Zoheir Sabeur

Bournemouth University | BU · Computing and Informatics

In an era where urbanisation is not just an occurrence but a deliberate pursuit, Smart Cities stand at the forefront of the technological revolution-testaments to human innovation and resolve. The cornerstone of Smart Cities is the guarantee of security and safety, both in the tangible streets we walk and the intangible digital alleys we navigate....

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) concerns the serious decline of human lung functions. These have emerged as one of the most concerning health conditions over the last two decades, after cancer around the world. The early diagnosis of COPD, particularly of lung function degradation, together with monitoring the condition by physicians,...

The advent of deep learning has brought in disruptive techniques with unprecedented accuracy rates in so many fields and scenarios. Tasks such as the detection of regions of interest and semantic features out of images and video sequences are quite effectively tackled because of the availability of publicly available and adequately annotated datase...

The S4AllCities project has progressed rapidly during the last twelve months since it began in 2020 for the development of three distinct digital twins that collectively augment intelligence concerning cyber and physical security monitoring in smart urban spaces. These respectively specialize on; a) Distributed Edge Computing IoT (DEC-IoT); b) Mali...

In reality, atrocities such as kidnapping and murder are far more horrific than they appear on the surface. If they are not bound by law, they endanger the precious lives. Ongoing litigation in the courts demands that those who have committed crimes be held account- able for the disruption that they have caused to the orderly advancement of organiz...

The advancement of cyber-physical behaviour detection and understanding in context of urban environment safety and security has been developed in the S4AllCities project (S4AllCities, 2020). Specifically, various concepts of fundamental artificial intelligence and reasoning have been successfully developed and will subsequently be tested in situ in...

The ever-growing adoption of big data technologies, smart sensing, data science and artificial intelligence is enabling the development of new intelligent urban spaces with real-time monitoring and advanced cyber-physical situational awareness capabilities. The advancement of cyber-physical situational awareness is experimented for achieving safer...

The ever-growing adoption of big data technologies, smart sensing, data science and artificial intelligence is enabling the development of new intelligent urban spaces with real-time monitoring and advanced cyber-physical situational awareness capabilities. The advancement of cyber-physical situational awareness is experimented for achieving safer...

Managing navigational safety is a key responsibility of coastal states. Predicting and measuring these risks has a high complexity due to their infrequent occurrence, multitude of causes, and large study areas. As a result, maritime risk models are generally limited in scale to small regions, generalized across diverse environments, or rely on the...

Within the last thirty years, the range and complexity of methodologies proposed to assess maritime risk have increased significantly. Techniques such as expert judgement, incident analysis, geometric models, domain analysis and Bayesian Networks amongst many others have become dominant within both the literature and industry. On top of this, advan...

A spatial model of maritime risk would be useful to navigational authorities in accident prevention and waterway management. Mapping maritime incident rates, the frequency of accidents per vessel movement within an area could provide such an evidence base. However, aggregating spatial data is subject to challenges associated with the Modifiable Are...

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) contracted the University of Southampton to conduct research concerning the use of statistical and data science methods for the automatic detection of outliers and anomalies in Census data. This project considered both Census 2011, which was based mostly on traditional survey methods, and Census 2021, whic...

Each year, accidents involving ships result in significant loss of life, environmental pollution and economic losses. The promotion of navigation safety through risk reduction requires methods to assess the spatial distribution of the relative likelihood of occurrence. Yet, such methods necessitate the integration of large volumes of heterogenous d...

The effective management of the safety of navigation by coastguards is challenged by the complexity in quantifying and describing the relative risk of accidents occurrence. The discovery of patterns in observation data is reliant on the collection and analysis of significant volumes of relevant heterogenous spatial datasets. Conventional approaches...

The ever-growing adoption of big data technologies, smart sensing, data science and artificial intelligence is enabling the development of new intelligent urban spaces with real-time monitoring and advanced cyber-physical situational awareness capabilities. In the S4AllCities international research project, the advancement of cyber-physical situati...

Within the last thirty years, the range and complexity of methodologies proposed to assess maritime risk have increased significantly. Techniques such as expert judgement, incident analysis, geometric models, domain analysis and Bayesian Networks amongst many others have become dominant within both the literature and industry. On top of this, advan...

