Bill Buchanan

Bill Buchanan is a Professor in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University, and a Fellow of the BCS and the IET.

He currently leads the Centre for Distributed Computing, Networks, and Security and The Cyber Academy, and works in the areas of security, Cloud Security, Web-based infrastructures, e-Crime, cryptography, triage, intrusion detection systems, digital forensics, mobile computing, agent-based systems, and security risk.

Bill has one of the most extensive academic sites in the World, and is involved in many areas of novel research and teaching in computing. He has published over 27 academic books, and over 200 academic research papers, along with several awards for excellence in knowledge transfer, and for teaching, such as winning at the I ♥ my Tutor Awards (Student voted), Edinburgh Napier University, 2011, 2014 and 2015, and has supervised many award winning student projects.

He was named as one of the Top 100 people for Technology in Scotland for 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. In Feb 2016, he was also included in the FutureScot "Top 50 Scottish Tech People Who Are Changing The World".

He has been an external examiner at many universities, and is currently an external examiner at Royal Holloway (University of London). Also with this he has been involved in many PhD completions and many external PhD examinations (including recent ones in Newcastle, Liverpool, and Dublin). He is part of many editorial boards for conferences and reviews in a wide range of journals.

Bill regularly appears on TV and radio related to computer, and has given evidence to the Justice Committee at the Scottish Parliament, along with being part of the BBC Scottish Independence Team of Experts (specialty: Cyber Security). This includes appearances on Newsnight Scotland, Good Morning Scotland, and Radio 5 Newsdrive, and was named as one of the Top 100 people for Technology in Scotland for the last two years. Along with this he gives many keynote/endnote talks at conferences, including at NISC 2014 on Heartbleed.

He has led many innovations in teaching related to Cyber Security, including with the DFET Cloud Training project and leads the Scottish EU Centre of Excellence for Law Enforcement Training within the 2Center Network, along with being part of the setup of SIPR (Scottish Institute for Police Research). He currently leads on a range of training projects with Police Scotland and a range of industry partners.

Presently he is working with a range of industrial/domain partners, including with the Scottish Police, the finance sector, and many large and small companies. He has a long track record in commercialisation activities, including being a co-founder of Zonefox and safi.re, which of which progressed from PhD work to a university spin-out, though the Scottish Enterprise funded Proof-of-Concept scheme. Over the past three years he has received direct funding of over £2million related to computer security, which has had a major impact on an international basis. Both spin-outs build on patented technology, including one which has patenting protection over three territories around the World.

His current work includes a €500,000 project which aims to build an advanced training infrastructure for Cyber Security and Digital Forensics. Previous projects have included collaboration of TSB Grants with Microsoft plc on a £2million project which aimed to improve the care of the elderly using Trusted Cloud-based services, and with Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on a next generation Health Care platform. This also matches up with other funded projects with the FSA and the Scottish Police.

He has created many innovations in teaching related to computer security, including being sole author on http://networksims.com (Cisco Simulators), and http://asecuritysite.com (one of the most extensive computer security site for academic material in the World) and in creating DFET (an innovative Cloud training infrastructure for security and digital forensics training). His lectures are online at http://youtube.com/billatnapier, with over 500 on-line lectures, and has over 1,500 subscribers, with more than 1million minutes watched. He regularly appears on the BBC radio and TV talking about Cybercrime (see http://youtube.com/billatnapier).

Bill is also a member of the ICT in Education Excellence Group, which has been setup by the Scottish Government in 2012, and innovated the Christmas Cyber lecture for Schools in Scotland (attended by over 3,000 pupils in Dec 2013). He has done extensive work with Schools in promoting ICT, especially focused on computer security, and created the Bright Red Digital Zone, which now includes most of the subjects with the N5 (CfE) subjects in Scotland (brightredbooks.net), and which has extensive coverage of areas such as computer security.