School of Computing and Digital Media staff profiles content store_hidden Karim Ouazzane Our staff

Professor Karim Ouazzane received a BEng degree from the University of Oran, Algeria, an MSc from Liverpool University, UK and a PhD from Salford University, UK. A polymath, he has a portfolio of multi-disciplinary interconnected achievements including physics, mathematics, electronics, signal processing, engineering, computing, artificial intelligence, cyber security and biometrics, and financial services, all under the aegis of enterprise and strategy. Professor Ouazzane is currently a Senior Professor of Computing and Knowledge Exchange at London Metropolitan University, and also is the founder of London Met's Cyber Security Research Centre. He's also the universities KTP (Knowledge Transfer Partnership) director in the period 2013-2018.

His research interests include artificial intelligence (AI) applications, cyber security and big data, computer vision, bimodal speech recognition for wireless devices, hard and soft computing methods, computational flow dynamics (CFD) and flow metering, optical instrumentation and lasers. He has carried out research in collaboration with industry through a number of research schemes such as The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), KTP, EU Tempus, LDA (London Development Agency), KC (Knowledge Connect) and more. He has also published over 150 papers, three chapters in books, is the author of three patents (see an image of the Laser Based Intelligent Machine below) and has successfully supervised 24 PhDs.       

Prof Ouazzane has worked for Imperial College London as a senior research fellow for four years and acted as a consultant for companies and charities such as Endress-Hauser, ICI, PowerGen, Schlumberger, Lloyds Banking Group, Barclay cards, Callsign, LifelineIT, Ask outlets and Disability Essex. He has generated income of £1.3 Millions in the period 2010-2020. Also, he has been running 20 KTP  programmes since 1996.

He is a peer reviewer for a large number of conferences and journals (e.g. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing journal, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning system). He's also examined over 31 PhD thesis internationally and was a keynote speaker in 4 different events including the Eighth International Conference on Business Intelligence and Technology in 2018.

Prof. Ouazzane is a Fellow of British Computer Society, Fellow of Higher Education Academy, Senior Member of IEEE and a Senior Member of American Society of Mechanical Engineering. He was appointed as non-executive Director at LifelineIT Ltd. (2014-2017) overseeing the development of the company Security policy framework. He is currently the Chair of the European Cyber Security Council at Brussels; overseeing discussion about the increasing range of vulnerabilities created by the introduction of new technologies and business model like BYOD. He also works on the EU Network and Information Security Directive and the reforms to EU data protection legislation. He has been a member of Parliament Internet Communication Forum at Westminster debating strategic topics such as ‘Impact of AI on the UK economy’, 5G network technology in the UK and cyber threat on the UK grid energy.

Prof. Ouazzane has played a major part in bringing businesses and policy makers into the Cyber Security Research Centre at London Met University which has significantly contributed in enhancing the unit’s infrastructure, embedding the culture of innovation, and developing world-leading research and translating its key aspects into areas of societal importance. He has organised a number of workshops and events inviting external speakers from businesses and government bodies to enhance knowledge exchange within the school and university. Additonally, he organises the Summer School Enterprise and Networking Day (SEND) inviting businesses, academics and students; organized seminars such as Open Banking delivered by a speaker from the Whitehall-2018 and co-organized workshops such as ‘Hadoop big data platform’ delivered by Hortonworks from the US-2017.

He's also co-organized a number of other events including the launch of IEEE blockchain in the UK and Ireland hosted by London Met in February 2020, which was the first one of its kind in the UK, the inaugural of Lloyds Innovation Community exhibition (20th November 2018) at the Royal Horticultural Society – the Lindley Hall in Westminster with the participation of students and academics from the Cyber Security Research Centre. 

In the last ten years, Prof. Ouazzane’s focus has been mainly in the area of cyber security and machine learning. He conducted projects for many organisations such as the Ministry of Defence (MoD), Lloyds and Callsign. The projects were carried out in various areas, including intrusion detection and prevention system, data analytics, malware detection using AI, machine learning and law enforcement. He is currently leading two projects at Lloyds Banking Group with IBM as a vendor; the first project aims to build a big data platform that is shared with departments such as digital fraud, cyber security and marketing; the second project is in the area of threat Intelligence modelling. 

Some of his work has been nominated for awards such as Bafta and Radar, and he was commended by the Queen in recognition of the novel Intelligent Keyboard, a project he carried out as part of KTP programme in partnership with Essex Disability.