Extreme weather events can result in loss of life, environmental pollution and major damage to vessels caught in their path. Many methods to characterise this risk have been proposed, however, they typically utilise deterministic thresholds of wind and wave limits which might not accurately reflect risk. To address this limitation, we investigate t...

Crowd behaviour understanding in computer science is a research discipline which has grown rapidly in recent years. Specifically, we are currently able to generate large and high-resolution observation data through crowd sensing in varieties of spatial environments. This has also given us the advantage to adopt computer vision methods for detecting...

Crowd behaviour analysis using vision has been subject to many different approaches. Multi-purpose crowd descriptors are one of the more recent approaches. These descriptors provide an opportunity to compare and categorise various types of crowds as well as classify their respective behaviours. Nevertheless, the automated calculation of descriptors...

The establishment of incident rates, the number of accidents per unit measurement, can be used to characterise and compare navigational safety between areas. Whilst there are a multitude of factors which influence these rates, such an approach assumes some relationship between traffic volume and incidents. This paper characterises the incident rate...

Datacubes are increasingly being implemented to efficiently manage big data workflows; 20 particularly those for processing geospatial data. However, there is confusion in both the 21 definition of the term “datacube” and the choices of how they are implemented. This, and 22 the conventional approach to managing spatial data (i.e. in map projected...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a tremendous potential to benefit European citizens, economy and society, and already demonstrated its potential to generate value in various applications and domains.From an industrial point of view, AI means algorithm-based and data-driven computer systems that enable machines and people with digitalcapabilities s...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a tremendous potential to benefit European citizens, economy and society, and already demonstrated its potential to generate value in various applications and domains. From an industrial point of view, AI means algorithm-based and data-driven computer systems that enable machines and people with digital capabilities...

Scientific drilling of the volcanic ocean crust recovers cores and undertakes downhole wireline logging. However, because core recovery rates are typically low (<30%), interpreting the wireline data is essential to gain a complete understanding of the stratigraphy. Ocean Drilling Program Hole 1256D samples 1500 m of in situ upper oceanic crust and...

The effects of climate change have been observed for decades now that we can access to multiple methods of Earth Observation (EO) using in situ, air-borne and space-borne sensing. The generated EO Big Data from these sources is of paramount importance for scientists to understand the effects of climate change and the specific engendered natural (an...

Guest lecture at IET for presenting Transforming Transport with Big Data.

Earth Observation (EO) can be defined as the gathering of information about Earth’s physical, chemical and biological systems using remote sensing technologies such as satellites and aerial sensors, supplemented (Science Communication Unit, 2013) by ground-based observations and other surveying techniques. EO is used to monitor and assess the statu...

Climate change has been observed using multiple methods of Earth Observation (EO) including in situ, air-borne and space-borne sensing methods. These use multi-modal observation platforms, with various geospatial coverages, spatio-temporal resolutions and accuracies. The resulting EO Big Data from heterogeneous sources constitute valuable sources f...

Our paper presented our latest development of a Big Data open platform and web processing services of Big Data Analytics to predict emerging marine species behaviour trends and habitats due to climate change. The Big data used is acquired from big data connectors to both Copernicus and Argos Satellites EO data. The paper was selected as the best pa...

4th Project newsletter on EO4wildlife research activities

Hydrodynamic wave loading at coastal structures is a complex phenomenon to quantify. The chaotic nature of the fluid flow field as waves break against such structures has presented many challenges to Scientists and Engineers for the design of coastal defences. The provision of installations such as breakwaters to resist wave loading and protect coa...

Hydrodynamic wave loading at coastal structures is a complex phenomenon to quantify. The chaotic nature of the fluid flow field as waves break against such structures has presented many challenges to Scientists and Engineers for the design of coastal defences. The provision of installations such as breakwaters to resist wave loading and protect coa...

This paper describes the current ongoing research activities concerning the intelli-gent management and processing of Earth Observation (EO) big data together with the implementation of data connectors, advanced data analytics and Knowledge Base services to a Big Data platform in the EO4Wildlife project (www.eo4wildlife.eu). These components suppor...

