a) Knowledge Economy Skills Scholarships (KESS 2) studentship funding in Cyber Security for £54,085 in 2019/20:
I have developed and successfully secured the KESS studentship for this interdisciplinary collaborative project in computing and cyber security in collaboration with the private company Aytel Systems Limited (https://www.aytel.co.uk/). This project builds upon and extends my existing research work available at [2, 9, 10] to to assess Cyber security challenges within the SME sector. This project will develop a framework to assess and model cyber security challenges with the SME sector. The purpose of this research is to pin down the elements required to secure an SMEs IT and networking infrastructure from the threats of cyber security through the means of external devices (BYOD) and cloud applications and to understand and make users aware of its boundaries and its security benefits and non-benefits towards the success of its business growth.
b) Cancer Informatics in 2018/19:
I have developed interdisciplinary UK-Germany collaborative project in cancer bioinformatics with German Institute of Tumour Biology. This project builds upon and extends my research work available at [1, 3, 4] to develop therapy for cancer. This project will have an impact for (i) patients by enhancing quality and increasing survival chances through prevention of metastatic progression, (ii) researchers by gaining new insights into mechanisms of therapy resistance, (iii) clinicians dealing with cancer treatment, and (iv) 2 of 10pharmaceutical companies by generating novel companion diagnostics to tailor drugs to the individual needs of cancer patients.
c) Bioinformatics - Institute of Biomedical Science IBMS Grant of £4,659.00 in 2017/18
This interdisciplinary project, in collaboration with School of Health Sciences, is aimed at developing a diagnostic tool for NHS to reduce cost of managing and resolving recurrent infection in patients. The project was granted an amount of £4659.00 by Institute of Biomedical Science IBMS Grant. An article about this grant was published in 'Biomedical Scientist' magazine published by the Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS). Link for this article is as follows.
https://thebiomedicalscientist.net/science/supporting-research-home-and-overseas
MinION sequencing machine has been purchased as part of this grant and being used to generate in house sequencing data. This project involves generating inhouse sequencing data and applying various computation and information engineering techniques. The major outcome of this project will be the production of a comprehensive list of small colony variant (SCVs) -specific genetic changes for Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria. The benefit of this will be the acquisition of knowledge that will enable us to design molecular probes to detect Pseudomonas aeruginosa SCVs in patients with chronic, infected wounds, where P. aeruginosa has been identified. Identifying patients with SCVs will allow for amended treatment to ensure clearance of infection, for example, increasing antimicrobial treatments to ensure that SCVs are eliminated effectively from the wound. This in turn will enable better management and resolution of wound infection and thus go some way to reducing the rate of recurrent wound infection and associated annual cost to the NHS.
d) Knowledge Transfer Project (KTP) Funding with Yard Associates Ltd, £131,079 in year 2017
I have contributed towards building a partnership with a local SME Yard Associates Ltd which has resulted in a successful two year KTP project in the area of Data Science. I attended the very first meetings with the company to nurture the relationship and exchanged ideas for possible knowledge exchange collaboration. These meetings and exchange of ideas culminated in a 2 year KTP with the company. I also helped develop the work plan for this KTP application.
e) Knowledge Transfer Project (KTP) Funding with 7 Layer Solutions Ltd, £131,079 in year 2013-15
I led and built a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP No 9205) with 7Layer Solutions Limited. This is a Big data analytics project to develop a banknote lifecycle solution for monitoring and analysing the degradation of bank notes.
f) European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Innovation Vouchers, £11,940 in year 2014
This was an innovation project between Snow Business International Ltd and University of Gloucestershire. The project involves developing embedded system for Arduino microcontroller to control the snow delivery machine using sms text messages.
g) South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) Innovation Voucher £4000 in year 2011
I led and built this innovation project between First Cyber Security Limited and University of Gloucestershire. The 2011 SEEDA innovation vouchers encouraged and allowed high growth SME to engage with the UK knowledge base. The aim of this project was to develop a Proof of concept secure browser for iPhone using objective c language. The digital artefact and technical report for this project has been deposited in Github repository.