Karim's main strength is working closely with students and industrial partners for knowledge exchange. He is the co-founder of the WoW (World of Work) Agency which enables students and graduates to work on commercial projects, maximising their chance for full employment which is in line with the university strategic plan. He was also instrumental in contributing to the incubator development as a member of the London Enterprise Office (TLEO) in 2005.

Teaching and course leadership

Professor Ouazzane has led a range of computing modules at postgraduate level, with a variety of subjects including:

• Artificial intelligence
• E-business
• Advanced database; big data
• Information system developments
• MSc curricular projects (module leader in the School of Computing)
• CPD Oracle workforce course leader

Current projects

• Designing security policy framework for Lifeline IT
• Building big data platform for Lloyds (fraud detection, customer insight, marketing, cyber security)
• Developing a forecasting solution which will help identify trends and facilitate optimum stock management for ASK Outlets
• Building a knowledge management system to support the transformation of the traditional reactive production business into a modern productive and profitable knowledge intensive and proactive business, including the company’s culture (Coborn Ltd)
• Developing a bespoke software application that will facilitate the large-scale use of electric vehicles in a private hire operation (E-connect cars)
• Mandatory Access Control (MAC) framework for Microsoft Windows; designing a policy adapter that can accept a set of policy documents and adequately assign labels to subjects and objects from a centralised location

Current PhD projects

• Cross Channel Fraud Detection Framework in Financial Services using Recurrent Neural Networks
• Classifier based incremental reconstruction of human object trajectory in live video streams
• New framework development for improving features engineering for fraud detection of financial transactions using machine learning methods
• Heuristic constraint-based planning for mass evacuation
• Technological model to enhance modification of dynamic & scattered business rules in Workflow Systems
• Structural and dynamic patterns of individual and group behaviour in constrained worlds
• Feature Extraction, Shape Recognition, and Object Identification of Dynamic Objects in Video Surveillance
• An Evaluation of the Analysis and Visualization options for Network Traffic Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIP)
• Pro-active Self-defence Cyber Intelligence Sharing (PSDCIS)
• Building an ontology for cyber threat intelligence in digital banking
• Secure authentication using audio signal processing techniques
• Enhanced online Personal data security and GDPR
• Social Media and Entropy Estimation for Various Human Languages
• A personalised planning agent framework for the disabled
• Development of reinforcement learning methods to computer game dynamics
• Semantic querying and search in distributed and heterogeneous ontologies

Potential PhD topics

• further development of Adaptive Language Modelling Intermediate Layer (ALMIL) framework
• combining heuristic planning and event-driven learning methods for evacuation and spatial navigation
• Hybrid information security policy framework
• data manipulation of discrete trajectories for the purpose of 3D visualisation

C.onwubiko, K.Ouazzane (2020), ‘SOTER: A Playbook for Cyber Security Incident Management’, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. ISSN: 1558-0040; DOI:10.1109/TEM.2020.2979832.

Riaz, Muhammad, Virdee, Bal Singh, Shukla, Pancham, Ouazzane, Karim, Onadim, Muhittin and Salekzamankhani, Shahram (2019) Quasi-elliptic dual-band planar BPF with high-selectivity and high inter-band isolation for 5G communications systems. Microwave and Optical Technology Letters. pp. 1-7. ISSN 0895-2477

C.Onwubikol and K.Ouazzane "Challenges towards building an effective cyber security operations centre" International Journal on cyber situation awareness, Volume 4 N1, 2019. DOI: 10.22619/IJCSA.2019.100124

C. Onwubiko and K. Ouazzane (2019) 'Cyber Onboarding is Broken' IEEE Cyber Security 2019 conference Oxford June 3-4th 2019. pp. 124-136; ISBN-13 978-0-9932338-4-5.

Y. Patel, K. Ouazzane, V. Vassilev, I. Faruqi and G.L Walker (2019) 'Keystroke Dynamics using Auto Encoders', IEEE Cyber Security 2019 conference Oxford June 3-4th 2019. pp. 233-240; ISBN-13 978-0-9932338-4-5.

Bal S. Virdee, Muhammad Riaz, Muhittin Onadim, Panchamkumar Shukla and Karim Ouazzane (2019) ‘Wideband Microstrip Quasi-Elliptic Function Bandpass Filter with High Out of Band Rejection’ International Journal, Microwave and Optical Technologies; Volume 61, Issue 8, August 2019, Pages 1993-1998.

