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Staff profile

Overview

Dr Nelly Bencomo

Associate Professor

Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science+44 (0) 191 33 42713
Associate Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study
Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing 

Biography

Looking for a PhD ?

(Slowly, I will be moving this website to https://nellybencomo.webspace.durham.ac.uk/ but, not yet!)

Potential new PhD students: having good PhD students can be super rewarding! I am always interested in receiving new good PhD Students. Contact me to talk about your research proposals, academic visits or scholarships.PhD Funding Opportunities: 

---> There are always funding opportunities offered (in Durham and other sources. <--- It is about being ready for when they appear). Therefore, a good step is to apply for a PhD as soon as possible. Contact me if you want to get the instructions to start your application.

If you bring your own research funding, we can chat (contact me if interested)

Research and Biography

Publications: Google Scholar citations  DBLP  Scopus  Social Media: Twitter @nellybencomo

I exploit the interdisciplinary aspects of software engineering, comprising both technical and human concerns while developing techniques for intelligent, autonomous and highly distributed systems.

I am an Associate Professor in the CS Department at Durham University. Earlier, I was a Senior Lecturer (equiv. Associate Professor) in the Computer Science Department at Aston University. From September 2020 I am the PI of the EPSRC Twenty20Insight research project. In 2019 I was granted the Leverhulme Fellowship "QuantUn: quantification of uncertainty using Bayesian surprises." Before, I was a Marie Curie Fellow at INRIA Paris - Roquencourt. The Marie Curie project is called Requirements-aware Systems (nickname: Requirements@run.time). Before, that I was a Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University (UK) where I also got my PhD.

Research Projects:

Current and Recent Projects

-  Durham's Strategic Research Fund (SRF) JusTN0W: Just Transitions to a Net Zero World (2024 -  Dec 2028) Principal Investigators (PIs): Professor Petra Minnerop (PI, Law), Professor Laura Marsiliani (PI, Bussiness School), Dr John Bothwell (PI, Bioenergy), Dr Nelly Bencomo (PI, Computer Science Department) ~£5 Million

- EPSRC Research Twenty20Insight (EPSRC link) (2020-2024) Principal Investigator (PI) Nelly Bencomo, £892,384 (total Value to Aston and then Durham £587 K) website Twenty20Insight

- EPSRC IAA: weDecide: Clinical Tool for Shared Decision-Making for Treatment of Menopause Symptoms, Principal Investigator (PI) Nelly Bencomo, £120 K (Feb 2024 - Jan 2025)

- UArctic network Project DART (Digital Arctic Twin) (start end of 2024 ) is a networking project in the context of JusTN0W. Our DART (Digital ARktisk Tvilling, Digital Arctic Twin) project will develop digital twins to study transitions to net zero under the aegis of the UArctic ‘Climate Justice’ thematic network. Partners: Oslo University (Norway), Durham University (UK), IT University and Aarhus University (Denmark), Glasgow Caledonian (UK),  University of Washington, USA.

- ALTS: AI-enabled Legal Technologies and their Consequences on Society (PI N Bencomo, Co-PIs W Lucy and M Hardey)(2023-24). Partially funded by the Institute of Advance Studies and the EPSRC.

– iDecide: Quantifying Uncertainty in Models using Artificial Intelligence for Personalised and Shared Decision-Making in Digital Health. (Jun- Aug 2023)

– ERiMA: Envisioning Risk Models for Assessment of AI-based applications (Sept-Nov 2023)

- Research Fellowship by Leverhulme Trust “QuantUn: Quantification of Uncertainty using Bayesian Surprises” (2019-2020)

– ReqModAI Requirements Models for Artificial Intelligence: Framework and Casestudy (Jul- Nov 2022)

- Marie Curie Action Intra-European Fellowship requirements@runtime: Requirements-aware Systems, €222.547, Inria, France, (2011-2013)

- 2 VC international PhD scholarships, Aston University, (2018)

- Faculty PhD scholarship, Aston University (2015)

- Visiting Scholar Funding 2015, Aston University

- M@TURE Models @ run Time for self-adaptive pervasive systems: enabling User-in-the-loop, REquirement-awareness, and interoperability in ad hoc settings, 24-month, Inria-funded international collaboration grant (Brazil-France). We also won a second version (2014-2016) 

Awards / Rewards / Recognitions:

- Best Paper Award International Conference on Engineering Digital Twins 2024 (EDTconf'24)  “Declarative Lifecycle Management in Digital Twins”, E Kamburjan, N Bencomo, S Lizeth Tapia Tarifa, E Broch-Johnsen 

- Best Software Artefact at  Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS’24),  "Latency-aware RDMSim: Enabling the Investigation of Latency in Self-Adaptation for the Case of Remote Data Mirroring" by S Götz, H Samin, N Bencomo

