovations and digital health solutions to make local services more efficient and effective to address societal challenges in the 2Seas area.
• Digital Health Living Lab, initiated at Leach Court and expanded in more areas in Brighton. Living Labs offer an arena for developing and testing prototypes or more mature digital health products and services, through co-production with citizens, that have the potential to improve welfare services, reduce financial pressure to public sector services and to enable healthy living as a whole. The project was funded by the KSS AHSN Darzi Fellowships.
• the development of a Living Lab situated at The Bevy, aiming to explore and tackle social isolation and loneliness. The partnership will build on the experience of the Bevy in starting to tackle loneliness through different community initiatives and the university’s experience of the Brighton and Hove Digital Health Living Lab. It will enable the Living Lab to innovate from a domestic space – working with older people in sheltered accommodation – to also being located in a quintessentially British public space – the local pub. The project was funded by the UoB Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP)
• INNOVATEDIGNITY-ITN project led by Professor Kathleen Galvin where I am a member of the supervisory team. The purpose of INNOVATEDIGNITY-ITN funded by the European Commission (2019–2023) is to develop a shared research and training agenda in order to educate the next generation of interdisciplinary health care researchers and care leaders across Europe. The project is a response to the Europe wide need to provide sustainable and dignified care for older people at home and in residential, municipal and hospital settings.

The need to secure and esnure the privacy of software systems and the relevant infrastructure, has been recognised as a major challenge not just for the further usage of technology but also for the further advancement of human society. As such, a number of fundamental research challenges have been identified for relevant disciplines such as security engineering, privacy engineering, software engineering, and information systems.

My research interests lie in the intersection of privacy, security and software engineering.

My long-term research goal is to effectively analyse, understand and improve security and privacy of software systems for large, open and dynamic environments. In doing so, I have pioneered work in developing ontologies, languages, models, processes, methodologies and automated testing and optimisation techniques that consider security and privacy as integral aspects of the software systems development process.

In particular, my research focuses on the following areas:

• Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering. My work in this area is concerned with the development and precise definition of modelling languages, methodologies and ontologies to support elicitation, modelling and analysis of security, trust, and privacy requirements. I have developed the Secure Tropos methodology, one of the first methodologies in the literature that implements the idea of security and privacy by design and integrates security, privacy and engineering techniques under one methodological approach.
• Data Privacy Management and GDPR. I am interested in developing platforms and solutions that facilitate visual analysis of privacy requirements and needs and assist the creation, monitoring and enforcement of Privacy Level Agreements. Moreover, my work is focused in the analysis and development of innovative data privacy governance platforms, which facilitate scoping and processing of data and data breach management and support organisations towards GDPR and regulatory compliance.
• IoT, 5G, Cyber-Physical, and Cloud Computing Security. My work in this area is focused on developing novel models, methodologies and analysis techniques that guarantee the highest possible levels of protection within IoT, 5G and Cloud computing environments, in the presence of different security and privacy threats.
• Model-Based Security/Privacy Engineering. My work in that area focuses on the development and analysis of methods, processes, and architectures for secure and privacy-aware systems. At the requirements level, I focus on the development of processes that enable the elicitation and modelling of security and privacy requirements and analyse them in terms of security and privacy properties, relevant threats and vulnerabilities. At the architectural level, I focus on developing software architecture techniques to ensure that socio-technical systems satisfy security, trust and privacy requirements and that developed architectures reduce potential risks.
• Security Engineering Decision Support. I am investigating novel decision-making methodologies and models that offer the highest possible levels of protection within different domains (e.g. IoT, Cloud) with regards to different security and privacy threats and a set of evolving factors such as security requirements, financial cost, indirect costs (e.g. people’s productivity), intangible and tangible assets. I am also interested in developing underlying formalisms, utilising logics and graph transformations, to enable precise specifications and automated reasoning, within the context of security and dependability, taking into account organisational policies and resource allocation.
• Security Attack and Threat Discovery. I am interested in developing novel reasoning techniques and algorithms that assist the discovery of potential cyber-attack paths in supply-chain and critical infrastructures, taking into account information from the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) and from the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE). My work can be applied within a dynamic risk management system to detect the vulnerabilities of the IT infrastructure and to deliver attack paths that satisfy certain criteria.
• Security and Privacy Patterns. My work investigates the development of security and privacy pattern languages that enable the representation of patterns and guide developers through the process of designing a system to ensure security and privacy. A major novelty of this work is that the solution to the pattern is represented using concepts from the requirements stage, which enable developers to directly apply the patterns of the language to the security and privacy requirements analysis.
• Automated Analysis Tools. I am interested in developing tools to support security and trust analysis of the socio-technical systems at different levels. At the higher level, they are graphical editors where security, privacy and trust models can be drawn and the grammatical correctness of the models is automatically checked. On the lower level, they enable analysis of security, privacy and trust properties and security threats.

Within these research areas I have supervised to completion seven PhD and one MPhil students and I currently supervise Five PhD students at the University of Brighton. I have  examined 16 PhD students.

I have lead the University of Brighton team on three European Union funded projects, VisiOn, MITIGATE and SESAME and I am the technical coordinator of the DEFeND Project.

I am also interested in applying the theoretical research outputs of my work to different application domains and my work has been applied to the development and analysis of systems in the areas of critical infrastructures, cloud computing, health-care, telecommunications, banking, and e-commerce.

"If you must choose one single idea to work on for the rest of your life, what will that be ?"

In 2003, my grandma passed away with severe dementia. At the time, there was no existing technology to help communicating her daily needs, or her whereabouts for the carer to attend to swiftly. It was a struggle for my family to provide her the end-of-life care that she deserved.