Y. Patel, K. Ouazzane, V. Vassilev and J. Li (2019) 'Remote Banking Fraud Detection Framework using Sequence Learners', International journal of Internet Banking and Commerce, April 2019 Vol. 24, no. 1, ISSN: 1204-5357.

K. Ezekiel, V. Vassilev, K. Ouazzane and Y. Patel (2018) ‘Adaptive Business Rules Framework for Workflow Management’, Business Process Management Journal © Emerald Publishing Limited 1463-7154 DOI 10.1108/BPMJ-08-2017-0219.

Amirhosseini, M., Kazemian, H., Ouazzane, K. and Chandler, C. (2018) 'Natural Language Processing approach to NLP Meta model automation', IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, Rio de Janeiro 8-13 July, pp.186-193. ISBN: 978-1-5090-6014-6.

P. Gasiorowski, V. Vassilev and Karim Ouazzane (2018) ‘3D simulation based analysis of individual and group dynamic behaviour in Video surveillance’, Visual 2018, Third International Conference on Applications and Systems of visual paradigms, pp 1-6, Venice 2018 ISBN: 978-1-61208-647-7.

M. Afzal, K. Ouazzane and V. Vassilev, (2018) ‘K-Nearest Neighbours based classifiers for moving object trajectories reconstructions’ Visual 2018, Third International Conference on Applications and Systems of Visual Paradigms, pp 7-12, Venice 2018, ISBN: 978-1-61208-647-7.

K. Ezekial, V. Vassilev and K. Ouazzane (2018) ‘Two-level Architecture for Rule-based Business Process Management’, BUSTECH 2018: The Eighth International Conference on Business Intelligence and Technology,   pp37-42, ISBN: 978-1-61208-614-9.

S. Habte, K. Ouazzane, P. Patel and S. Patel (2017) ‘Generic data warehousing for consumer electronics retail industry’ International journal of computer and information engineering, Volume 11 N7, ISSN: 1000-7397.

Pawel Gasiorowski, Vassil Vassilev and Karim Ouazzane (2016), ‘Simulation-based Visual Analysis of Individual and Group Dynamic Behaviour’, Int’l Conference, Computer vision and Pattern recognition (ACM), ISBN: 1-60132-442-1 pp.303.

Karim Ouazzane, Sajid Afzal, Vassil Vassilev, Kaushik C. Patel, Althaff Irfan (2015), 'E-business Framework Using an Enhanced Web 2.0 Component Model', International Journal of E-business Development, Volume 5 Issue 1, pp 1-11.

Chi Li, Yong Xue, Quanhua Liu, Karim Ouazzane, and Jiahua Zhang, (2015), 'Using SeaWiFS Measurements to Evaluate Radiometric Stability of Pseudo-invariant Calibration Sites'. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters. (DOI: 10.1109/LGRS.2014.2329138).

Khurram Majeed, Karim Ouazzane, Yanguo Jing and Dusica Novakovic and ‘Behavior Based Anomaly Detection for Smartphones using Machine Learning Algorithm’ International conference on Computer Science and Information Systems (ICSIS’2014) Oct. 17-18, 2014 Dubai (UAE), pp 67-73.

Ouazzane, M. Aigbodi, D. Mitchell, V. Vassilev, J.Li (2013) ‘An Innovative Custom Cyber Security Solution for Protecting Enterprises and Corporates’ Assets’

Ouazzane, M. Aigbodi and J. Li (2013) ‘Real life pilot solution with artificial intelligence for disabled computer users’ The third conference on digital information processing and communication (ICDIPC2013) ISBN: 978-0-9853483-3-5, pp 310. Internatio​nal Journal of E-Entrepre​neurship &Innovatio​n, 4(3), 53-64, July-September 2013,  DOI: 10.4018/ijeei.2013070104.

M. Malcangi, K. Ouazzane, P.Patel  (2013) ‘Audio visual fuzzy fusion for robust speech recognition’ Proceedings of International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, Dallas, Texas, USA, August 4-9, 2013, pp 284.

M. Malcangi, M. Riva, K. Ouazzane (2013) ‘Hard and soft computing methods for capturing and processing phonocardiogram’ International Journal of Circuits, Systems and Signal Processing, Issue 1, Volume 7, pp 34.

J. Li, K. Ouazzane, H. Kazemian, M. S. Afzal (2013) 'Neural Network Approaches for Noisy Modelling', IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning system, Volume 24 page 1-12. DOI: 10:1109/TNNLS.2013.2263557.

