Skip to content

Toggle service links

You are here

  1. Home
  2. Dr Jane Bromley

Dr Jane Bromley

Jane Bromley

Profile summary

  • Central Academic Staff
  • Lecturer in Cyber Security
  • Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics
  • School of Computing & Communications
  • jane.m.bromley

Professional biography

My CV is here. 

I grew up and went to school in High Wycombe, a leafy, furniture making town in the Chilterns.  This was followed by a BSc in Physics and PhD in Biophysics (1987) at Imperial College (IC). I then held a joint postdoc funded by the Wellcome Trust between IC and the Royal London Hospital during which I constructed a visual psychophysics lab in a small room off the Neurology Ward and also occasionally visited the museum to see the skeleton of the "Elephant Man". 

My research at this time was on Visual Dysfunction and my most interesting subject was a person with Visual Agnosia  who you can see in this YouTube video.  As a result of this study I became interested in modelling visual dysfunction and with a travel grant from the Royal Society I went to  Bell Labs (1990) to learn about artificial Neural Networks.  Here I became involved in the work of the Adaptive Systems Research Department on recognizing characters - handwritten or machine printed, on paper or a tablet.  Initially this was applied to automating mail sorting for the US post office, but later the technology was (and is) used by banks around the world.  This was one of the first demonstrations that neural networks could be applied to "real-world" applications.  I also developed some expertise in signature verification using Time Delay Neural Networks.  When AT&T broke up (for the 2nd time) I then worked in Project Management (I always gravitated to organising things) on a variety of telecoms projects. 

When my son started school I returned to the UK and taught in schools for a few years, but I restarted my research career by joining the Open University as a Visiting Research Fellow in 2005.   Initially I worked on Robotics Activities for children, editing the English Language version of Roberta learning material, running Robotics Clubs and entering competitions - one team even won the UK RoboCup Junior and competed in the world finals in Suzhou, China (2008).  More recently I have worked as a researcher on EU funded projects.  Firstly with the ASSYST, a Coordination Action for Complex Systems, and now on agINFRA. 

As a result of my involvement in a number of EU projects I'm now a dab hand at the financial tracking and reporting required to run a successful EU project.  I continue to organise things such as the group coffee club and the Complexity and Design group - here's a picture of my door plate which appeared one morning... 

 

Picture of office door

 

Research interests

Complexity and Design (at the OU)
A highly interdisciplinary area involving fundamental research into the methods of complex systems science supported by research into the design of many domains of application.  Our current rsearch project is with the Police Consortium set up by Prof Jean Hartley.  We also have a UNESCO CS-DS UniTwin, Complex Systems Digital Campus.  See our related MOOC here: 

Previous projects are:

  • Topology driven methods in complex systems, TOPDRIM
  • Global systems Dynamics and Policy, GSDP.
  • Étoile, EU FET Coordination Action "Enhanced Technologies for Open Intelligent Learning Environments".
  • ASSYST a €900,000 funded Coordination Action 2009-2012  "Action for the Science of complex SYstems for Socially intelligent icT" where we were the lead partner

Information extraction and data mining (at the OU)

Copy of latest paper on this work is here; submitted to special track at 8th Metadata and Semantic Reserach Conference

Project: agINFRA: a data infrastructure to support agricultural scientific communities - promoting data sharing and development of trust in agricultural sciences. EU FP7, Capacities – Research Infrastructures. The total budget is €4 million, with the OU share being £222,745.

  • information extraction from the legacy biodiversity literature
  • how to find agriculturally relevant educational material automatically (Semantic Web, SPARQL queries

eg typing "select distinct ?t where {
?olu a <http://data.open.ac.uk/openlearn/ontology/OpenLearnUnit>.    
?olu <http://purl.org/dc/terms/subject> ?t
}" here will give you a list of topics covered by OpenLearn - the OU's free learning material - selecting any of these topics will then list the OpenLearn webpages

Convolutional Neural Networks (at Bell Labs, NJ)
Initially for modelling the visual system, but I never got very far on this, instead becoming engrossed in projects that applied variants of the famous LeNet architecture  created by Yann LeCun to a broad variety of problems in image recognition and signal processing

  • handwritten and machine printed address readers (for the US post office)
  • faxed form reader (for AT&T business forms)
  • use of a special purpose chip (called ANNA) that implemented a handwriting recogniser in silicon (with Bernard Boser and Eduard Sackinger)
  • automatic teller machine that can read checks and bills deposited by bank customers
  • signature verification with a time delay neural network

The last 2 were collaborative projects with NCR.

