Distributed and Networked Systems Group
Many of the successes of today’s digital world, such as the Internet, World Wide Web, blockchain, distributed ledgers, cloud computing, and social networks, are underpinned by distributed and networked systems. The interests of this group span both technical and socio-technical challenges arising in these settings.
Overview of research interests
Our group brings together a number of academics with an interest in various kinds of systems: distributed systems, networked systems, social systems, concurrent systems, and combinations thereof. We maintain a strong inter-disciplinary focus on socio-economic questions arising in the context of user interaction with these systems and emergent behaviours that stem from such interactions.
There is a broad interest in both theoretical underpinnings of such systems as well as large-scale data-driven empirical analyses and topics of active research includes:
- Complex network analysis, including controllability and criticality
- Concurrency control
- Development of control policies
- Distributed coordination
- Distributed trust
- Edge networks and cloud computing
- Fault-tolerance
- Formal verification
- Information processing in networks
- Resource management
- Social computing and computational social science
- Web tracking and privacy.
Find an expert
Find out more about our staff and get in contact.
Group leads
Professor Gregory Chockler
Professor in Computer Science
Areas of expertise
- Trustworthy distributed systems and fault-tolerance
- Distributed and concurrent algorithms, and their modelling and analysis
- Blockchains, cloud computing, large-scale distributed systems.
Professor Nishanth Sastry
Professor, Associate Head of Research and Innovation
Areas of expertise
- Internet data science
- Large-scale internet measurements
- Edge networks, including applications of block chains
- Social media and social computing
- Computational social science
- Web privacy.
Academics
Dr Roman Bauer
Senior Lecturer
Areas of expertise
- Biological networks (neural networks, protein interaction networks, gene regulatory networks, ...)
- Complex network modelling and analysis
- Information processing in networks.
Dr Suparna De
Lecturer in Computer Science
Areas of expertise
- Smart city big data processing
- Deep learning for textual data, including social networks and longitudinal studies
- Semantic modelling and search.
Professor Brijesh Dongol
Director of the UK Research Institute on Verified Trustworthy Software Systems (VeTSS)
Areas of expertise
- Concurrent algorithms: Data structures and transactional memory
- Weak memory models
- Semantics and verification
- Robotics and autonomous agents.
Dr Yunpeng Li
Visiting Reader
Areas of expertise
- Concurrent algorithms: Data structures and transactional memory
- Weak memory models
- Semantics and verification
- Robotics and autonomous agents.
Dr Sotiris Moschoyiannis
Reader in Complex Systems
Areas of expertise
- Controllability in complex networks (control theory, machine learning)
- Reinforcement learning (rule-based, deep)
- Cascades and criticality in learning, in naturally occuring systems
- Concurrency and compensation semantics.
Professor Helen Treharne
Head of School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering; Professor in Computer Science SFHEA, FBCS
Areas of expertise
- Formal verification
- Authentication, including passwordless technologies
- Trusted computing
- Intelligent transport systems and rail applications
- Computational social science with application to cyber awareness.
Postgraduate research students
