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 Davis, William and Hung, Dang Viet and Trestian, Ramona and Karamanoglu, Mehmet and Barn, Balbir and Prasad, Raja and Venkataraman, Hrishikesh and Nguyen, Huan X. (2021) A digital twin framework for predictive maintenance in industry 4.0. In: HPCS 2020, 25-29 Jan 2021, Barcelona, Spain (Online Virtual Conference). (Accepted/In press)
Barat, Souvik and Barn, Balbir and Clark, Tony and Kulkarni, Vinay (2020) OrgML - a domain specific language for organisational decision-making. In: 13th IFIP Working Conference (PoEM 2020), 25-27 Nov 2020, Riga, Latvia.
Primiero, Giuseppe and Barn, Balbir and Barn, Ravinder (2020) Value-sensitive co-design for resilient information systems. Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric , 63 (1). pp. 141-164. ISSN 0860-150X
Clark, Tony and Barn, Balbir and Kulkarni, Vinay and Barat, Souvik (2020) Language support for multi agent reinforcement learning. In: 13th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC), 27-29 Feb 2020, PDPM Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing, Jabalpur, India.
Barat, Souvik and Kulkarni, Vinay and Clark, Tony and Barn, Balbir (2020) An actor based simulation driven digital twin for analyzing complex business systems. In: Winter Simulation Conference 2019 - Simulation for Risk Management, 08-11 Dec 2019, Gaylord National Resort & Conference Center, National Harbor, Maryland.
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.
