Balbir is Professor of Software Engineering at Middlesex University. Following a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bath, Balbir embarked on an industrial research career of over 15 years working in the various research labs at Marconi, Texas Instruments and Sterling Software where he was involved in the research and design of leading software products such as the IEF. Balbir joined Middlesex in 2008 as Associate Dean for Business in the School of Engineering and Information Sciences after an earlier academic role as Head of Department and Professor of Computing at th University of West London. Balbir has been a principal investigator on research projects totalling over £1.5M. He has also provided consultancy to prestigious clients such as JP Morgan Chase and JISC.
Teaching interests include: Requrements Management; Systems and Software Modelling; Software Engineering and Knowledge Management.
My research contributes to software engineering and information systems primarily through research that enables the delivery of software tools and processes that promote business change or increase productivity. This theme has been an on-going thread for over 24 years and includes contributions to leading commercial products such as the IEF at Texas Instruments.
Recent research projects have focused on model driven software engineering where the goal is to use models as abstractions and execution environments to support, for example, enterprise architecture and software design. This also includes a return to a more fundamental philosophical position around "theory building". Some of this work draws input from both the Philisophy of Fiction and Legal reasoning (Argumentation).
A second strand of research activity has focussed on application of technology to support health education.Two projects have focused on the use of mobile technologies to support the health care domains – Nursing and Social Work. More recently, Balbir is managing a project funded by the Nominet Trust to develop applications to support young offenders in the youth justice system. Further details on this project are available at:http://www.mayot.mdx.ac.uk/
Mihai, Stefan and Yaqoob, Mahnoor and Hung, Dang Viet and Davis, William and Towakel, Praveer and Raza, Mohsin and Karamanoglu, Mehmet and Barn, Balbir and Shetve, Dattaprasad and Prasad, Raja V. and Venkataraman, Hrishikesh and Trestian, Ramona and Nguyen, Huan X. (2022) Digital twins: a survey on enabling technologies, challenges, trends and future prospects. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials , 24 (4). pp. 2255-2291. ISSN 1553-877X
Barn, Balbir and Clark, Tony and Barat, Souvik and Kulkarni, Vinay (2022) Towards the essence of specifying sociotechnical digital twins. In: ISEC'23 16th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference, 23-25 February 2023, Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, India. (Accepted/In press)
Barat, Souvik and Kulkarni, Vinay and Clark, Tony and Barn, Balbir (2022) Digital twin as risk-free experimentation aid for techno-socio-economic systems. In: ACM / IEEE 25th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), 23-28 Oct 2022, Montreal, Canada.
Hoang, Tiep M. and Son, Dinh-Van and Barn, Balbir and Trestian, Ramona and Nguyen, Huan X. (2022) RIS-aided smart manufacturing: information transmission and machine health monitoring. IEEE Internet of Things Journal . ISSN 2327-4662 (Published online first)
Barn, Balbir (2022) The sociotechnical digital twin: on the gap between social and technical feasibility. In: 2022 IEEE 24th Conference on Business Informatics (CBI), 15-17 June 2022, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
2013: £150,000: "MAYOT: Mobile Applications for Youth Offending Teams". Nominet Trust. (PI).
A project in collaboration with Royal Holloway, University of London aiming to develop software tools for helping Case workers in their support activity with youth offenders. This project has the backing of the Youth Justice Board.
2012: £45,000: 'SLR-Guide': A project to develop a tool to support the systematic literature review process, JISC, (PI)
2011: £10,000: 'Middlesex Strategic-ICT Toolkit', A project to explore the business and strategic ICT alignment maturity at Middlesex University, JISC, (PI)
2010: £3000: 'Tools for Music Composition and Performance for All', Knowledge Connect. (PI). Research to explore the potential of music technology for supporting music education for disabled children, with Drake Music.
2009: £300,000: 'MUSKET -Middlesex University Skills and Education Planning Tool': JISC, (PI). The development of automated support for comparing programme and module learning outcomes to support APELand other academic processes. The project developed a number of algorithms based on semantic analysis of course specifications.
Recent examples of engagement and impact include:-
Provision of consultancy to JP Morgan Chase on component based software practice.
Provision of consultancy to JISC on technologies to support service oriented architectures for higher education (E-Framework).
Regular invitations to Practitioner forums on Enterprise Architecture.
Review of EPSRC research proposals.
Co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Software and Systems Modelling on "Enterprise Modelling".
Work with the Tata Research, Design and Development Center on a collaborative research project on embedding model driven approaches to managing organisations.
