Research interests

• Artifical intelligence for health systems
• Human centred interactive systems
• Federated systems management 
• Data governance and risk management
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Current research

His current research focus on advancing data governance and artificial intelligence for health and wellbeing working with legal experts, data governance practitioners, healthcare professionals and the public. He provided strategic leadership for the 2019 Institute for Life Sciences initiative Coalition for Innovation and Digital Health Research (CIDHR) to establish an innovation ecosystem for the progressive digitisation of networked health and social care in collaboration with Hampshire and IoW NHS, NHS Trusts (University Hospital Southampton, Hampshire Hospitals, Portsmouth Hospitals) and Wessex Academic Health Science Network. CIDHR laid the groundwork for the Social Data Foundation exploring new socio-technical models of data governance and contributing to national policy for UKRI Trusted Research Environments and NHS Secure Data Environments. Internationally he is advancing semi-automated privacy risk assessment of cross border exchange of health data for studying rare diseases using federated learning and synthetic data (SYNTHEMA)

His AI healthcare programme is tackling challenges across public health, chronic disease management and integrated care. He leads AI research tackling the prevention of (MELD-B) and integrated care (health and social care) for multiple long term conditions (Cluster-AIM Study). He is Principal Investigator for the mySmartCOPD one of the first projects to undertake a national scale clinical trial of AI for self-management of achronic disease, building on a feasibility study conducted as part of the H2020 BigMedilytics project. His rapid insight work “validating home oxygen saturations as a marker of clinical deterioration in patients with suspected COVID-19” supported the NHS through COVID Virtual Wards working with NHS partners across North Hampshire and informing national policies. The South East NHSX RECOxCARE programme that he initiated was scaled by Dr Matt Inada-Kim as the £60 million national COVIDoximetry@home and clinical model adopted by WHO. His AI decision support research for integrated care pathways continued with a focus on the challenge of complex discharge (PROCED) and supporting NHS winter pressures of Acute Respiratory Infections (PHILOSARIP) and Hospital Discharge (DS4SmartDischarge).

His research includes a distinct focus on human centred AI and trust/trustworthiness of AI systems. As part of the UKRI Trustworthiness Autonomous System Hub he is laying the Foundations for Trustworthiness Risk Assessment of AI systems, whilst also tackling the challenge of codesigning AI systems with the public, patients and clinicians using computational notebooks as a design tool.

Michael has 20+ years’ experience of applied research and innovation in federated systems management and data-driven research/innovation across healthcare, smart cities, engineering, telecommunications and creative industries. He is an expert in translational research through deep knowledge of digital innovation, acceleration methodologies, state-of-the-art data infrastructures, discovery pipelines and real-world testing. He has an international reputation as thought-leader pioneering the evolution of information technologies for tackling important business and societal challenges. 

His contribution to digital transformation builds on large-scale multi-disciplinary projects revolutionising the way Internet ecosystems are designed, built and how impacts are understood. From 2000-2010 Michael undertook ground-breaking research into B2B web services supporting dynamic management, security and interoperability for inter-organisation collaboration. The insights led to ways to interoperate, federate and orchestrate data and computing resources, as well as reducing the cost of operating such federations. The work influenced service strategies of the world’s biggest companies (IBM, GSK, Audi, BAE Systems, EADS, Fujitsu, British Telecom, Microsoft and Pinewood Studios for example) through dynamic management protocols linked to business decisions, SLA-based service management and integrating service discovery and negotiation into enterprise processes and standards. Data, computing and network convergence during this period extended research towards Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) supporting QoS engineering and management for real-time interactive applications deployed on virtualised clouds and networks. 

As a result of this research, in 2010 Boniface was appointed to the Steering Committee of the European Future Internet Assembly and Chair of the Future Internet Socio-Economics working group (2010-2014). Here he explored the dynamic and complex interdependencies between heterogenous resources under different domains of control, along with the socio-economic challenges faced by companies needing to understand performance, acceptance and viability of new services introduced into Internet ecosystems. This led to principles of open APIs, programmable resources, deep observability, on-demand access and approaches that overcome the constraints of current business models and as such digital innovation platforms were born as an extension of PaaS, and a way to build platforms as hubs for communities wanting to explore service and value networks.

In collaboration with major European institutes such as Fraunhofer and IMEC, he then pioneered innovation processes, services and tools to establish platforms for digital innovation. From 2010, his research led to a series of platforms and communities that have incrementally tackled aspects of convergence through federation models. He led strategy to influence funding priorities and community building for digital innovation , and as a core player with IMEC and Fraunhofer, he helped sure €21M of grants from funding bodies for FP7 FED4FIRE/H2020 FED4FIRE+   (2012-2021) resulting in the largest federation of testing facilities in Europe.

In FP7 EXPERIMEDIA programme (€10.8M 2011-2015) Michael led ground-breaking social and networked media services conducting 10s of trials in real-world operational environments with end users. He developed techniques combining semantic graph knowledge modelling and time-series data analysis extending earlier QoS engineering research towards QoE and the exploration of provenance and correlation between derived from data sets within an ethical framework considering Privacy by Design and EU 95/46. As part of EXPERIMEIDA he led the research and development of the world's first mixed reality ski competition appearing on BBC News and BBC Click in 2015. He the provided scientific leadership of ProsocialLearn exploring how educational games for children could help them learn social and emotional well-being skills. Working together with teachers and game developers he demonstrated how serious games can create new learning opportunities for inclusive education in school settings across Europe

Then through the H2020 FLAME  programme (€7M 2017-2020) he extended EXPERIMEDIA by adding infrastructure providers to the ecosystem within smart cities to drive adoption of 5G. His research focused on graph analytics exploring aggregation, normalisation, linking and causation between federated datasets for optimal resourcing decisions. In FLAME, he managed a €2.1M investment programme for engagement of SMEs including establish Dev/Ops used by 24 companies running over 30 technology trials for continuous deployment, testing and evaluation of a 5G service delivery platform including scaling from desktop to lab to real-world locations in Bristol, Barcelona, London and Sicily. Within these projects is has led over 50 trials in real-world environments building evidence of performance, acceptance and feasibility as input to standardisiation and future investment.