My unique contribution, apart from training software that ran like the Disney version of the Sorcerer's Apprentice and couldn't be stopped, was introducing training on “rubbish” to improve rejection performance.

Human Vision (at Imperial College and the Royal London Hospital with Keith Ruddock and Chris Kennard)
The application of psychophysics (the investigation of the relations between physical stimuli and sensation) to the understanding of the normal mechanisms of visual processing, but also to the study of visual abnormalities in order to offer practical assistance to clinical patients.  This was experimental work using computer monitors, Maxwellian View Optical Systems , essentially an optical bench with mirrors, lenses, filters and light sources (picture) and the wonderful W. D. Wright Trichromatic Colorimeter built in the 1920s.

  • the role of blue-sensitive cones on spatial processing
  • parallel and sequential visual processing (particularly in dyslexia and amblyopia)
  • visual perseveration
  • visual agnosia
  • hemianopia (in particular blindsight)
  • various central visual defects

Maxwellian View Optical System

Teaching interests

My first experience of teaching was over 20 years ago in the physics labs (picture below) at Imperial College.  Following this I also tutored maths (KS2 and GCSE).

More recently I have started teaching with the Open University:

  • firstly on ME627 Developing geometric thinking for which I was critical reader (2006) for the course text book
  • And now at Engineering Residential School T176 Engineering: professions, practice and skills and as a tutor on T192 Engineering: origins, methods, context.

I also jointly supervise a number of PhD students in the Centre for Complexity and Design.

Finally, I have studied the following OU short courses:

  • T184 Robotics & the meaning of life: a practical guide to things that think (there seems to be some old content for this course here and part of it reused in T174 - Engineering the future.  Tony Hirst also talks about the course on the OU's free learning material site OpenLearn
  • TM190 The story of maths
  • T183 Design and the Web - a useful introduction to web page design issues - which I did partly so that I could make a web site (pic) using ideas from my son.  It looks a bit dated now, but I'm sure he was ahead of the crowd at the time

They were all excellent - the content was thought provoking - and I would recommend any of them, but the only one still available to study is "The story of maths".  

Joanne Haigh current head of physics in the IC labs

Jo Haigh, current head of physics

Externally funded projects

Forensic 'Big Code' Analytics in Secure Software Engineering
RoleStart dateEnd dateFunding source
Co-investigator06 Jun 201908 Sep 2022The Royal Society

The aim of this project is to collect forensic evidence from the "Big Code" that violate security requirements in the past and predict the risks of security incidents in the future. "Big code" consists of a variety of artefacts including security goals and requirements, software licenses with terms and conditions, bug reports and code patches at development time, and microservice logs at runtime. Apart from being large in quantity and high in diversity, the big code is also evolving continuously over time. Substantial human efforts have been spent on identifying forensic evidence from the big code, in order to identify computer-related frauds or other security-related incidents. Therefore, the project will focus on three objectives: 1) To identify forensic evidence from unstructured big code, mostly in natural languages, by selecting or extracting the relevant features in software artefacts; 2) To predict changes in structured big code, mostly in programming languages, by evaluating machine learning models against the precision/recall metrics about security-related incidents; 3) To maintain the predictability of forensic analytics continuously, during evolving software development, by updating the learning models incrementally according to the newly arrived big code.

Publications

Detecting gravitational lenses using machine learning: exploring interpretability and sensitivity to rare lensing configurations (2022)
Wilde, Joshua; Serjeant, Stephen; Bromley, Jane M; Dickinson, Hugh; Koopmans, Léon V E and Metcalf, R Benton
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 512(3) (pp. 3464-3479)

Super-resolving Herschel imaging: a proof of concept using Deep Neural Networks (2021-10)
Lauritsen, Lynge; Dickinson, Hugh; Bromley, Jane; Serjeant, Stephen; Lim, Chen-Fatt; Gao, Zhen-Kai and Wang, Wei-Hao
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 507(1) (pp. 1546-1556)

COVID-19 and computation for policy (2020-10)
Johnson, Jeffrey; Denning, Peter; Delic, Kemal and Bromley, Jane
Ubiquity, 2020(October) (pp. 1-14)

Using Convolutional Neural Networks to identify Gravitational Lenses in Astronomical images (2019-08-01)
Davies, Andrew; Serjeant, Stephen and Bromley, Jane M.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 487(4) (pp. 5263-5271)

