THE BIG INTERVIEW
University is at the forefront of a global digital revolution
As pro vice-chancellor for research and enterprise, Professor David Mba heads up De Montfort University Leicester’s commercial and research activity. With the university taking a regional lead in the fields of artificial intelligence and cyber security, it puts him in a good position to observe the latest technology trends. He discusses these with Dan Robinson and explains how the university is helping businesses move into the digital age.
“If I was a student now, I’d definitely be doing a course in AI.”
Professor David Mba becomes animated as he reels
off a list of examples in which artificial intelligence (AI) is helping to improve efficiency and performance in businesses, local authorities and healthcare settings. De Montfort University (DMU), where he is one of the
most senior academics, has worked with supermarket chain Waitrose to apply machine learning – a subset of AI in which algorithms find patterns in huge amounts of data – to price products reaching the end of their shelf life more effectively, while a colleague has used prediction models to help East Midlands Airport in managing passenger flows through its terminal. There’s even talk of a Minority Report-style council
project to anticipate violence and vandalism via CCTV cameras equipped with body language-reading technology, while sensors could also optimise waste
collectors’ routes by monitoring when bins will likely be filled. “AI is fundamentally based on classification and
learning from history by using algorithms to find patterns,” says David, who has published more than 250 journal and conference papers during his career. “If you have data on purchases or machinery, and
want to find out information that isn’t necessarily intuitive, you can use AI to spot those behaviours. “We’re now beginning to look at how it can be used
to modify business decisions, and that’s where the research is being applied for really exciting purposes.” The application he is perhaps most enthusiastic
about, though, is in digital health – which is ripe for huge disruption as the proportion of GP appointments conducted remotely jumped from 15% to 85% between February and May 2020, according to NHS England. Last year, DMU teamed up with Leicester’s largest
primary care provider Willows Health, with a caseload of 44,000 patients across nine surgeries, to apply
Responding to a complex cyber-attack in real time can be a monumental challenge, but such scenarios will be commonplace inside the new Security Operations Centre (SOC) at DMU. The university has partnered with Deloitte to offer
a bespoke incident response training programme, which is structured around the innovative incident response tools and techniques developed as part of its research. It will enable businesses to develop and maintain
their threat identification and incident response skills in realistic environments that can be tailored to specific needs as part of DMU’s digital twinning capability. The facility is near completion and will be able to
accommodate up to 24 people in The Gateway building post-Covid.
28 business network February 2021
Businesses can access the support via three routes
– organisations can hire the facilities to conduct their own exercises, have exclusive access to a training package developed and run by DMU for up to a week, or join an open-to-all exercise for firms looking to upskill smaller numbers of their team. David says: “We are moving away from the idea
that cyber is just about computers – we know there is a hugely important human element too so upskilling operators is crucial. “We’ll take a company’s entire technical team
through a mock cyber-attack and show them how to respond to it. “It will help them to understand cyber threats and
the algorithms, as well as training people to respond to the attacks through gamified scenarios.”
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