- I am on the list of Women for Innovation in Health Science in the North of England by the Northern Health Science Alliance (NHSA) and @N8research (just 3 Women from CS are part of the list), 8th March 2024 https://www.thenhsa.co.uk/2024/03/northinnovationwomen-2024-list-revealed/

- 10-year Most Influential Paper Award 2019, "RELAX: Incorporating Uncertainty into the Specification of Self-Adaptive Systems", by Jon Whittle, Pete Sawyer, Nelly Bencomo, Betty H.C. Cheng, Jean-Michel Bruel, Proceedings of 17th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE09), pp. 7988, September 2009, Atlanta, Georgia.

- 10-year Most Influential Paper Award 2019, "A Goal-Based Modeling Approach to Develop Requirements of an Adaptive System with Environmental Uncertainty" by Betty H.C. Cheng, Pete Sawyer, Nelly Bencomo, Jon Whittle, in the Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MoDELS 2009), pp. 468483, Denver, Colorado, 2009.

- Best Paper Award REFSQ 2013: "Supporting Decision-making for Self-adaptive Systems: From Goal Models to Dynamic Decision Networks" by N. Bencomo, A. Belaggoun

Books

Models@run.time: Foundations, Applications, and Roadmaps - Programming and Software Engineering (2014) Editors: Nelly Bencomo (editor), Robert B. France (editor), Betty H.C. Cheng (editor), Uwe Aßmann (editor)

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-08915-7 

https://www.amazon.com/Models-run-time-Foundations-Applications-Roadmaps/dp/3319089145

Miscellaneous

In other words, what is really important!

In Durham, I am planning to enjoy Durham County, Scotland and the Lake District, among other beautiful places in the North and East of the UK :)

During my time in Birmingham, I was not working. I liked walking on the hills (the Malvern Hills, Snowdonia), running, dancing, taking pictures, hanging around with my family and friends, and Talisker, my dog. I enjoy running by the canal in Birmingham. I wish I could have more time for these activities.

During my time in Paris, I used to go to Museums & Cafes :) if my daughter did not decide something else. I also did some exercise with my dog, running near Inria and by the river Seine in Paris. Happy days!

I love eating good food, and I am MAD about sushi. I LOVE chocolate; BTW, dark and bitter chocolate; if it is not at least 75% Cocoa, that is not chocolate :). If chocolate is from Venezuela, that is even better!

 

Previous PhD Students

- Owen Reynold, since January 2019, Submitted 2023 (co-supervision with Antonio Garcia)

- Huma Samin Graduated 2022. Now a Lecturer in Exeter University

- Juan Marcelo Parra, Graduated 2022. Now a Senior Researcher at Bristol University

- Luis Hernan Garcia Paucar, PhD, Graduated in March 2020. Now a Senior Teaching Fellow at Aston University

- Amel Belaggoun, Master Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and TELECOM SudParis and Inria, France, Graduated 2013

Research interests

  • AI/ML
  • Software Engineering
  • Software Engineering for Autonomous and Self-adaptive Systems
  • Software Engineering for AI/ML Systems
  • autonomous systems
  • decision making under uncertainty
  • runtime models

Esteem Indicators

  • 2022: PC Co-Chair MODELS 2022:
  • 2022: 2022: Member of the IEEE TCSE (22-24): I was elected again to be part of the IEEE TCSE Executive Committee

  • 2020: Member of the IEEE TCSE: Member of the IEEE TCSE (Technical Council on Software Engineering) members-at-large (TCSE Elected Officers 2020- )
  • 2019: Associate Editor of IEEE TSE: Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) (2019-Present)
  • 2019: Member of Editor Board of SoSym: Member of Editor Board of Software and Systems Modeling (2019- )
  • 2018: Member of Editor Board of JSERD:
    Member of Editor Board of Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development JSERD (2018 - )
  • 2017: The Role of models@run.time in Autonomic Systems: Keynote (ICAC 2017): Autonomic systems manage their own behaviour in accordance with high-level goals. This paper presents a brief outline of challenges related to Autonomic Computing due to uncertainty in the operational environments, and the role that models@run.time play in meeting them. We argue that the existing progress in Autonomic Computing can be further exploited with the support of runtime models. We briefly discuss our ideas related to the need to understand the extent to which the high-level goals of the autonomic system are being satisfied to support decision-making based on runtime evidence and, the need to support self-explanation. https://vamos2020.dbse.iti.cs.ovgu.de/program.html

Publications

Conference Paper

Journal Article

Report

Supervision students

Dr Amal Alshehri

Postgraduate Student

Gavin Vaughan

Postgraduate Student

Marc North

Postgraduate Student