The Computer Science and Informatics PGR community has expanded greatly over the current REF period, attracting many students from across the globe, with international students making up 68% of the PGR community. The unit has awarded 84 PhDs in the current cycle compared to 6 in REF 2014 - a significant increase.
PGR students are encouraged to get involved in academic activities with undergraduates to equip them for careers beyond the successful completion of their thesis. Students are also embedded in the research culture of the unit by participating in relevant research groups and seminars. In addition to this, students also proactively engage with non-academic communities and charities to disseminate their research as well as share knowledge and best practices.
See a showcase below of some of our PG researchers and the projects they are carrying out.
Fraser Young
Title of thesis: Towards a multi-modal, low-cost approach to gait assessment
Supervisors: Alan Godfrey, Sam Stuart, Rosie Morris
ERDF IIIP funded PhD in collaboration with Mymo, a North East-based start-up. Focus on developing methods to enable gait assessment for older adult health using the Mymo platform while exploring other modalities that will help to augment gait assessment such as computer vision.
Hailun Xie
Title of thesis: Evolving Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models Using Evolutionary Algorithms
Supervisors: Li Zhang, Kezhi Wang
The conventional machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods suffer from severe obstacles in tackling real-life problems, such as feature selection, initialization sensitivity, as well as hyperparameter optimization. In this research, several evolving ML and DL models are proposed to eliminate above bottlenecks, respectively, through hybridization between the advanced evolutionary algorithms and the conventional ML and DL methods.
Jeyamohan Neera
Title of thesis: Privacy protection in Third Party Based Mobile Payment Systems
Supervisors: Xiaomin Chen, Nauman Aslam
In this project our aim is to design an innovative third-party mobile payment solution for delivering a global mobile payment service. We are aiming to tackle the security and privacy issues these services pose. Via an open and detailed design, we are not only aiming to address these areas not only at the theoretical level but at the architectural implementation level as well.
Graham Coulby
Title of thesis: Monitoring building occupants for personalised health and wellbeing: Integration of scalable technologies
Supervisors: Alan Godfrey (Principle), Oliver Jones (Industry), Adrian K. Clear (External)
The PhD aims to investigate which aspects of health and wellbeing can be measured using quantitative data from sensor-fusion technology. This involves investigating the augmentation of localised environmental quality data with data from wearables and surveys to better understand the effects indoor environments have on building occupants.
This work was funded by Northumbria University and the European Regional Development Fund’s Intensive Industrial Innovation Programme (IIIP) (Grant No. 25R17P01847), as part of doctoral research. Ryder Architecture sponsored this research as the ‘SME Sponsor’ for this programme and it is being delivered through Northumbria University’s Department for Computer and Information Sciences.
Chloe Kliman-Silver
Supervisor: Shaun Lawson
Title of thesis: Examining the Animal-Human Bond Through the Lens of Telepresence
My research mainly focuses on designing and building technology telepresence probes to expose problematic sides of pet tech and to increase human understanding of dogs’ otherness. I am also interested in human-animal relations and privacy. Before Northumbria, I was a data scientist at an e-commerce company and a research assistant at a social network systems lab.
Dylan Powell
Title of thesis: Wearables as objective tools in the monitoring of sports-related concussion
Supervisors: Dr Alan Godfrey, Secondary supervisor: Dr Sam Stuart
Dylan’s doctoral work (Northumbria University) is investigating the use of wearables to improve sports related concussion assessment & monitoring. Part of digital health and wellbeing research group, Dylan’s has received external grants (£24,461.00) from the Private Physiotherapy Educational Fund to expand and collaborate with local players and clinicians across the UK. Alongside studying Dylan works as a Consultant Academy Physiotherapist at Rangers Football Club, Glasgow.
Yunus Celik
Title of thesis: Instrumenting gait in neurological disorders: Wearables for inertial measurement and muscle activation synergies
Supervisors: Dr Alan Godfrey, Second Supervisor: Dr Sam Stuart, Third Supervisor: Prof Wai Lok Woo
Yunus is working on the use of wearable sensors in gait assessment of people with neurological conditions. He is interested in the inertial sensor and EMG algorithms for gathering multi-model gait characteristics. He has been working on a project with collaborators from the University of Bradford for more than a year. Yunus is externally funded by the Turkish Ministry of National Education for his PhD work.
Kevin McCay
Title of thesis: “Sensing Movement using Action Recognition Technology in Babies (SMART-Baby)”
Supervisors: Edmond Ho & Wai Lok Woo
Working closely with healthcare consultants based at the RVI in Newcastle, we are evaluating the feasibility of using computer vision and machine learning techniques to provide early diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy. By analysing videos of infant motion, recorded at a specific stage in development, we hope to automate the diagnostic process, providing measurable evidence to support decisions made about care.
Steven Thirkle
Title of thesis: Monitoring the Implementation of Trauma-informed Care
Supervisors: Dr Petia Sice, Dr Angela Kennedy (NHS), Dr John Rooksby
My PhD is a collaboration between Northumbria University, and The Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys Foundation NHS Trust. Mental health services have long experienced difficulty operating under the traditional medical model. The Trauma-informed Care system model is an alternative model that raises the awareness of individuals to the impacts of service-interaction. My research investigates the observation of practice change.
Daniel Organisciak
Title of thesis: Attention Mechanisms in Surveillance
Supervisors: Dr Shanfeng Hu, Dr Edmond Ho, Dr Hubert Shum (external)
Deep learning, despite dramatically advancing artificial intelligence, is deemed untrustworthy with sensitive data because of a lack of explainability. This project proposes interpretable mechanisms and integrates them into deep models to improve efficacy on person and vehicle re-identification; UAV detection, tracking and re-identification (project funded partly by the Future Aviation Security Solutions [FASS]); and face verification.
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