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Sarajevo School of Science and Technology (SSST)

Sarajevo is a city trying hard to revitalise itself after the war in the 1990s and the prolonged siege that caused much loss of life and destruction of buildings and infrastructure. Modern economies depend on IT and Information Systems. Bosnia and Sarajevo, in particular, lack a homegrown computing school and this has lead to setting up of a private engineering and computing school open to all students of whatever ethnic background.

An agreement was made on March 1, 2004, between The University of �Թ��� and Sarajevo School of Science and Technology. The agreement has enabled UB, the Awarding Institution, to validate, monitor and examine four year undergraduate degree programme(s) in Computer Science and/or Information Systems, which have been offered by SSST, the Partner Organisation since September 2004, and award a UB degree to those students who have fulfilled all the requirements of the SSST degree programme(s).

The aims of the agreement are for both UB and SSST to be strengthened in their respective profiles internationally, to enable academic, financial and cultural benefits to accrue to both parties.

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Broadwan project

��is a European co-funded project (IST-2002-001930) that aims at realising a combined fixed and mobile wireless network providing good coverage for all.

Efficient wireless access systems ensure that everyone in Europe can get access to broadband services within a reasonable time frame. A pan-European full-service coverage requirement leads to an access networking structure where wireless solutions are necessary as well as attractive.

European broadband industry in the lead will have a very interesting global market. In some areas, wireless solutions will interwork with or compete with other solutions, in other areas they represent the only possibility. The radio solutions will be important for competition and represent an extension of the fixed network into the broadband nomadic and mobile domain.

The group at �Թ��� have concentrated on Ipv6 and “ad hoc” network construction and have been particularly concerned with QoS and denial of service attacks.

SecurePhone project

SecurePhone��is a European co-funded project (IST-2002-506883) that aims at realising a new mobile communication system enabling biometrically authenticated users to deal m-contracts during a mobile phone call in a highly dependable and secure way. The SecurePhone is based on a prototypal 3G/B3G-enabled smartphone, providing a number of innovative functionalities, including authentication by means of a “biometric recogniser”, mutually recognise each other, and exchange in real-time audio and/or re-signed text files.

SecurePhone’s biometric recogniser will be based on fusing a combination of non-intrusive innovative biometric schemes such as audio-visual and handwritten signature identification techniques. Biometrically authenticated users get direct access to the SecurePhone’s built-in e-signing facilities.

The �Թ��� Imaging Group (BIG) has been developing an innovative wavelet-based face verification scheme that is efficient for implementation on PDAs and yet performs as well as state-of-the-art face verification schemes.

Our collaboration with the Dixons Group

�Թ���’s place at the cutting edge of information systems is supported through our partnership with the Dixons Group. Initial funding from Dixons was used to equip a new laboratory with state-of-the-art multimedia PCs. Some of the money has also been used to support research into specific areas such as security. Dixons has valuable experience in information and communications technologies as an online retailer, an Internet Service Provider and the biggest high street retailer of IT products in the UK.

Our Collaboration with the Centre for Information and Computer Sciences

We are registered with the Centre for Information and Computer Sciences��as part of the Higher Education Academy (formerly the Learning and Teaching Support Network), which provides professional support for ICS academics.

Visiting Professors

Dr Andrew Edmonds
After an early career in electronic design, Andy Edmonds became interested in computational/artificial intelligence in the mid-1980s. He produced Britain’s first commercial neural network development software and then went on to create various tools and solutions embodying genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic and genetic programming. He converted some work on predicting chaotic time series into a PhD in 1994 and thereafter spent several years creating a novel program that evolved financial trading strategies using genetic programming and fuzzy logic for a futures trading house. He is now running Scientio, Inc. a company that specialises in tools for data mining unstructured data in XML, and is interested in reviving semantic networks and mining structures from ensembles of data.

Visiting Fellows

Dr Jeremy Martin
Jeremy is a software development team leader in the Cheminformatics department at . Previously he worked at Oxford University for many years where, latterly, he held the position of Parallel Programming Advisor in the Supercomputing Centre. He was also a lecturer in Computation at St Catherine’s College. Jeremy holds the MA degree in Mathematics from Cambridge University and the DPhil in Computer Science from �Թ���. His doctoral research was in the theoretical avoidance of deadlock in concurrent systems. His current computing interests are agile development methodologies, grid computation, and large-scale software engineering.