Stephen W. Neville | PhD, PEng (BC), Professor, Software Engineer

Welcome to the academic website of Stephen W. Neville, PhD, PEng (BC).

I am a Professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Victoria.

Additionally, I co-manage Entrepreneurship@UVic, a highly successful program developed as a collaboration between the University, the Alacrity Foundation, and Wesley Clover International that has to date co-founded 7 successful and growing high-tech ventures which combined employ nearly 200 people. and have a market value of over $100MM. I also serve on the Scientific and Technical Advisory Boards of these companies.

I am also the Director of Software Engineering, a joint program of the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well I am a member of the Leadership Board of the Faculty of Engineering’s Matrix Applied Data Science Institute.

I am also a Co-PI with the Networks of Centres of Excellence of Canada (NCE) funded funding agency cyber-security focused Knowledge Mobilization effort the Smart Cybersecurity Network (SERENE-RISC) hosted by the Université de Montréal.

Previously, I have been the founding Director of the Faculty of Engineering’s provincially supported Centre for Advanced Security, Privacy, and Information Research (ASPIRe Centre), as well as being one of 15 founding academic members of NSERC’s coast-to-coast cyber-security focused Strategic Network – the Internetworked Systems Security Network (ISSNet), which involved 20+ industry/government partners including the Government of the Province of British Columbia and ran from 2007-2014.

My primary research focuses on industry- and government-applied research in the areas of:

High-tech entrepreneurship.
Enterprise-scale (and larger-scale) cyber-security and cyber-privacy issues, such as arise with critical infrastructure systems, and involving nation-state adversaries.
Software engineering and issues associated with large-scale software system scalability and QoS/QoE predictability,
Applied data analysis and data science, including statistical and machine learning methods , typical as applied to industry relevant problems.
Cloud computing, dynamical resource management, and QoS predictability.
Control and dynamical systems theory concerns arising in larger-scale software systems, Cyber-Phyical Systems (CPS), and the Internet-of-Things (IoT)

The common theme underlying these research areas is:

“Building the tools and understandings necessary to become able to quantitatively engineer the larger-scale software, IT, and data analysis systems upon which modern societies are coming to depend upon.”

My research areas build on and make extensive use of the theoretical disciplines of:

Data analysis, artificial intelligence, and machine learning,
Statistical signal processing,
Stochastic processes,
Statistical pattern recognition,
Dynamical systems theory (and ergodic theory),
Game theory,
Cyber-security and Privacy, and
Software Engineering.

Much of the research I undertake involves direct industry collaborations which must provide real industry value and end-of-day industry usable results.

My research typically involves the use of substantial computing resources available either through my own InSPiRe lab, which contains a closed-facility 60 machine research cluster, or via HPC resources provided via West Grid and Compute Canada.

Students, postdoctoral researcher, visiting scholarly, etc, interesting in working with my Information Security and Privacy Research laboratory should follow the Research Positions link.