The 2015 ASU Annual Distinguished Seminar (ADS) was delivered by Prof Jonathan Blackledge on Monday, 14 December. The seminar was followed by a Master-Class on Homeland Security: Research and Development. Both were well received and attended (over 50 people both from within and outside ASU).

Prof Blackledge is currently Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal where he is a Full Professor and Honorary Professor of Computer Science in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science.

After a career in both academia and industry Prof. Blackledge was appointed to the Science Foundation Ireland Stokes Professorship in 2008 (named after the famous Nineteenth Century Irish Mathematician and Physicist Sir George Gabriel Stokes) at Dublin Institute of Technology where he has been an Honorary Professor since 2011.  During his tenure as Stokes Professor he focused on Innovation and Entrepreneurship leading the commercialisation of a range of research projects and the spin-out of a number of companies in the EU for which he was awarded Researcher of the Year in 2010 and 2011.

The ADS was on Energy Trading and Economic Security in which Prof Blackledge has set up the context where energy companies always require support from market analysis in order to protect themselves against exposure to energy price increases and price uncertainty due to high volatility.  This requires energy traders to decide what markets and commodities to trade in, when to open or close trades and how to maximise profits.  In turn, energy generators and energy suppliers need support for developing effective bidding strategies, planning operational capacity requirements and establishing appropriate contractual agreements so that governments and national agencies can appreciate what energy policies to implement. Then he went on to focus on the application of a new methodology in energy forecasting using a combination of non-Gaussian Stochastic Modelling, Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms for predicting the long, intermediate and short term behaviour of the energy markets, respectively.  He then concluded with a demonstration of some of the algorithms and strategies developed for this purpose for analysing and predicting Oil and Gas prices and for Carbon emissions trading.

In the Master-Class, Prof Blackledge emphasized that work on encryption and in particular quantum computing are fundamental to any research agenda on Homeland Security. He highlighted the inter-disciplinary nature of the topic as it requires the talents and expertise in areas such as mathematics, engineering, technology, business and management and law. He analysed various encryption algorithms and gave a hands-on experiments on industry-strength crypto systems.