Dr. Ahmad Atamli is a lecturer in Cyber security at the University of Southampton. He graduated with a BSc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 2012. He received a DPhil from the University of Oxford in System Security in 2017. He joined Oxford as a Lecturer in Software Engineering in 2019, following which he moved to Southampton to lead the Hardware Security research.
Dr. Atamli is an ACM and IEEE professional member, and is renowned public speaker. He has published numerous papers and technical reports in IoT security, system security, hardware security, intrusion detection, malware analysis. He has established multiple collaborations and research with national and international partners, the latest projects funded by H2020 is ASSURED and TrustedFog.
Iris Kramer is completing a PhD in Southampton’s Vision, Learning and Control Research Group.
Archaeologist turned computer scientist Iris Kramer secured a record-breaking ã770,000 valuation for her deep learning tool for archaeological surveys in a Dragons' Den-style event at the University of Southampton.
The Computer Science PhD student was offered a ã70,000 investment in her startup, ArchAI, despite pitching from over 200 miles away in the Netherlands for the virtual series hosted by the Future Worlds startup accelerator.
Iris's technology taps into techniques she developed in the Vision, Learning and Control Research Group for her PhD, which is the first in the world to apply deep learning to the detection of archaeological sites from Earth Observation data.
The investors rewarded the ArchAI pitch with the biggest valuation in the event's history, funding Iris to focus on product development and sales and marketing.
"Receiving this offer of investment has brought me much closer to achieving my vision of disrupting the commercial archaeology market," Iris says. "Having spent years during my PhD honing my technology, I'm excited to work with the Dragons to save time and costs for developers and protect our archaeological heritage both in the UK and internationally'.
Iris studied Archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands before moving to Southampton to complete an MSc degree in Archaeological Computing. Her ground-breaking PhD research, which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Ordnance Survey, has been advanced under the supervision of Dr Jonathon Hare and Professor Adam Prugel-Bennett.
The Future Worlds Dragons' Den series also saw investment offers for two other student startups that brought the combined total valuation across the four-day event to more than ã1.1 million.
Longstanding Future Worlds investors Chris Broad and Andrew Doe pledged to invest ã20,000 into Future Brew at a ã200,000 valuation. The startup, which was founded by MEng Aerospace Engineering student Dimitris Stoidis, is a carbon negative approach to brewing beer that uses surplus bread as one of its main ingredients.
Southampton Law graduate Avila Chidume raised ã15,000 from all the investors with a ã150,000 valuation in her business Kutenda, an online marketplace that celebrates the representation of underrepresented groups.
Other startups pitched across the series included Angel, a one-person fully electric multicopter for first responders designed by MEng Aerospace Engineering students Umar Khan and Radu Tudorache, Stardust, a personal data protection platform founded by Computer Science and Mathematics students Til Jordan and Andrius Matšenas, and Small Steps, a subscription service founded by Psychology student Sally Goillon that curates sustainable alternatives to everyday products.
Ben Clark, Future Worlds Director, says: Future Worlds Dragons' Den 2020 has seen immensely talented founders meet committed and supportive multi-millionaire investors to launch audacious startup adventures. I'm inspired by how the ambitious students have battled through this year's challenging process in lockdown to seize life changing opportunities and reach for international success.
Moving online in lockdown has brought together angel investors from across Europe and North America to invest in the exceptional startups emerging from the University of Southampton. With over ã600,000 now offered to student entrepreneurs in Future Worlds Dragons' Den the University's infectious startup culture is making waves on the South coast.
All four episodes of Future Worlds’ Dragons' Den are available to view for free online at futureworlds.com/dragons.
The virtual wards will monitor patients’ oxygen levels from home.
Oxygen levels will be remotely monitored in COVID-19 patients across the south east in a new virtual ward programme being supported by computer scientists from the University of Southampton.
The community monitoring will enable early identification of patient deterioration and timely and appropriate interventions, including escalations to higher levels of acute care through hospital admissions.
