Steve Appleby

Steve Appleby has worked on a wide range of research topics over a number of years, including Ground Probing radar to find cables and pipes in the ground, Signal Processing for anomaly detection in networks, Distributed Artificial Intelligence for resilient network management, Human Geography, investigating human population settlement patterns with a view to distribution network planning, Automated language Learning for Machine Translation and most recently media delivery technology.

Steve was a awarded a BSc. degree in Physics from the University of Surrey in 1983 and a Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of Kent in 1995.  He has been awarded two medals from the British Computer Society (Mobile Agents for network management and Equitable Quality video streaming).

Steve currently leads a team in the Networks Research unit in BT which addresses all aspects of media delivery over fixed and mobile networks.  The team’s work areas include cost-effective distribution of video for large-scale, live events and maximising the quality of experience for end users.

One particular area of interest is the use of multicast to help achieve scalability.  This has included the use of 5G MBS for efficient delivery of live streams (leading a workpackage in the 5G-XCAST project and on the advisory board of the Fudge-5G project) as well as the use of Multicast ABR technology on the fixed broadband network.  Another specific area of research is been low-latency streaming, moving to match, or improve on, the latencies achieved by over-air broadcast.

During the course of his research, Steve has filed around 50 patents.