The FuturICT education accelerator (2012-10)
Johnson, J.; Buckingham Shum, S.; Willis, A.; Bishop, S.; Zamenopoulos, T.; Swithenby, S.; MacKay, R.; Merali, Y.; Lorincz, A.; Costea, C.; Bourgine, P.; Louçã, J.; Kapenieks, A.; Kelly, P.; Caird, S.; Bromley, J.; Deakin Crick, R.; Goldspink, C.; Collet, P.; Carbone, A. and Helbing, D.
European Physical Journal - Special Topics, 214 (pp. 215-243)

Signature verification using a"Siamese" time delay neural network (1993)
Bromley, Jane; Bentz, James W.; Bottou, Léon; Guyon, Isabelle; LeCun, Yann; Moore, Cliff; Säckinger, Eduard and Shah, Roopak
International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, 7(4) (pp. 669-688)

Improving rejection performance on handwritten digits by training with “rubbish” (1993)
Bromley, Jane and Denker, John S.
Neural computation, 5(3) (pp. 367-370)

Application of the ANNA neural network chip to high-speed character recognition (1992)
Säckinger, Eduard; Boser, Bernhard E.; Bromley, Jane M.; LeCun, Yann and Jackel, Larry D.
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 3(3) (pp. 498-505)

Hardware requirements for neural network pattern classifiers: a case study and implementation (1992)
Boser, Bernhard E.; Sackinger, Eduard; Bromley, Jane; leCun, Yann and Jackel, Lawrence D.
IEEE Micro, 12(1) (pp. 32-40)

Reading handwritten digits: a ZIP code recognition system (1992)
Matan, Ofer; Baird, Henry S.; Bromley, Jane M.; Burges, Christopher J. C.; Denker, John S.; Jackel, Lawrence D.; Le Cun, Yann; Pednault, Edwin P. D.; Satterfield, William D.; Stenard, Charles E. and Thompson, Timothy J.
Computer, 25(7) (pp. 59-63)

Abnormal responses to multielement spatial stimuli in a subject with visual form agnosia (1992)
Alkhateeb, W.; Bromley, J. M.; Humphreys, G. W.; Javadnia, A.; Riddoch, M. J. and Ruddock, K. H.
Clinical Vision Sciences, 7(3) (pp. 163-173)

An analog neural network processor with programmable topology (1991-12)
Boser, Bernhard E.; Säckinger, Eduard; Bromley, Jane M.; Le Cun, Yann and Jackel, Lawrence D.
IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 26(12) (pp. 2017-2025)

Visual spatial filtering and pattern discrimination are abnormal in strabismic amblyopia (1987)
Bromley, J. M.; Javadnia, A. and Ruddock, K. H.
Clinical Vision Sciences, 1(3) (pp. 209-218)

Visual discrimination of target displacement remains after damage to the striate cortex in humans (1986-04-17)
Blythe, Isobel M.; Bromley, Jane M.; Kennard, C. and Ruddock, K. H.
Nature, 320(6063) (pp. 619-621)

A study of systematic visual perseveration involving central mechanisms (1986)
Blythe, I. M.; Bromley, J. M.; Ruddock, K. H.; Kennard, C. and Traub, M.
Brain, 109(4) (pp. 661-675)

The contribution of blue-sensitive cones to spatial responses of post-receptoral visual channels in man (1986)
Blythe, Isobel M.; Bromley, Jane M.; Holliday, I. E. and Ruddock, K. H.
Spatial Vision, 1(4) (pp. 277-289)

Multilevel systems and policy (2018-01-26)
Johnson, Jeffrey; Fortune, Joyce and Bromley, Jane
In: Mitleton-Kelly, Eve; Paraskevas, Alexandros and Day, Christopher eds. Handbook of Research Methods in Complexity Science: Theory and Applications (pp. 363-387)
ISBN : 9781785364419 / 9781785364426 | Publisher : Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd | Published : Cheltenham, UK

Systems, Networks and Policy (2017-02-05)
Johnson, Jeffrey; Fortune, Joyce and Bromley, Jane M.
In: Johnson, Jeffrey; Nowak, Andrzej; Ormerod, Paul; Rosewell, Bridget and Zhang, Yi-Chang eds. Non-Equilibrium Social Science and Policy: Introduction and Essays on New and Changing Paradigms in Socio-Economic Thinking. Understanding Complex Systems (pp. 111-134)
ISBN : 978-3-319-42422-4 | Publisher : Springer | Published : Cham, Switzerland

