Software Engineering MSc: Who teaches this course

• Staff teaching on this course

The Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing teaches this course. The Faculty's wide selection of undergraduate and postgraduate courses covers a diverse range of subject areas, from aerospace to geography; from maths and computing to biotechnology; and many more. Our collaborative set-up provides new opportunities for our students, and we design our courses with industry professionals to ensure you stay up to date with the latest developments.

Computing and Information Systems

The School of Computing and Information Systems offers high-quality undergraduate and postgraduate courses, designed to reflect the developing needs of business and industry. We deliver our teaching in an exciting and challenging learning environment, and make use of modern, well-equipped facilities.

Our courses cover the range of modern technologies in computer science, information systems and software engineering, with specialisations in games technology; network and wireless technologies; information security; electronic business; and embedded systems.

Karel Riha

Title: Principal lecturer and field leader
Email: k.riha@kingston.ac.uk
Membership of professional bodies: British Computer Society (MBCS CITP CEng)

Background: Karel has a Physics degree from Oxford University and a PhD in Computer Science from Kingston University. He has over 29 years' experience of ICT, working both in academia and in industry. As well as working at Kingston University, he has also worked as a software development project manager, consultant, analyst/programmer, systems architect and database administrator for several commercial organisations, including British Telecom, British Airways and Deutsche Bank.

Karel has designed and run courses on many aspects of software development methods and tools. As field leader of the Software Engineering and Web Development MSc courses, Karel is keen to ensure that the course content reflects the latest industry practices and technologies such as agile development, test driven development, aspect-oriented programming, service oriented architecture, web services, open source software, integrated development environments and software development frameworks.

Karel has also organised a number of collaborative links with industry to help postgraduate students gain commercial experience as a part of their MSc project and after they finish their University course.

Research fields: Karel has a long-standing interest in software engineering methods and tools – these have a long history of often failing to live up to expectations in terms of helping to improve the productivity of software developers and the quality of delivered software.

He is a firm believer that for methods and tools to be effective, they have to adapted to fit the software development organisation's culture, and that the organisation needs to invest heavily in the education and training of the software engineers so they become proficient in those methods and tools. Karel has published papers on this and other subjects in a number of internationally-reviewed conference proceedings.

Paul Wallin

Title: Principal lecturer
Email: paul.wallin@kingston.ac.uk

Specialist subjects: Paul has been the director of the New Technology Institute (NTI) since September 2005. Kingston University is the lead institution for the NTI with a partnership of seven local FE colleges. It offers a programme of foundation degrees in IT for E-Business.

Within the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing, Paul is the module leader for the MSc module Broadband and Mobile Networks.

Dr Miroslav Novak

Title: Principal lecturer and director of postgraduate programmes
Email: novak@kingston.ac.uk 

Dr Novak is the director of postgraduate programmes for the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing. He is responsible for the taught MSc degrees' quality; academic coherence; management; and operation.

Dr Novak has been teaching and researching in universities across Europe and Australia since the late '70s. By training a theoretical physicist, his work on the first supercomputer in the UK, the Cray 1S, introduced him to vector computation and led to a series of published papers. He has published 11 books and is the author of more than 40 research papers.

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