School of Computing and Digital Media staff profiles content store_hidden Vassil Vassilev Our staff

Prof. Vassilev graduated with an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University in Sofia and obtained a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He was active during the nineties in both academia and industry in his home country of Bulgaria. He founded the Department of Informatics at the New Bulgarian University and led several EU funded projects dedicated to the transformation of Higher Education in Bulgaria. After a couple of years in the offshore software development business, Dr. Vassilev joined the academic community in the UK with positions at the University of Northumbria, the Open University, and London Met.

Currently Prof. Vassilev is the course leader of the Artificial Intelligence MSc at the School of Computing and Digital Media and leads several innovation projects funded by Lloyds and Innovate UK. His research interests are in hybrid intelligence and semantic technologies and their applications to cyber security. 

Prof. Vassilev is teaching Formal Specification and Software Implementation and Distributed and Internet Technologies modules to students on Computer Science BSc, and Artifical Intelligence and Semantic Technologies modules to students on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) MSc course. Additionally, he has an interest in Hybrid Intelligence and System Integration. He is also supervising several PhD students doing research in AI and it's application to cyber securty.

• Mitu N., Vassilev V. and Tabany M., Low Cost, Easy-to-Use, IoT and Cloud-Based Real-Time Environment Monitoring System, Int. J. of Internet of Things and Web Services, Vol. 6, 202, pp. 30-44. ISSN: 2367-9115

• Vassilev, V., Ilieva, S., Sowinski-Mydlarz, V. et al., "AI-based Hybrid Data Platforms”. In: Curry, E., Scerri, S. and Tuikka, T. (eds.), Data Spaces:

• Donchev D., Vassilev V., Tonchev D. (2021) Impact of False Positives and False Negatives on Security Risks in Transactions Under Threat. In: Fischer-Hübner S., Lambrinoudakis C., Kotsis G., Tjoa A.M., Khalil I. (eds) Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Business. TrustBus 2021. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12927.

• V. Sowinsky-Mydlarz, J. Li, K. Ouazzane and V. Vassilev (2021). Threat Intelligence Using Machine Learning Packet Dissection, In: Proc. 20th International Conference on Security & Management (SAM'21), 26-29 July 2021, Las Vegas, USA. Springer (2021, in print).

• V. Vassilev, D. Donchev and D. Tonchev (2021). Risk Assessment in Transactions under Threat as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process, In: Proc. Int. Conf. Optimization in Artificial Intelligence and Decision Sciences (ODS2021), 14-17 Sep, 2021, Rome, Italy. Springer (2021).

• A. Phipps, K. Ouazzane and V. Vassilev (2020), Enhancing Cyber Security Using Audio Techniques:  A Public Key Infrastucture for Sound, In: The 19th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (IEEE TrustCom 2020), Guangzhou, China, 29 Dec 2020 (in print).

• K. Bataityte, V. Vassilev and O. Gill (2020), Ontological Foundations of Modelling Security Policies for Logical Analysis, In: I. Maglogiannis, L. Iliadis, E. Pimenidis (eds.), IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, Vol. 583 (Springer), pp. 368-380; ISBN 978-3-030-49160-4.      

• V. Vassilev, V. Sowinski-Mydlarz, P. Gasiorowski, K. Ouazzane and A. Phipps (2020), Intelligence Graphs for Threat Intelligence and Security Policy Validation of Cyber Systems, In: P. Bansal, M. Tushir, V. Balas and R. Srivastava (eds.), Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, Vo. 1164 (Springer); ISSN 978-981-15-4991-5.
• V. Vassilev, A. Phipps, M. Lane, K. Mohamed and A. Naciscionis (2020), "Two-factor authentication for voice assistance in digital banking using public cloud services", In: Proc. 10th International Conference on Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering (Confluence), Noida, India (IEEE), pp. 404-409, doi: 10.1109/Confluence47617.2020.9058332.
• S. Aslam, V. Vassilev and K. Ouazzane (2019), Parallel Querying of Distributed Ontologies with Shared Vocabulary, Int. J. of Computer and Information Engineering, 13 (5). ISSN 2010-3921 (2019).
• Y. Patel, K Ouazzane, V. Vassilev et. al. (2019), Keystroke Dynamics using Auto Encoders, in: Proc. IEEE Cyber Science Conf. 2019, Oxford, UK.
• Patel, Yogesh, Ouazzane, Karim, Vassilev, Vassil and Li, Jun (2019) Remote banking fraud detection framework using sequence learners. Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce, 24 (1). pp. 1-31. ISSN 1204-5357 
• K. Ezekiel, V. Vassilev and K. Ouazzane (2019), Adaptive Business Rules Framework for Workflow Management, J. of Business Process Management, BPMJ-08-2017-0219.
• M. Afzal, K. Ouazzane and V. Vassilev, K-Nearest Neighbours Based Classifiers for Moving Object Trajectories Reconstruction (2018), In Proc. Int. Conf. on Applications and Systems of Visual Paradigms VISUAL2018, Venice, Italy, pp. 7-12; ISBN: 9781612086477.
• P. Gasiorowski, V. Vassilev and K. Ouazzane (2018), 3D Simulation-based Analysis of Individual and Group Dynamic Behaviour in Video Surveillance, In Proc. Int. Conf. on Applications and Systems of Visual Paradigms VISUAL2017, Venice, Italy, pp. 1-6; ISBN: 9781612086477.
• K. Ezekiel, V. Vassilev and K. Ouazzane (2017), Two-level Architecture for Rule-based Business Process Management, in: Proc. Int. Conf. on Business Intelligence and Technology BUSTECH 2018, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 37-42; ISBN 9781612086149.
• M. Afzal, K. Ouazzane and V. Vassilev (2016). Incremental reconstruction of moving object trajectory, In: Proc. Int. Conf. on Visualization VISUAL 2016, Barcelona, Spain; ISBN: 978-1-61208-520-3.
• P. Gasiorowski, V. Vassilev and K. Ouazzane (2016). Simulation-based Visual Analysis of Individual and Group Dynamic Behavior. In: Proc. Int. Conf. on Image Processing, Computer Vision, & Pattern Recognition IPCV'16, CSREA Press, pp. 303-309; ISBN 1601324421

During the last ten years, Prof. Vassilev has been successful in obtaining a number of external grants from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Lloyds Banking Group, and the EU. Thanks to his work on Knowledge Transfer Partnership projects In 2013 he received an award for contribution to the goals of the national programme of Knowledge Transfer between academia and industry.

During the last five years, Prof. Vassilev has been involved in different forms of collaboration with academic and industrial partners from both the UK and overseas – joint structural and research projects, innovation projects, consultancy, and knowledge exchange. Together with his international collaborations, he has partners in more than 15 European countries. He is especially keen to work with academic institutions in India where he established links with five different universities. He is also an overseas member of an academic consortium led by Chalmers University in Sweden for developing of a Centre of Excellence in Big Data in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Prof. Vassilev is a regular presenter at the Royal Institution Masterclasses, over the last few years he has given four invited talks at international conferences and summer schools. He recently presented at two events organised by the British Council in India.