Teaching Philosophy

At The Open University, we are committed to making higher education accessible to all. My teaching focuses on helping students develop practical software engineering skills while understanding the theoretical foundations that underpin modern computing.

I am particularly interested in teaching the art of computer programming at a distance, including developing innovative approaches using deep neural networks to generate educational dialogues and make programming education more accessible to students with visual impairments.

Teaching Areas

Distance Learning Innovation

As part of The Open University's mission, I contribute to innovative distance learning approaches:

• Developing accessible programming education for students with visual impairments
• Using deep neural networks to generate educational dialogues
• Creating interactive learning materials for software engineering concepts
• Exploring multimodal approaches to programming education

Supervision

PhD Supervision

I welcome applications from prospective PhD students interested in:

• Automated Software Engineering
• Deep Learning for Code Analysis
• Requirements-Driven Adaptation
• Program Transformation and Migration
• Security and Privacy in Software Systems

Current PhD Students

• Pedreira Diaz (2021 - present)

  Bug Localisation using AI

  Co-supervised with Michel Wermelinger and Tamara Lopez

• Chris Neale (2020 - present)

  On Anti-Forensics for UAVs

  Co-supervised with Blaine Price and Bashar Nuseibeh

Completed PhD Students

• Julian A. Harty (2023)

  Improving Application Quality using Mobile Analytics

  Co-supervised with Arosha Bandara

  LinkedIn

• Dimitris Gkoumas (2021)

  On Retrieval of Multimodal Information

  Co-supervised with Dawei Song and Shailey Minocha

• Sagar Uprety (2020)

  On Quantum Theoretic Information Retrieval

  Co-supervised with Dawei Song and Shailey Minocha

  Website Scholar

• Tezcan Dilshener (2017)

  Improving Information Retrieval Bug Localisation Using Contextual Heuristics

  Co-supervised with Michel Wermelinger

  Thesis Scholar

• Michael A. Giddings (2016)

  The Early Assessment of System Performance in Distributed Real-time Systems

  Co-supervised with Michel Wermelinger, Pat Allen, Andrian Jackson, and Jan Jürjens

  Thesis

• Simon J. Butler (2016)

  Analysing Java Identifier Names

  Co-supervised with Michel Wermelinger and Helen Sharp

  Thesis

• Saad bin Saleem (2015)

  Analysing the Resolution of Security Bugs in Software Maintenance

  Co-supervised with Bashar Nuseibeh

  Thesis LinkedIn

• Pierre A. Akiki (2014)

  Engineering Adaptive Model-Driven User Interfaces for Enterprise Applications

  Co-supervised with Arosha Bandara

  Thesis Website ResearchGate

• Stefan Tautenberger (2014)

  Vulnerability Identification Errors in Security Risk Assessments

  Co-supervised with Jan Jürjens and Bashar Nuseibeh

  Thesis

• Lionel Montrieux (2013)

  Model-Based Analysis of Role-Based Access Control

  Co-supervised with Michel Wermelinger

  Thesis

• Mohammed Salifu (2008)

  Analysing the Requirements for Monitoring and Switching: A Problem-Oriented Approach

  Co-supervised with Bashar Nuseibeh

  Thesis

Project Supervision

I supervise undergraduate and postgraduate projects related to software engineering, program analysis, and machine learning for code.

Public Engagement

I regularly contribute to public understanding of computing and technology through:

• Articles on The Conversation (13 articles published)
• Public lectures and presentations
• Media commentary on software engineering topics