Testing the relative importance of species diversity and cutting regime in agricultural grasslands

ELIGIBILITY: This project is for a student taking the MSc in Statistics and Sustainability. In agriculture, grasslands can play an important role in producing feed for animals and maintaining soil health in crop rotations. In recent years, mixing plant species with complementary traits have been proposed to reduce the quantity of synthetic fertiliser required to … Read more

[TAKEN] Fairness and Robustness in Risk Detection Models (2 Projects)

Risk detection models (such as IBM’s Granite Guardian) are increasingly used to flag harmful prompts and responses in large language model pipelines. These systems are trained on human and synthetic data to identify risks across multiple dimensions, but their reliability and fairness are not guaranteed. They may over-flag certain groups, miss subtle harms, or be … Read more

[TAKEN] Debugging Classifications with Counterfactual Explanations

This project investigates how post-hoc counterfactual explanations can be used to debug opaque models such as deep neural networks by revealing which feature changes most influence predictions. In applications like anomaly detection, counterfactuals help clarify why certain cases are flagged as abnormal and expose when models rely on spurious correlations or biased patterns. By using … Read more

Machine learning for fibre disturbance detection via state of polarisation sensing – Taken, no longer available

Project Description: Optical fibre networks are critical to global connectivity, yet they are susceptible to accidental damage or deliberate tampering. While distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) has been widely investigated for disturbance detection, an alternative approach relies on monitoring the state of polarisation (SOP) of light propagating in the fibre. The SOP is highly sensitive to … Read more

Machine learning application to fibre sensing in maritime applications – Taken, no longer available

Project Description: Recent advances in distributed fibre sensing have shown that existing optical fibre cables, originally deployed for telecommunications, can also serve as dense sensor arrays. By sending probe signals through the fibre and analysing the backscattered light, it is possible to extract information about environmental changes such as vibrations, temperature, and strain along the … Read more

Quantum communications protocols for entanglement distribution – Taken, no longer available

Project Description: The exploration of quantum communication protocols for entanglement distribution is critical to advancing secure and efficient quantum networks. Entanglement, a unique quantum phenomenon, enables instantaneous correlations across vast distances, which is essential for applications like quantum key distribution (QKD) and quantum teleportation. In particular, quantum teleportation is an essential feature of quantum networks … Read more

Development of digital twins of optical networks using machine learning – Taken, no longer available

Project Description: Over the past few years, telecommunications networks have migrated towards concepts of virtualisation and programmability, which has recently also affected the optical layer [1]. This has provided the opportunity to build more intelligent control of optical networks, for example to predict quality of transmission and thus improve overall network utilisation, as transmission channels … Read more

[Taken] Web-Browser and Server for Information-Centric Networking

The current Internet architecture assumes communication based on the identity of hosts e.g. the name/IP address of a webserver in a URL. Individual clients connect to specific servers to retrieve documents and videos. Information-centric networking instead assumes that content is the focus of communication and is uniquely named in networks e.g. a consumer asks a … Read more

[Taken] AI connectivity for Information-Centric Networks

Information-centric networking assumes that content is the focus of communication and is uniquely named in networks e.g. a consumer asks a network for specific content instead of connecting to the IP address of a specific server. This approach allows content to be cached within the network and network nodes to change their location without affecting … Read more