Penacée: a neural net system for recognizing on-line handwriting (1996)
Guyon, I.; Bromley, J. M.; Matić, N.; Schenkel, M. and Weissman, H.
In: Domany, E.; Van Hemmen, J. L. and Schulten, K. eds. Models of Neural Networks III: Association, Generalization and Representation. Physics of Neural Networks (pp. 255-279)
ISBN : 978-0387943688 | Publisher : Springer | Published : New York

Neural network applications in character recognition and document analysis (1994)
Jackel, L. D.; Battista, M. Y.; Ben, J.; Bromley, J.; Burges, C. J. C.; Baird, H. S.; Cosatto, E.; Denker, J. S.; Graf, H. P.; Katseff, H. P.; Le Cun, Y.; Nohl, C. R.; Sackinger, E.; Shamilian, J. H.; Shoemaker, T.; Stenard, C. E.; Strom, B. I.; Ting, R.; Wood, T. and Zuraw, C. R.
In: Yuhas, Ben and Ansari, Nirwan eds. Neural Networks in Telecommunications (pp. 271-285)
ISBN : 9780792394174 | Publisher : Kluwer Academic Publishers | Published : Boston

Parallel and sequential processing in visual discrimination of simple geometrical patterns (1989)
Alkhateeb, W.; Bromley, J. M.; Ibbotsen, V.; Javadnia, A.; Ruddock, K. H. and Terry, A.
In: Kulikowski, J. J.; Dickinson, C. M. and Murray, I. J. eds. Seeing Contour and Colour: Proceeedings of the Third Symposium of the Northern Eye Instiute, Manchester, UK, 9-13 August 1987. Vision and Visual Health Care (3) (p 419)
ISBN : 9780080361369 | Publisher : Pergamon Press | Published : Oxford

Finding agriculture among biodiversity: metadata in practice (2014-11)
Bromley, Jane M.; King, David and Morse, David R.
In : 8th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (MTSR 2014) (27-29 Nov 2014, Karlsruhe) (pp. 185-192)

Hypernetwork-based peer marking for scalable certificated mass education (2014-09)
Johnson, Jeffrey; Jimenez-Romero, Cristian; Rodrigues, David and Bromley, Jane M.
In : European Conference on Complex Systems 2014 (22-26 Sep 2014, Lucca, Italy)

agINFRA - where agriculture, biodiversity and information technology meet (2013-10)
Morse, David; Bromley, Jane and King, David
In : TDWG 2013 (27 Oct - 1 Nov 2013, Florence, Italy)

Signature verification using a Siamese time delay neural network (1994)
Bromley, Jane M.; Guyon, Isabelle; LeCun, Yann; Sackinger, Eduard and Shah, Roopak
In : 7th Annual Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (29 Nov - 02 Dec 1993, Denver) (pp. 737-744)

An analog neural network processor and its application to high-speed character recognition (1991)
Boser, Bernhard E.; Säckinger, Eduard; Bromley, Jane; LeCun, Yann; Howard, Richard E. and Jackel, Lawrence D.
In : IJCNN-91- International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (8-14 Jul 1991, Seattle, WA, USA) (pp. 415-420)

A neural network approach to handprint character recognition (1991)
Jackel, L. D.; Stenard, C. E.; Baird, H. S.; Boser, B.; Bromley, J.; Burges, C. J. C.; Denker, J. S.; Graf, H. P.; Henderson, D.; Howard, R. E.; Hubbard, W.; leCun, Y.; Matan, O.; Pednault, E.; Satterfield, W.; Säckinger, E. and Thompson, T.
In : Compcon Spring'91 (25 Feb - 1 Mar 1991, San Francisco, CA, USA) (pp. 472-475)

Functional mapping of stimulus colour in human subjects suffering a central visual defect (1987)
Alkhateeb, Wafa; Bromley, Jane; Javadia, Atafeh and Ruddock, K. H.
In : Physiological Society Meeting, Imperial College London (13-14 Feb 1987, Imperial College London) (p 44)

Pattern discrimination in a human subject suffering visual agnosia (1986)
Bromley, J. M.; Humphreys, G. W.; Javadnia, A.; Riddoch, M. J. and Ruddock, K. H.
In : Physiological Society (25-26 Mar 1986, London) (67P)

Abnormal prolongation of visual sensations in a human subject (1985)
Blythe, I. M.; Bromley, J. M.; Kennard, C. and Ruddock, K. H.
In : Physiological Society, St. Andrews Meeting (14-15 Jun 1985, St. Andrews, Scotland, UK) (p 20)

Neural-Network and k-Nearest-neighbor Classifiers (1991-08-19)
Bromley, J. and Sackinger, E.
AT&T Bell Laboratories