Dr Blesson Varghese awarded Royal Society Short Industry Fellowship with BT
Dr Varghese will partner with BT as part of this fellowship which aims to build collaborative links between industrial and academic sectors.
Dr Varghese, a senior lecturer at ECIT and EEECS at Queen's University Belfast, will take up this exciting fellowship with BT for one year and his work will focus on ‘Enabling Accountability Using Edge Computing’.
Edge computing is a disruptive paradigm envisaged to make the Internet sustainable as billions of devices get connected. In this paradigm, certain services from clouds are brought closer to end-user devices on edge nodes located at the edge of the wired network (for example, micro data centres or routers and gateways).
Edge nodes offer a principal advantage in serving as a privacy firewall by selectively controlling the release of sensitive data from the edge to the cloud. However, one significant opportunity has not been exploited by edge computing – enabling trust by creating accountability at the edge.
Dr Varghese commented: “I am excited to begin this partnership with BT. The ambition of this one-year fellowship is to ensure trust on the move, which is fundamentally different from approaches that 'box' data and does not allow user-generated data to move freely whilst respecting and enforcing user privacy. The fellowship aims to bring clarity to our understanding of what is required in both concept and practice for incorporating accountability at the edge.”
We will start by exploring trust-based mechanisms required for distributed machine learning applications to understand where data should (and should not) be processed.
Dr Varghese added: “The fellowship will provide me with unique opportunity to pursue this transformative research for future Internet technologies by partnering with British Telecommunications plc, the largest edge infrastructure providers in the UK.”
Peter Willis, Senior Manager Software-based Networks, BT commented: “The fellowship is an excellent opportunity for Dr Varghese to align his research in the nascent area of edge computing with industry standards and practices.
Dr Varghese will gain knowledge of real-world services offered by BT that will allow him to ask research questions in the right context.
BT collaborates widely with the University sector and the fellowship provides further opportunity to closely interact with an academic with a track record in edge computing.
We look forward to working closely with Dr Varghese to further develop this work.”
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Contact Helen McCrory for further information