Biography
- 1984 - 1988 Sunderland Polytechnic. BSc Hons Combined Studies in Science (Computing Science and Applied Physics).
- 1992 - 1998 University of Sunderland. PhD - thesis entitled "An Investigation into MetaCASE and Object Orientation".
- 1996 - 1998 University of Sunderland: CERT.Ed (HE) Certificate in Education - (Higher Education).
- 1988 - 1991 Development Engineer. Saxon Micro Ltd - Newmarket. Involved with the development of hardware and software for medical technology. Included work on robotic micro-manipulators, genetic fingerprint analysis and image processing.
- 1991 - 1992 Project Engineer. Enstec Consultants - Cambridge. Worked as a consultant on safety critical environmental monitoring software for (amongst others) British Nuclear Fuels. Responsible for management of major monitoring project of BNFL Sellafield.
- 1995 - 2000 Senior Lecturer. University of Sunderland, School of Computing, Engineering and Technology
- 2000 - 2010 Lecturer. University of Strathclyde, Department of Computer and Information Sciences
- 2010 - present Lecturer. University of Abertay Dundee, School of Computing and Engineering Systems
- Research
Dr. R.I. Ferguson gained his PhD in Software Engineering from the University of Sunderland in 1998.
Whilst at the University of Sunderland, he established a publication record in the fields of software engineering and mobile-agent based systems. His work on engineering mobile agent environments lead to a interest in mobile computing and context aware systems. Funded research included two Teaching Company Scheme Studentships (£120K). During 1997 and 1998 he was seconded to the Centre for Electronic Commerce, with a remit to manage the design stage of the EU funded TRADEPOINT e-commerce research project.
Between 2000 and 2010 at the University of Strathclyde he was a member of Smartlab (the Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing Group) and subsequently the Software Systems Group where he successfully supervised (5) PhDs on agent based middleware for group communication, quality metrics for context data in ubiquitous computing, semi-structured databases and scalable distributed indexing systems. The theme underpinning this research has been networks of distributed (and sometimes mobile) agents, concentrating on problems ofcommunication between distributed agents, utilising them to solve distributed indexing problems, ad-hoc networks of agents and the use of agents in pervasive and ubiquitous computing. His research in mobile agents has included the Microsoft funded moboNET project (£30K).
Experience in distributed computing and networking has lead to an interest in forensic computing and a project in digital forensic readiness funded by SLIC (£12K) looking at security issues in public access networks.
Since arriving at the University of Abertay Dundee his work has concentrated on digital forensic triage and applying visualization techniques to problems in digital forensic analysis.
