Senior Lecturer in Computer Science
I have strong research interests, knowledge, and expertise in AI, data science, cybersecurity, and pedagogical research.
I have served as a technical committee member for a number of national and international conferences. I serve as a regular reviewer for many major international journals (e.g. IEEE, Springer, and ACM).
I actively teach many computer science modules, ranging from undergraduate to postgraduate level, to on-campus and online students, as well as leading off-campus modules.
I have acted as programme leader for MSc Cybersecurity, MSc Applied Cybersecurity, and MSc National Diploma. I'm currently, in collaboration with colleagues, leading all our online MSc courses.
I have supervised undergraduate and postgraduate student projects and supervised PhD students to completion.
I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Teaching and supervision
- Various programming languages (Java, C, Python, Haskel and Prolog)
- Databases
- Legal, social, ethical, and professional issues in computer science
- Research
- Software development/engineering
- Web technologies
- Group project
- Networks
- Computer Systems
- Enterprise software development
- Advanced cyber security
- Supervise undergraduate, postgraduate, PhD projects
Research interests for potential research students
I am particularly interested in applied computer science projects related to my areas of research interest (natural language processing). I'm very keen to supervise projects related to natural language processing, data science, big data, and cyberspace problems (mainly cyberbullying, hate speech, and fake news detection in social media texts).
I have supervised students at various levels of study (undergraduate, postgraduate, and PhD).
Research
My area of expertise is in AI. Specifically, I have extensive expertise, knowledge, and skills in natural language processing (where I have extensively published and reviewed peer-reviewed articles). In addition, I have strong knowlege and skills in data science (where I apply machine learning algorithms to Big Data), and cybersecurity (dealing with cybercrime, cyberbullying, hate speech, and anomaly detection).
Besides my primary and secondary research activities, I have a strong interest in pedagogical research. I have investigated the impact of teaching/learning technologies on students learning and I investigate the application of technologies in education at all levels of education.
I have served as a technical committee member for a number of national and international conferences and journals. I'm a regular reviewer, a member of the reviewer college for EPSRC, and Future Leaders Fellow (part of UKRI). I have served as a faculty representative at the University research ethics committee.
I'm a member of the Association for Computational Linguistics and a fellow of the AdvanceHE (previously known as Higher Education Academy).
Publications
Article
Rusyaidi, Muhammad, Jaf, Sardar and Ibrahim, Zunaidi (2022) Detecting Distributed Denial of Service in Network Traffic with Deep Learning. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 13 (1). pp. 34-41. ISSN 2156-5570
Rusyaidi, Muhammad, Jaf, Sardar and Zunaidi, Ibrahim (2022) Detecting DDoS in Network Traffic with Deep Learning. The International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA), 13 (1). (In Press)
Caldarini, Guendalina, Jaf, Sardar and McGarry, Kenneth (2022) A Literature Survey of Recent Advances in Chatbots. Information. ISSN 2078-2489
Rusyaidi, Muhammad, Jaf, Sardar and Zunaidi, Ibrahim (2021) Machine Learning Methods in Detecting Distributed Denial of Service: A Systematic Literature Review.
Jaf, Sardar and Calder, Calum (2019) Deep Learning for Natural Language Parsing. IEEE Access, 7 (1). pp. 131363-131373. ISSN 2169-3536
Book Section
Elabd, Mazeb and Jaf, Sardar (2024) Simple Attention-Based Mechanism for Multimodal Emotion Classification. In: 2024 29th International Conference on Automation and Computing (ICAC). IEEE, pp. 1-6. ISBN 979-8-3503-6088-2
Caldarini, Guendalina and Jaf, Sardar (2023) Recent Advances in Chatbot Algorithms, Techniques, and Technologies: DESIGNING CHATBOTS. In: Trends, Applications, and Challenges of Chatbot Technology. IGI Global, pp. 245-273. ISBN 9781668462348
Gajbhiye, Amit, Jaf, Sardar, Al-Moubayed, Noura and Bradley, Steven (2018) CAM: A Combined Attention Model for Natural Language Inference. In: Proceedings 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data. IEEE, Seattle, USA, pp. 1009-1019. ISBN 9781538650349
Gajbhiye, Amit, Jaf, Sardar, Al-Moubayed, Noura, McGough, Stephen and Bradley, Steven (2018) An Exploration of Dropout with RNNs for Natural Language Inference. In: Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning – ICANN 2018. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, III (11141). Springer, pp. 156-167. ISBN 9783030014247
Conference or Workshop Item
Elabd, Mazeb and Jaf, Sardar (2024) Simple Attention-Based Mechanism for Multimodal Emotion Classification. In: The 29th International Conference on Automation and Computing (ICAC 2024), 28-30 Aug 2024, University of Sunderland. (In Press)
Algharibeh, Moath, Husari, Gaith and Jaf, Sardar (2021) A Data-Driven Password Strength Meter for Cybersecurity Assessment and Enhancement. In: The 7th IEEE International Conference on Dependability in Sensor, Cloud, and Big Data Systems and Applications, 20-22 Dec 2021, Haikou. (Unpublished)
Mohammadi, Mahnaz, Jaf, Sardar, McGough, Andrew Stephen, Breckon, Toby P., Matthews, Peter, Theodoropoulos, Georgios and Obara, Boguslaw (2019) On the Use of Neural Text Generation for the Task of Optical Character Recognition. In: 16th ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications AICCSA 2019, 3-7 Nov. 2019, Abu Dhabi - UAE.
Jaf, Sardar and Ramsay, Allan (2015) The Application of Constraint Rules to Data-driven Parsing. In: the 2015 International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, Bulgaria.
Show/Exhibition
Hutchinson, James, Jaf, Sardar and Lewis, Nick (2020) Cybercage. Breeze Creatives, 25-19 Oct 2020, Newcastle, UK.
- Natural language processing
- Applied machine learning
- Data Science
- Cybersecurity
- Big Data
- Artificial Intelligence
- Pedagogy