A proof-of-concept system for large scale surveillance, detection and alerts in-formation management (SDAIM) is presented in this paper. Various aspects of building the SDAIM software system for large scale critical infrastructure moni-toring and decision support are described. The work is currently developped in the large collaborative ZONeSEC pro...

In this paper, we introduce an Integrated Decision-Support Tool (IDST v2.0) which was developed as part of the INFRARISK project (https://www.infrarisk-fp7.eu/). The IDST is an online tool which demonstrates the implementation of a risk-based stress testing methodology for analyzing the potential impact of natural hazards on transport infrastructur...

This paper describes the current ongoing research activities concerning the intelligent management and processing of Earth Observation (EO) big data together with the implementation of data connectors, advanced data analytics and Knowledge Base services to a Big Data platform in the EO4Wildlife project (www.eo4wildlife.eu). These components support...

A proof-of-concept system for large scale surveillance, detection and alerts information management (SDAIM) is presented in this paper. Various aspects of building the SDAIM software system for large scale critical infrastructure monitoring and decision support are described. The work is currently developped in the large collaborative ZONeSEC proje...

In this paper, we introduce an Integrated Decision-Support Tool (IDST v2.0) which was developed as part of the INFRARISK project (https://www.infrarisk-fp7.eu/). The IDST is an online tool which demonstrates the implementation of a risk-based stress testing methodology for analyzing the potential impact of natural hazards on transport infrastructur...

The management of the security and safety of crowd in major events is a challenging task. In particular, as the crowd volume and densities increase, the early detection of anomalies (unusual or unexpected behaviour) in crowds becomes more difficult to achieve. The deployment of staff to achieve the above task manually will basically never scale. Th...

Hydrodynamic wave loading at coastal structures is a complex phenomenon to experiment, simulate and quantify. The nature of the fluid flow field as waves break against such structures has presented many challenges to scientists and engineers for the design of sustainable coastal defences. The provision of installations such as breakwaters to resist...

This presentation was achieved at the INFRARISK Dissemination Conference in Madrid, Spain, hosted by DRAGADOS who are one among the biggest organisations in civil infrastructure construction in the world. The interest of DRAGADOS, among partner in the flagship project INFRARISK (www.infrarisk.eu), is for the development of an overarching methodolog...

The INFRARISK IDST software is described in this presentation during the final project conference, held at the DRAGADOS premises in Madrid, Spain, on September 29th 2016. The presentation is detailed in youtube at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK2li3t8NU4&t=29s#

The management of risks to which urban critical infrastructure may be exposed from rare and extreme natural hazards is challenged by the full requirements of data and information processing, analytics and modules integration using open web-enabled system technologies. In this project, we have successfully achieved the full integration of data and i...

Hydrodynamic wave loading at structures is a complex phenomenon to quantify. The design of structures to resist wave loading has been historically and predominantly achieved through empirical and experimental observations. This is due to the challenging understanding and quantification of wave impact energy transfer processes with air entrainment a...

As part of the series of data science seminars which are conducted at the University of Southampton, Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), Dr Zoheir Sabeur, Science Director at IT innovation Centre, ECS, provides a generic framework for handling big data and the various levels under which researchers need to address big data prior t...

This is the first edition newsletter of the EO4wildlife project (www.eo4wildlife.eu), June 2016, where I highlighted our approach on implementing big data technologies together with open data mining, fusion and thematic analytics services. The project started in January 2016 and will run for 36months. The aim is to understand the emerging behaviour...

This document presents an overview of the software design of the DSSP. The software design is based on user input as defined by the use cases which are found in the Appendix B. In addition, the tools used in the construction of the portal are presented, together with the specific licenses required accordingly, in the Appendix A.

This document provides a user guide for the DESURBS DSSP. It covers aspects of how to operate the major components incorporated into the DSSP, such as the ISR, the security incidents database, the UK crime browser application and also the STREMA materials database, as well as how to look at examples of data from the tracking tool (fear sensometer)...

In his contribution, Zoheir Sabeur called for the need to develop systems able to track, forecast and control uncertainties regarding biodiversity loss, the results of which should be made accessible to a range of end-users. Although difficult to achieve, he emphasised the need to expand on the current status of data access and dissemination. In S...