For the past decade, my research has been around navigation and tracking, with an emphasis on contact tracing and healthcare monitoring. I have developed novel, practical systems combining the ubiquitous mobile sensors with machine learning.

Since 2017, I have published on average 3 papers, journals a year, most of them as the lead author. See here for a full list of my publications.

My main research focuses on the engineering of secure and trustworthy information systems that ensure data privacy. I study methods, tools, and techniques that support engineers in the development of software systems that are secure and protect data privacy.

Current research projects:

• DEFeND - A data governance framework for supporting GDPR - H2020 - https://www.defendproject.eu/

Previous research projects:

• VisiOn - Visual Privacy Management in User Centric Open Environments - H2020 - https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/653642
• MITIGATE - Multidimensional, IntegraTed, rIsk assessment framework and dynamic, collaborative Risk ManaGement tools for critical information infrAstrucTurEs – H2020 - https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/653212
• DEFTRUST – DEsigning For TRUST – EPSRC & BT funded

Recommender systems, Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning and cybersecurity.

Gabriela is an algebraist with logician tendencies. She is interested in group theory and combinatorics, often as related to formal languages, but also other structures, such as knots. 

She is also interested in mathematics education and the construction of mathematical knowledge - how do we, as humans, communicate in the context of mathematics, how does this reflect in the materials produced, and how does it translate to prospective members of the mathematical community such as students?

My research interests include the development and application of computing technologies for the digitisation of objects and environments; the information management, analysis, search/browse visualisation of visual representations, including 2D and 3D content; as well as their physical reproduction using digital fabrication. A focus of the research is the Cultural Heritage (CH) sector and its related applications such as creative applications, art, culture, education and tourism. I have produced research outputs in interdisciplinary areas such as computer graphics, information and knowledge management as well as cultural heritage.

I serve in various international committees in these areas. I am currently member of the Editorial board and information Director for the ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH), member of the Management Board of the Centre for Secure, Intelligent and Usable Systems (CSIUS), and member of the Steering Comittee of the Eurographics Workshop on Graphics and Cultural Heritage. I have been past programme chair of International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Intelligent Cultural Heritage (VAST) and review regularly for conferences, journals and national and international funding bodies.

Ben's work is situated in the fields of cybernetics, systemic design, and architectural theory, with focuses including relations between design, ethics, place, methodology, technology, and education.

Broadly speaking, my research interests and activity falls within the areas of biostatistics, categorical data analysis, high-dimensional statistics, and statistical genetics focusing on statistical methods for multivariate or high-dimensional data. In particular, I am interested in developing regression techniques for correlated responses, estimation methods of large covariance matrices, and hypothesis testing procedures in high-dimensional settings. Although my research is motivated by cross-disciplinary collaborations with biologists, bioinformaticians, computer scientists, and doctors, it finds application in a wide range of studies, including studies in social sciences, health studies, and omics-studies among others. I disseminate the developed methods in R packages that are contributed to the R-CRAN and Bioconductor projects.

My research explores ubiquitous computing and machine learning applications in the contexts of education, cultural heritage and public engagement. Taking a human-computer interaction perspective, it investigates issues around awareness, engagement, agency and digital inclusion in pervasive and intelligent computing environments. Visit my profile page to browse current and past projects.

Hanan Alsawagh is a PhD student at the University of Brighton. She received an award from Ministry of Defence of Kuwait to pursue her Ph.D. project. This research is an investigative study about Kuwaiti women living experience of breast cancer in Kuwaiti, and the use and impact of social in their lifes as women with breast cancer. Hanan will apply a phemenlogicla approach and a qualitative method of collaborative inquiry, one-on-one and focus group discussions, to better understand women’s experiences of breast cancer in the Arab world.

The aim of my doctoral research is to investigate the design, production and introduction of 3D digitally fabricated replicas of artefacts in cultural heritage experiences to address expectations and needs of distinctive audience groups.

The cultural heritage sector has been used over the last few decades as a test field for 3D technologies, such as 3d imaging and 3d printing. Until recently, the main focus of researchers and professionals has been on developing more accurate and effective techniques and to serve processes related to the documentation, preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. This project emphasises the communication aspect of cultural heritage management by investigating how the attributes of digitally fabricated artefacts work within experiential frameworks, how these physical representations are perceived by audiences and how museum professionals, educators and designers can manipulate them to effectively communicate cultural heritage information.

The project is carried out with the collaboration of the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove.

Patrick's current research is investigating the efficiency of common defensive controls and frameworks and comparing them to hackers' tactics, tools and procedures.  To better understand the weaknesses and strengths of well documented controls and international frameworks.

This research will highlight where time and energy are best spent and advise which proposed controls, standards, frameworks and policies to follow. 

This research has been recreating common attacks seen across various industry's and how recommended controls mitigate them.  The outcome of the study will provide data and recommendations that can be used across various industries.  

By investigate what attacks are most effective and what controls a business should focus on will uncover what value the organisation is seeing from current controls in place. 

It will also allow the reader to understand the value of common standards that “seem” to be required to prove a gold standard in Cyber Security, such as ISO:27001, NIST 800 and Cyber Essentials. 

The research aims to protect smaller businesses from identifying and mitigating security risks and helping the industry grow by saving time and money and providing more value from their IT and security functions.

Other Research Interests 

• Automated Penetration Testing
• Web Application Security
• Security Operations 
• Advanced Persistent Threats 

Interested in GDPR. Especially how organisations can gain Informed Consent from data subjects.

Researching how organisations can implement gaining Informed Consent, extending existing Privacy By Design/Privacy by Default frameworks.