The University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre has won a major NHSX project with North and Mid Hants Integrated Care Partnership and the Wessex Academic Health Sciences Network to deploy and scale the remote pulse oximetry in the region.
COVID-19 has forced rapid, accelerated change within the NHS to embrace digital innovations such as remote consultation and remote monitoring. Remote interactions not only reduce infection rates by reducing physical contact but offer news ways of delivering emergency care.
Remote Community Oximetry Care (RECOxCARE) is one such innovation, providing a way for clinicians to remotely monitor patients at home, avoiding the need for attendances to GP practices or hospital.
The new insight will also allow the rapid follow up of patients post hospital discharge, particularly for those frail, elderly and vulnerable patients with multiple long-term conditions at high risk of adverse complication events and re-admission to hospital.
Dr Matt Inada-Kim, National Clinical Lead Deterioration & National Specialist Advisor Sepsis, NHS England and NHS Improvement, and Emergency Consultant at Hampshire Hospitals Foundation Trust, says: A characteristic of COVID-19 is that some patients suffer from silent hypoxia where oxygen saturation levels fall to dangerously low levels without noticeable difficulties when breathing.
During the first wave, patients were arriving at hospital in a serious condition, significantly more poorly than their symptoms would suggest. RECOxCARE aims to empower patients with oximetry at home and allow clinicians to spot early deterioration, initiate timely escalation and reduce mortality risk.
Professor Michael Boniface, Director of the University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre, and leader of the RECOxCARE digital work stream, says: The technology to remotely observe oximetry, vital signs and symptoms is relatively straight forward, but rapidly integrating observation data into safe clinical processes and across different primary and secondary clinical context raises significant challenges of interoperability and timely access to data needed for direct care.
Monitoring oximetry and other risk factors over the full disease trajectory also allows for greater understanding of COVID-19 and for better clinical models to be developed. Through the Wessex ARC PPDRCOM project (Predicting Patient Deterioration in Communities) we will exploring how predictive analytics techniques can be used to understand which COVID-19 patients are at most risk in different care settings.
The RECOxCARE project is funded by NHSX as part of a South East Regional scale programme to support people at home through report monitoring.
Cyber attacks pose an increasing threat to UK military systems
Computer scientists from the University of Southampton have collaborated with incident modelling solutions provider Riskaware to help defend UK military systems and networks from rapidly growing cyber threats.
The research partnership has produced CyberAware Predict, which takes a proactive approach to minimise risk and mitigate the impact of future cyber attacks.
Researchers from Southampton's Cyber Security Research Group have advanced the capability as part of a ã1m innovation funding round from the UK's Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA).
Dr Leonardo Aniello, Southampton project lead, says: "In today's cyber threat landscape, attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and can develop over many consecutive stages, from reconnaissance to first intrusion, from privilege escalation to data exfiltration.
"CyberAware Predict aims to protect an IT defence infrastructure in a proactive way: by anticipating how and where cyber-attacks can target the infrastructure, and how they can evolve over time, the platform can help operators develop a more precise cyber risk awareness and take appropriate countermeasures in advance."
Southampton researchers shared expertise in cyber security and machine learning to enable the system to make predictions about the likely next steps of an evolving cyber attack against the monitored IT defence infrastructure.
Dr Aniello adds: "As UK defence assets become increasingly integrated with and reliant on the cyber space, the need arises to protect defence IT infrastructures from cyber attacks to ensure security and continuity of critical operations. In this context, the capability to predict cyber threats in advance is a key enabler and presents a competitive advantage. After land, sea, air and space, cyberspace has become the new battlefield."
Riskaware's CyberAware platform includes visual analytics that enable organisations to understand and communicate current cyber risk, given analysis of real network vulnerabilities through cyber attack prediction and simulation.
The aim is to help organisations identify how critical assets might be impacted by cyber attacks, and ultimately facilitate the design of cost-effective cyber security controls that reduce cyber risk to acceptable levels.
This new predictive capability relies on machine learning techniques that seamlessly integrates existing software tools and cyber threat intelligence (CTI) knowledge bases.