An OGC compliant open information processing service based tool for the prediction of microbial contamination in bathing zones is briefly summarised in the BMT Focus magazine, first issue of 2009. The approach under which the tool is based uses environmental observation data to run a data driven module which is machine learnt from historic data inc...

Chair of Climate and Environment Session of this Conference

This paper investigates the usability of Future Internet technologies (aka "Generic Enablers of the Future Internet") in the context of environmental applications. The paper incorporates the best aspects of the state-of-the-art in environmental informatics with geospatial solutions and scalable processing capabilities of Internet-based tools. It sp...

Crowd physical motion and behaviour detection during evacuation from confined spaces using computer vision is the main focus of research in the eVACUATE project. Its early foundations and development perspectives are discussed in this paper. Specifically, the main target in our development is to achieve good rates of correct detection and classific...

e achievements of the European Union targets regarding energy and socio-economic sustainability are highly dependent on the way risks and vulnerabilities of European operating infrastructure networks and critical assets are minimised against natural extreme events. e INFRARISK project is developing reliable stress tests for European critical infr...

This paper provides benchmarks for the identification of best performance classifiers for the detection of operational states in industrial drilling operations. Multiple scenarios for the detection of the operational states are tested on a rig with various drilling wells. Drilling data are extremely challenging due to their non-linear and stochasti...

Crowd evacuation management at large venues such as airports, stadiums, cruise ships or metro stations requires the deployment and access to a Common Operational Picture (COP) of the venue, with real-time intelligent contextual interpretation of crowd behaviour. Large CCTV and sensor network feeds all provide important but heterogeneous observation...

This paper describes a service oriented architecture for mobile and web applications and the enablement of participatory observations of the environment. The architecture hosts generic microbial risk forecast models in bathing zones, which are trained by heterogeneous input data. Open observation data sources, specializing in water quality indicato...

The genesis of this work began during the DESURBS project. The scope of the project was to help build a collaborative decision-support system portal where spatial planning professionals could learn about designing much more secure and safer spaces in urban areas. The portal achieved this via integrating a number of tools under a common, simple to u...

The intelligent management of big data for the surveillance and security of widezones is of paramount importance for achieving situation awareness on the processes under which the widezones normally operate but also in situations where illicit intrusions can alter the integrity of such operations. In the upcoming ZoneSEC FP7 project which will run...

The purpose of Deliverable 2.3 is to report on the development of an Integrated Security and Resilience (ISR) framework.

This presentation was achieved at the European Parliament, Brussels. The audience was with member of the European Parliament, research organisations, Energy industries executives, Regulatory Agencies and Insurance industries executives. The aim was to discuss the implication of the new Directive 2013/30/EU and the proposal of strategic research the...

This paper motivates the enablement of the Future Internet to become a highly functional service platform supporting the design and the operation of software applications in the Environmental Information Space. It reports on the experience made by the European research project ENVIROFI as one of the usage area projects within the Future Internet Pu...

This paper describes the major research and development activities which have been achieved so far since the launch of the DESURBS project (www.desurbs.eu) in 2011. The project focuses on the development of a Decision-Support System Portal (DSSP) which integrates information, data and software modules representing city assets, hazards and processin...

The TRIDEC project (Collaborative, Complex, and Critical Decision Processes in Evolving Crises) focuses on real-time intelligent information management in the Earth management domain and its long-term applications. It is funded under the European Union's seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The TRIDEC software framework is applied in two application...

The automated detection of tsunamigenic signals at oceanic observation stations is highly desirable for the advancement of current tsunami early warning systems. These are supported with matching methods using large numbers of tsunami wave propagation modeling scenarios. New techniques using real-time scanning of hydrodynamic signals around a netwo...

The rapid increase in environmental observations which are conducted by SMEs, communities and volunteers using affordable in situ sensors at various scales, together with the more established observatories set up by environmental and space agencies using airborne and space-borne sensing technologies is generating serious amounts of BIG data at ever...

Critical events in industrial drilling should be overcome by engineers while they maintain safety and achieve their targeted operational drilling plans. Geophysical drilling requires maximum awareness of critical situations such as “Kicks”, “Fluid loss” and “Stuck pipe”. These may compromise safety and potentially halt operations with the need of s...