H. Kazemian and K. Ouazzane (2012) ‘Neuro-fuzzy approach to video transmission over Zigbee; Neurocomputing journal, DOI: 10.1016/j.neucom.2012.10.006.

Ouazzane, J. Li, H. Kazemian, Y. Jing and R. Boyd (2012) ‘An artificial intelligence language modelling framework’ International Journal of expert systems with applications; DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2011.11.121.

J. Li, K. Ouazzane, H. Kazemian, Y. Jing, R. Boyd (2011) ‘A neural network based solution for automatic typing errors correction’, Journal of Neural Computing Applications; DOI:  10.1007/s00521-010-0492-3.

C. Althaff-Irfan, K. Ouazzane, S. Nomura and F. Yoshimi (2010) ‘An access control for e-learning management systems’, IEEJ journal (ID C10 -174).

C. Althaff-Irfan, S. Nomura, K. Ouazzane, Y. Takashi (2009) ‘Faced-based Access Control and Invigilation Tool For E-Learning Systems’ International conference on biometrics and Kasei Engineering, pp. 40, IEEE computer society, Cieszyn, Poland.

C. Althaff-Irfan, S. Nomura, K. Ouazzane and F. Yoshimi (2009) ‘Real Time Invigilation and Chronic Authentication Tool for E-learning Management System’ International Journal of 3-Dimensional Images, Vol. 23 N2, July 2009.

• Software Engineering Project for User-Centric Testing of an Authentication Service for Voice Controlled Devices (Research contract with InnovateUK -2019). The project aims at testing the technology for beacon-based authentication with an emphasis on elderly and disabled people. Dr. Vassil Vassilev, Prof. Karim Ouazzane, Matthew Lane and Anthony Phipps
• Development of a forecasting solution which will help identify trends and facilitate optimum stock management, KTP project in partnership with Ask Outlets Lld., InnovateUK: KTP009769, (2017) -   Prof. Karim Ouazzane and Dr. Preeti Patel
• To build a knowledge management system to support the transformation of the traditional reactive production business into a modern productive and profitable knowledge intensive and proactive business, including the company’s culture, KTP project in partnership with Coborn Lld., InnovateUK: KTP007972, (2017) – Prof. Karim Ouazzane and Dr. Qicheng Yu
• Threat intelligence modelling, (research contract with Lloyds Banking Group – 2019); main participants: Prof Karim Ouazzane, Dr Vassil Vassilev, Dr Jun Li and Viktor Sowinski-Mydlarz
• Sound-based intelligent authentication system (research contract with Lloyds – 2018); main participants: Dr Vassil Vassilev, Prof Karim Ouazzane and Artur Naciscionis
• Malware detection using deep learning methods (research contract with Callsign – 2018); main participants: Prof Karim Ouazzane, Yogesh Patel, Thekla Polykarpou and Dr Mona Ibrahim
• Beacon-based Authentication (research contract, InnovateUK  2018); main participants: Dr Vassil Vassilev, Prof Karim Ouazzane, Tony Phipps, Matthew Lane and Dr Pancham Shukla
• Cross-channel Banking Security Policy Framework (research contract with Lloyds – 2016); main participants: Prof Karim Ouazzane, Dr Vassil Vassilev and Aadya Shukla
• Big data POC, (Lloyds Banking group / IBM research contract – 2016); main participants: Prof Karim Ouazzane, Dr Vassil Vassilev and Dr Khurram Majeed
• Next generation fraud analytics on big data platform (commercial project, Lloyds Banking Group – 2015); main participants: Prof Karim Ouazzane , Dr Vassil Vassilev, Tam Holmes, Dr Rupert Parsons and Dr Khurram Majeed
• Two factor authentication for Remote Desktop Protocol using Yubikey (commercial project, LifelineIT – 2015); main participants: Prof Karim Ouazzane and Markson Aigbodi
• Behavioural biometrics for customer authentication in online banking, (Lloyds Banking Group research contract – 2014); main participants: Prof Karim Ouazzane, Dr Vassil Vassilev and Dr Khurram Majeed
• London Met and Mobilise awarded Knowledge Transfer Partnership, (2023)

Room: T10-03, Tower Building

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7133 4306

Email: k.ouazzane@londonmet.ac.uk

Availability: Tuesdays 12pm - 1pm in Room T10-03