Jayal, A., Williams, G., Bush, V., Hapeshi, K., (2011). i-phone low level analysis, SEEDA Innovation Voucher Project completion report (unpublished technical report), viewed 1 March 2019
h) The Mobile University: University of Gloucestershire Research Grant Funding Awards, £68,000 in 2010-11
This was an internal grant from University of Gloucestershire focused on developing and embedding mobile phone applications to enhance learning and teaching. The aim of this study was to research, develop and evaluate a wide range of applications for mobile and portable technologies in order to enhance research and scholarly activity within and beyond the classroom. Technologies included ‘smart’ mobile phones (iPhones, Android phones, Blackberry, etc.), pads (iPad and Android Pads eBooks) as well as laptops and netbooks.
i) Curriculum For Innovation Fund, £7950 in 2009 from Learning And Teaching Unit, Brunel University:
This project dealt with improving undergraduate assessment by using automated marking and was funded by a Innovation grant from Brunel University. Automated marking of diagrammatic coursework (e-Assessment), offers many potential benefits including timely feedback, consistency of marking and freeing up of valuable lecturer time. The use of diagrams is quite commonplace in many disciplines such as Computer Science, Engineering and Design. Unfortunately e-Assessment of diagrams is challenging because of imprecise semantics, the need to make sense of incomplete or only partially correct solutions and the possibility of a multiplicity of correct solutions. This research is important because quality and timeliness of feedback is an area about which the students have been consistently critical, so e-Assessment represents a very real opportunity to improve the Brunel student experience.
As part of this project I have developed a software tool for automated marking of diagrammatic coursework and evaluated it on a second year undergraduate module at the Brunel University. This software is customizable, plug and play and extensible. The evaluation results show that the software is effective but further work is required to perfect the accuracy. The software tool and corpus of coursework are published in sourceforge under the project 'e-Assessment of Diagrammatic Coursework'. The link for this project is as follows.
Digital artefact: Software for automatic assessment https://sourceforge.net/projects/eassessmentofd/files/
Project Report https://sourceforge.net/projects/eassessmentofd/files/LTDU_Project_Report_v4.pdf/download
Journal publication: Jayal, A. and Shepperd, M., 2009. An improved method for label matching in e-assessment of diagrams. Innovation in Teaching and Learning in Information and Computer Sciences, 8(1), pp.3-16.
j) Software to help lecturer organise the coursework and detect plagiarism, 2007
This was an internal grant from Brunel University to develop and evaluate a software tool for helping lecturers mark the coursework. Unfortunately a side effect of the introduction of some e-learning systems into HEIs has been the loss of flexibility and the imposition of new processes that can result in additional clerical and administrative burdens. As part of the grant I have developed a software tool, named PreMark, that fits between the e-learning tool (in our case WebCT/Blackboard) and the user (lecturer). PreMark is a prototype software system designed to provide support for lecturers during the assessment process by organizing the coursework electronically submitted by the students. Additionally it helps detect possible cases of plagiarism. This project has led to following outputs.
Digital artefact software: http://sourceforge.net/projects/eassessmentofd/
Publication Jayal, A. Cartwright, M. and Shepperd, M.J. (2007) Premark: A System Designed to Organising Course Work for Assessment. 5th International Conference on E-Governance, India, December 28-30, 2007, https://www.csi-sigegov.org/2/25_324_2.pdf [Accessed on Feb 2019]
k) Re-engineering Case Based Reasoning (CBR), Brunel University and British Telecommunications Limited, 2007
The aim of this project was to develop a web based CBR tool by re-engineering the original ANGEL software developed by Prof. Martin Shepperd. The task involved understanding the code of ANGEL, separating the business and presentation logic by designing and implementing a new business layer and developing the software as a client server application.
l) Interoperability project between Phosphorix Ltd and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), 2006
This project dealt with the interoperability issue between various virtual learning environments. As part of this project proof ¬of ¬concept software prototype was developed for automatically exporting levelA IMS Learning Design (LD) from activity sequences built using Phosphorix Ltd IOPortal technology. This was a part of a bigger project "LD4P: Supporting Practitioners in producing IMS Learning Designs (LD for practitioners)" funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) as part of the Designing for Learning programme. The project included partners from Liverpool Hope University, St Helens College, Phosphorix Ltd and the University of Bolton.
Digital Artifact: http://bsd1.phosphorix.co.uk/ld4p/
Technical report Griffiths, D., Beauvoir, P., Liber, O. and Barrett‐Baxendale, M., Jayal, A. 2009, Learning Designs for Practitioners (LD4P): Supporting Practitioners in producing IMS Learning Designs (LD for practitioners), Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), UK, viewed 18 Feb 2019,
m) Developed mobile application to engage students during open days at University of Gloucestershire
To help prospective students during open days, I have developed a mobile application [13] which promotes the town of Cheltenham as a computing hub by asking questions related to history and technology institutions around Cheltenham such as GCHQ and BCS headquarters. Additionally this app gives prospective students an insight into the kind of things, such as mobile application development techniques, that they will be taught during their computing undergraduate course.