David Cutting

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lecturer at Queen's University Belfast

It is essential to provide computing students with hands-on exposure to modern techniques and technologies such as cloud computing in an authentic and engaging fashion, but universities can be slow to respond to fast-moving technologies. Co-design is a process in which other stakeholders, such as members of the student body and industrial partners...

As software evolves, the source code tends to become more complex and therefore harder to maintain, something that is exacerbated by poor development practice, where a disorderly development process is more likely to yield a disorderly and more complex result. Disorder in source code evolution may be quantified by using source code change entropy,...

"It is essential to provide computing students with hands-on exposure to modern techniques and technologies such as cloud computing. To this end we engaged with industry to co-design a curriculum for modern cloud computing to meet the industry needs for graduates. Vendors do provide access to cloud computing but their academic programs often leave...

Aim: Research has shown that families' participation in a cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention programme could boost early adoption of healthy lifestyle behaviours in families. Behaviour-based, eHealth interventions are a potential means of achieving this. This study aimed to explore expectations of families-parents and children-at risk of CVD...

Context More than 78 countries have developed COVID contact-tracing apps to limit the spread of coronavirus. However, many experts and scientists cast doubt on the effectiveness of those apps. For each app, a large number of reviews have been entered by end-users in app stores. Objective Our goal is to gain insights into the user reviews of those...

The Ki-67 protein is associated with cell proliferation and is a clinical marker for breast cancer tumour aggressiveness. The percentage of immunopositive cells present in a histological image stained for Ki-67 expression informs the proliferation index quantifying tumour aggressiveness. This calculation is frequently carried out through manual ass...

More than 64 countries and regions have, so far, developed COVID-19 contact-tracing apps to limit the spread of coronavirus. However, many experts and scientists cast doubt on the effectiveness of those apps. For each app, between a few hundred to a few thousand reviews have been entered by end-users in app stores. In this paper, we mine insights f...

Objectives Our goal was to gain insights into the user reviews of the three COVID-19 contact-tracing mobile apps, developed for the different regions of the UK: ‘NHS COVID-19’ for England and Wales, ‘StopCOVID NI’ for Northern Ireland and ‘Protect Scotland’ for Scotland. Our two research questions are (1) what are the users’ experience and satisfac...

Objectives The aim of the study was to investigate the spatial and temporal relationships between the prevalence of COVID-19 symptoms in the community-level and area-level social deprivation. Design Spatial mapping, generalised linear models, using time as a factor and spatial-lag models were used to explore the relationship between self-reported...

This paper describes the development of the ‘Brain-Fit’ app, a digital secondary prevention intervention designed for use in the early phase after transient ischaemic attack (TIA) or minor stroke. The aim of the study was to explore perceptions on usability and relevance of the app in order to maximise user engagement and sustainability. Using the...

Context: More than 50 countries have developed COVID contact-tracing apps to limit the spread of coronavirus. However, many experts and scientists cast doubt on the effectiveness of those apps. For each app, a large number of reviews have been entered by end-users in app stores. Objective: Our goal is to gain insights into the user reviews of those...

This paper explores the potential for new workbased apprenticeship degrees to encourage more women into computing degrees and the IT sector. In the UK, women are currently under-represented on computing courses. Meanwhile the IT industry requires more computing graduates, in general, and specifically more highly skilled women to create appropriate...

The challenges of effective teaching in mass education environments are well documented. The cohorts of large size generally means that identification of struggling students is usually only at a point when meaningful interventions are too late. This paper reports on the use of novel technologies to provide insights into areas of learner behaviour i...

Computer software is, by its very nature highly complex and invisible yet subject to a near-continual pressure to change. Over time the development process has become more mature and less risky. This is in large part due to the concept of software traceability; the ability to relate software components back to their initial requirements and between...

D-UEA-ST (pronounced due east) is a plugin architecture that enables easy development of scientific software prototypes aimed at supporting software developers. Prototypes are developed as D-UEA-ST plugins that make use of knowledge representation models, reasoners and optimisers, and visualisation APIs. D-UEA-ST also defines a clear workflow that...

When a web client needs to periodically refresh data held on the server there are generally two approaches. Interval polling (" short polling "), which is most commonly used, where the client repeatedly reconnects to the server for updates, and a technique in which the HTTP connection is kept open (" long polling "). Although work exists investigat...

Various tools exist to reverse engineer software source code and generate design information, such as UML projections. Each has specific strengths and weaknesses, however, no standardised benchmark exists that can be used to evaluate and compare their performance and effectiveness in a systematic manner. To facilitate such comparison in this paper...

Various tools exist to reverse engineer software source code and generate design information, such as UML projections. Each has specific strengths and weaknesses, however no stan-dardised benchmark exists that can be used to evaluate and compare their performance and effectiveness in a systematic manner. To facilitate such comparison we introduce t...