Leveraging the BIG Data Potential in Crisis Management: - To enable and adopt best possible scientific, social and business added values - To extract knowledge and values which increase our context and situation awareness during engineering operations - To increase our real-time knowledge during crisis management operations. • To optimise our respo...

The rapid increase in environmental observations which are conducted by Small to Medium Enterprise communities and volunteers using affordable in situ sensors at various scales, in addition to the more established observatories set up by environmental and space agencies using airborne and space-borne sensing technologies is generating serious amoun...

Current early tsunami warning can be issued upon the detection of a seismic event which may occur at a given location offshore. This also provides an opportunity to predict the tsunami wave propagation and run-ups at potentially affected coastal zones by selecting the best matching seismic event from a database of pre-computed tsunami scenarios. Ne...

This paper describes the architecture and deployment of a software platform for information fusion, knowledge hosting and critical decision support. The work has been carried out under the TRIDEC project www.tridec-online.eu, focusing on geo-information fusion and collaborative decision making. Four technologies underpin the architecture: 1 A messa...

We describe our knowledge-based service architecture for multi-risk environmental decision-support, capable of handling geo-distributed heterogeneous real-time data sources. Data sources include tide gauges, buoys, seismic sensors, satellites, earthquake alerts, Web 2.0 feeds to crowd source 'unconventional' measurements, and simulations of Tsunami...

This paper motivates the enablement of the Future Internet to become a highly functional service platform supporting the design and the operation of software applications in the Environmental Information Space. It reports on the experience made by the European research project ENVIROFI as one of the usage area projects within the Future Internet Pu...

This document outlines the ENVIROFI data and meta-information specifications. The approach we have adopted is to first analyse the domain specific data models, vocabularies, ontologies and metadata found in the ENVIROFI pilots. This analysis is supported in the appendix with examples of the data sources described. We then review the available metad...

Professor Rahim Tafazolli, Director of the Centre for Communication Systems Research, University of Surrey Co-investigators: Professor Hamid Aghvami, Professor Rachel Cooper, Professor William Dutton and Dr Colin Upstill

Societal View on Smart Cities: Citizen-Centric Social Innovation Platforms Enabled by the Internet

The intelligent management of large volumes of environmental monitoring data for early tsunami warning requires the deployment of robust and scalable service oriented infrastructure that is supported by an agile knowledge-base for critical decision-support In the TRIDEC project (TRIDEC 2010-2013), a sensor observation service bus of the TRIDEC syst...

The critical detection and classification of tsunamigenic and other anomalous signals at various offshore hydrodyanmic observation stations is of paramount importance for the advancement of current early tsunami warning systems. Nevertheless, the challenges occur with the timely assessment of various hydrodynamic observations which exhibit diverse...

The rapid development of advanced smart communication tools with good quality and resolution video cameras, audio and GPS devices in the last few years shall lead to profound impacts on the way future environmental observations are conducted and accessed by communities. The resulting large scale interconnections of these "Future Internet Things" fo...

The rapid development of advanced smart communication tools with good quality and resolution video cameras, audio and GPS devices in the last few years shall lead to profound impacts on the way future environmental observations are conducted and accessed by communities. The resulting large scale interconnections of these "Future Internet Things" fo...

The phenomenal advances in information and communication technologies over the last decade have led to offering unprecedented connectivity with real potentials for “Smart living” between large segments of human populations around the world. In particular, Voluntary Groups(VGs) and individuals with interest in monitoring the state of their local env...

This paper describes our work to date on knowledge-based service architecture implementations for multi-risk environmental decision-support. The work described spans two research projects, SANY and TRIDEC, and covers application domains where very large, high report frequency real-time information sources must be processed in challenging timescales...

4) Austrian Institute of Technology, SIM, Vienna, Austria (denis.havlik@ait.ac.at), (5) Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation, Karlsruhe, Germany (thomas.uslaender@iosb.fraunhofer.de), (6) SINTEF -Foundation for Scientific and Industrial Research, Norwegian Institute of Technology, Oslo, Norway (Arne.J.Berre@...

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet...