Steering Group

Roger Woods is Dean of Research at Queens University Belfast. He has a well-established research portfolio in programmable hardware for signal and data processing, and wireless communications. This includes a large word vocabulary, speech recognition system, the world’s first FPGA-based musical instrument and traffic management and monitoring solutions. Earlier in his career, he designed a number of advanced signal processing chips, successfully transferred to industry including recursive digital filter chips with GEC Plessey Semiconductor (now Zarlink) and an award-winning, digital TV Phase Correlation chip.

He leads the University’s activity on use of FPGAs in data centres in the EU Nanostreams and OPRECOMP projects.  He established a £5M, Tier -2 high performance computing facility (NI-HPC) in Northern Ireland and also leads the e-Futures grant, seeking to grow and enhance the UK community in electronic systems. He is a member of the UKRI’s Strategic Advisory Team on ICT. In 2007, he co-founded a spin-off company, Analytics Engines Ltd. which develops data analytics software. It employs 20 people and is engaged on projects with the National Gallery, RTE, Innovate UK, Coriolis.

He holds four patents and has authored over 230 papers. He sits on the programme committees of numerous computing technology conferences, e.g., IEEE Conferences on Field Programmable Logic, Field Programmable Technology and Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling and Simulation. He is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing and Industrial Electronics Societies and sits on the Advisory Board for the IEEE SPS Technical Committee on the Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems. He is on the Editorial Board for the Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems and the IET Proceedings on Computer and Digital Techniques.

Queen´s University Belfast

Anthony O’Neill joined Newcastle University in 1986, having previously worked at Plessey Research (Caswell) Ltd. He has been Siemens Professor of Microelectronics since 1996. In 1994 he was Visiting Scientist at MIT, Cambridge, Ma, USA. In 2002 He became Royal Society Industry Fellow at Atmel, UK. He was a Visiting Professor at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland in 2009 and at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in 2017.

Roles and Responsibilities

  • Director of Research, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Director of nanoLAB University Research Centre
  • Leader of eFutures network for electronics research in UK universities, with ~300 members
  • Principal Investigator on EPSRC Projects:
    • eFutures
    • eFuturesXD
    • Atomic Layer Interface Engineering for Nanoelectronics (ALIEN):contacts
  • Joint- Principal Investigator on the Wellcome/EPSRC project
    • Controlling Abnormal Network Dynamics with Optogenetics (CANDO)
  • Co-Investigator on the RCUK projects
    • EPSRC: Multi-electrode electromyography: developing electrical cross-sectional imaging of skeletal muscle
    • EPSRC: Underpinning Power Electronics: Devices Theme
    • MRC/ESPRC: Newcastle Molecular Pathology Node (MICA)
  • Member of EPSRC College
  • Director of NMI, a UK trade organisation for the electronics industry with more than 200 members

Qualifications

BSc, PhD

Memberships

C Eng, Fellow IET, Senior Member IEEE

University of Newcastle

Dr Alex Oliver is a Portfolio Manager in the ICT Theme at EPSRC. Alex’s research portfolio spans Electronics, including the Architectures and Operating Systems, Microelectronics Design and Microelectronics Device Technology research areas. He is the lead on the Semiconductor Technology and Sustainable ICT as part of the Digital Futures priority area in the EPSRC Delivery Plan. He also has oversight within the theme of International Strategy, Trusted Research and Responsible Research and Innovation, and Business Engagement. Alex obtained his PhD from the University of Bristol in Chemistry in 2018.

EPSRC, Portfolio Manager

Beth McEvoy has 15 years experience in strategy consultancy, and in conducting and managing research; working across the public, private and third sectors. 

Beth has a degree in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, and an MA from Queen Mary, University of London.

Network Manager, Queen’s University, Belfast

  • Senior Member, US National Academy of Inventors and IEEE
  • Previously held faculty positions in India (2012-’15) and the US (2016-’19)
  • Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (2006-’12)
  • Co-author of over 75 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications 
  • Master Inventor at IBM, co-author of 59 issued US patents
  • Recipient of IBM Faculty Award (2019), IBM Research Division Award (2012), IBM Technical Accomplishment Award (2010), and Government of India’s Ramanujan Fellowship (2013)
  • B.Tech (IIT Kharagpur, 2000), M.S. and Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering (Stanford University, 2003, 2006)

Research Interests

  • Biomimetic engineering & computation
  • Architectures and systems for intelligent computing
  • Novel materials & devices for next-generation computing applications
  • Algorithms & analytics for event-driven computing

Further Information

King’s College London

Catherine has over 15 years’ experience in flexible electronics R&D both with PragmatIC (since 2011) and Plastic Logic (from 2002). She has pioneered technologies for semiconductor devices on plastic, including successful transfer to manufacturing. Catherine holds a PhD in organic electronics (Cambridge) and is named inventor on 12 patents.

VP of device development, PragmatIC

Cathal is a senior engineer in Xilinx, responsible for supporting academic teaching and research related to Xilinx. This includes development and delivery of training on the latest Xilinx tools and technologies, research support, industrial-academic partnerships, and special academic programs. Most recently this has included managing the Xilinx Adaptive Compute Clusters research program (XACC) in EMEA, which supports research into high-end FPGA compute applications, and member of the PYNQ project – a Python and Jupyter based open-source research project to enable higher productivity and ease-of-use on Xilinx platforms.
He has been a member of several international conference technical program committees, and has and acted as an advisor to many national, EU and international research projects related to FPGA.
Prior to joining Xilinx, Cathal worked for STFC (formerly CCLRC) and was the Europractice technical manager for FPGA, Embedded and ESL design.

Senior Engineer, Xilinx

Profile to follow

R&D Manager, Synopsys

Prof. Kanjo is currently a Professor of Pervasive Sensing at the Computer Science Department. She conducts research in Mobile Sensing, Pervasive Computing, Affective Computing and Data Science. Eiman currently leads the Smart Sensing and IoT Lab/team (Winner of the Vice Chancellor’s Outstanding Research Team Award 2020/2021).

Prof. Kanjo is a technologist who works closely with industry, local authorities and end user organisations to solve real-world problems. She works closely with Nottingham County Council and Nottingham City Council on developing its Smart Cities strategy and she is the technical lead of the NTU Smart Campus project.

Prof. Kanjo was first to coin the phrase ‘Mobile Sensing’ and wrote some of the earliest papers on the subject (GeoMobSens and Mobsens). She also built the first noise monitoring system using the phone-based microphone (NoiseSpy). Her current work (EnvBodySens) on studying and quantifying the impact of Environment on wellbeing using Mobile Sensing, Deep Learning, Data Science and AI, complements her work on Urban Computing in order to make sense of a place (NeuroPlace, ShopMobia).

Eiman is also an expert in developing digital technologies for Mental Health and she has been involved in a wide range of projects in this area, including (NotiMind). She works closely with Mental Health networks and charities and currently developing novel Fidgeting Interfaces to reduce Anxiety and Stress among adult and school children. She often employs data science and on-device processing (on Edge Computing) to create privacy preserving pervasive tools that can transform wellbeing.

Eiman’s team is active in developing tools and solutions to minimise the risk of COVID19, and recently developed a low-cost wearable for social distancing and contact tracing.

Nottingham Trent University

Elizabeth Rendon-Morales is a Senior Lecturer in Electrical and Electronics Engineering in the Department of Engineering and Design at the University of Sussex. She sits on the EPSRC eFutures steering group. Her areas of expertise include sensors, electronics, robotics and telemetry systems; and her current research is concentrated on the design, development and testing of sensing electronic systems and medical instrumentation.

Within the sensing area, she is leading the development of advanced sensing devices to monitor electrocardiogram [ECG] signals on living organisms, including zebrafish, premature babies and fetuses during early pregnancy and throughout labour. On the robotics area, she is leading the development and integration of micron level sensors and precision instrumentation tools in order to achieve high linearity and repeatability, which could contribute to the next generation of surgical robotic systems.

In 2016, Elizabeth was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions COFUND post-doctoral fellow. She completed her PhD in communications engineering and telemedicine applications at the Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona Spain. She has a BSc degree in Telecommunications Engineering from National Autonomous University of Mexico, School of Engineering, and a MSc degree in wireless communications from ITAM/ Telecom Bretagne, Rennes France. She’s also got industrial experience, having worked on the evaluation of wireless technologies from Nortel Networks, Alcatel, Ericson at the America MovilAT&T research laboratories in USA&Mexico.

Since 2017 she has lead an outreach program to promote Women’s Participation in Science and Engineering. She is the leader of the Sussex Women in Engineering Society (WES) and the Athena SWAN chair at the School of Engineering and Informatics. She is passionate about encouraging young women to pursue careers in science and engineering, and she is especially motivated to inspire her three-year-old daughter, Ely. A talented science communicator, Elizabeth has been an invited speaker to events to communicate her research to non-technical audiences (e.g. Soapbox Science 2018; the Big Bang Fair 2019); and liaised with press to communicate her research on sensor developments in the media (i.e. Jan 2019 “Stress-free way to listen to your unborn baby’s heartbeat” in Reuters Media Press).

University of Sussex

Esther Rodriguez-Villegas holds the chair of Low Power Electronics in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, where she leads a multi-disciplinary team of thirteen PostDocs and PhD students. Her most recent research interests are focused on wearable sensors for physiological monitoring and low-power integrated circuits with a focus on  healthcare applications.  

She graduated from the University of Seville with a MSci in Physics and was awarded a PhD in Physics from the same univeristy in 1996 and 2002 respectively. Esther Rodriguez-Villegas received the San Alberto Magno Award for finishing the Physics degree (Electronics specialization) as the top student of the year in 1996 and was awarded a professional research grant from the Spanish Government in 1997 when she joined the Microelectronic National Centre, where she worked for six years and was invloved in several successfull international industrial and ESPRIT project. From 1999 to September 2002 she was also an Assistant Professor at the University of Seville. 

Esther Rodriguez-Villegas joined Imperial College London as a lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in 2002. She is the author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and a book on FGMOS transistors, which was published by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in October 2006. Esther Rodriguez-Villegas is is a Senior Member of the IEEE and has been a member of technical committees in several international conferences such as the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, the IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems, and the IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCAS). She is also a member of the IEEE BioCAS Committee, Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I, Member of the Qatar Peer Review College, and Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College.

Esther Rodriguez-Villegas was the recipient of a €1.8m single investigator European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (2010-2015) and the winner of a CrackIT Challenge in 2012 which is run by the National Centre for Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement of Animals in Reseearch and is sponsored by Eli Lilly. She was the winner of the 2009 Complutense Young Award for Science and Technology which recongises the top Spanish Scientist under the age of 36. In 2009 she was also the winner of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Information Technology Innovations award and a finalist in the categories of Measurement in Action, Emerging Technologies, and Product Design. In 2014 she was one of the winners in an XPRIZE run competition (Nokia Sensing XChallenge).

Imperial College London

Geoff Merrett is Professor of Electronic and Software Systems at the University of Southampton. He is Head of the Centre for Internet of Things (IoT) and Pervasive Systems, a strategic research centre in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), and Co-Director of the Arm-ECS Research Centre, an award-winning industrial partnership between ECS and Arm. He received the BEng (1st, Hons) and PhD degrees in Electronic Engineering from Southampton in 2004 and 2009 respectively. He was appointed as a Lecturer shortly after, promoted to Associate Professor in 2014, and Professor in 2019. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Member of IET, and a Fellow of the HEA.

His research interests are in energy management of mobile/embedded systems and self-powered devices. He has published ~200 papers in these areas, with 2500 citations, an h-index of 27 and a g-index of 44*1. His papers have received Best Paper awards (IJCAI 2013, ICCES 2017, PECCS 2018) and were Best Paper finalists (DATE 2011/15/16, CODES-ISSS 2017, IEEE TCAD). He has given invited talks at leading workshops, conferences and research groups (e.g. DAC, DATE, Arm Research Summit, ETH Zurich). He is currently Deputy Director of a £1.4M EPSRC Platform Grant on Smart Cities (EP/P010164/1), and Southampton PI on the £1.2M EPSRC International Centre for Spatial Computational Learning (EP/S030069/1). He was previously a Theme Leader on the £5.6M EPSRC-funded PRiME Programme Grant (EP/K034448/1), Southampton PI on the £1.3M EPSRC ‘Graceful’ many-core computing project (EP/L000563/1), and a Co-I on both the EPSRC Holistic Energy Harvesting project (EP/G067740/1) and the EPSRC Energy Harvesting Network (EP/H013458/1).

Professor Merrett serves on the EPSRC Strategic Advisory Team (SAT) for the ICT theme, advising EPSRC on new research areas and strategy. He is a member of the eFutures Steering Group (an EPSRC-funded network representing the UK’s electronic systems academic community), having previously served on its ECR Steering Group, and co-manages the UK’s Energy Harvesting Network (co-organising its annual event from 2011-2016). He is a member of EPSRC College and the UKRI FLF Panel College, and also reviews proposals for Italy’s Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (serving on REPRISE, the Register of Expert Peer-Reviewers for Italian Scientific Evaluation) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research: Domain Applied and Engineering Sciences. He is an active reviewer for a number of prestigious international journals, and serves on a number of TPCs for international conferences (e.g. Track Co-Chair at DATE2021). He was a founder of the International Workshop on Energy Neutral Sensing Systems (ENSsys, co-located with the ACM SenSys conference), serving as General Chair from 2013-15, and on its steering/organisation committees since 2016. He is Associate Editor for IET Computers and Digital Techniques, a member of the Editorial Board for MDPI Sensors, and previously served as an Associate Editor for IET Circuits, Devices and Systems. He has been guest editor for special issues on IoT and Big Data, Energy-Neutral IoT Devices, Wearable Smart Devices, and Electronics Education. He co-edited the IET book on Many Core Computing: Hardware and Software, containing 22 chapters contributed by leading international researchers.

He currently leads a team of 1 research staff and 11 PhD students, having previously graduated 20 PhD students and line-managed 24 research staff and 29 interns. The quality of his PhD students has been externally recognised, for example winning the University’s 3 Minute Thesis competition in 2015, receiving Silver at SET for Britain 2015, receiving the Gold Medal at Malaysia’s Innovation Technology Expo 2016-17, and winning the Best of Faculty award at the University’s Festival of Doctoral Research 2019. He has been external examiner for >10 PhD theses, including students at Imperial College London, ETH Zurich, Bologna, Newcastle, and York.

Professor Merrett is External Examiner at the University of York for their MSc Embedded Wireless Systems and MSc Digital Systems Engineering degree programmes. He was General Chair of the 11th European Workshop on Microelectronics Education (EWME) in 2016, where he also published a paper on the use of innovative online lectures (for which he received funding from the National HESTEM Programme, and a VC Teaching Award in 2011). He now serves on the Workshop’s Steering Committee. He has been Branch Counsellor of the University’s IEEE Student Branch since 2010, and received the IEEE R8 ‘Outstanding Counsellor’ award in 2013. He has been Southampton’s academic representative for the UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF) since 2011, a collaboration between industry and universities which, alongside promoting a career in electronics, provides scholarships, summer employment and industrial mentoring to undergraduates. In 2016 he was invited to join the UKESF’s Strategic Advisory Group, and helped to guide activities, took part in a roundtable discussion with government ministers on the engineering skills gap, and presented at their 5-year celebration event and the TechWorks Industry Summit 2018.

At Southampton, he leads and teaches on a number of well-received lecture, lab, and project based modules. He has a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, has supervised a large number of UG/PGT project students, and continually seeks to improve his teaching. He led on the creation of a new MSc Internet of Things (IoT) degree programme at Southampton, uniquely designed to recruit students from both EEE and computing backgrounds. He has designed substantial educational material and delivered it to UG/PGT students, college teachers and students, and academic/industrial researchers. Internationally, he played a key role in the launch of the EEE degree at the University’s Malaysia campus, teaching there for two weeks every year from 2013-17.

Having previously served as Senior Admissions Tutor for ECS’ EEE degree programmes, Professor Merrett is currently Director of Outreach and Recruitment in the Department. In this role, he has overseen major projects for ECS’ public website, created ECS’ first outreach strategy, and led on a number of significant outreach projects (e.g. the ECS Summer Taster Courses, which were nominated for a VC Teaching Award in 2017, and the A-Level Electronic Engineering Teaching Kits, which were nominated for a VC Teaching Award in 2019).

University of Southampton

Hadi Heidari (PhD, SMIEEE, FHEA, MIET) is an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in the James Watt School of Engineering at the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. His Microelectronics Lab (meLAB) consists of 4 fellows/postdoctoral researchers and 9 PhD students, conducts pioneering research on magnetoelectronics and integrated microelectronics design for wearable and implantable devices.

Dr Heidari’s research has been funded by major research councils and funding organizations including the European Commission, EPSRC, Royal Society, British Council and Scottish Funding Council, e.g. EU H2020 MSCA-IF “WiseCure: Wireless Implantable Devices for Neurological Disorders Cure” and the €8.4M EU H2020 FET-Proactive “Hybrid Enhanced Regenerative Medicine Systems (HERMES)” projects. He is a member of the RSE Young Academy of Scotland (YAS) and a member of the eFutures Steering Group (an EPSRC-funded network representing the UK’s electronic systems academic community). He is a member of EPSRC College, and also reviews proposals for the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Royal Society of New Zealand. 

Dr Heidari is a member of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Board of Governors (2018-2020), IEEE Sensors Council Member-at-Large (2020-2021), Senior Member of IEEE and Fellow of Higher Education Academy (FHEA). He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology and IEEE Access, Editor of Elsevier Microelectronics Journal, and Guest Editor for the IEEE Sensors Journal, and Frontiers in Neuroscience. He was the General Chair of 27th IEEE ICECS 2020, Technical Program Chair of IEEE PRIME’19, and serves on the organising committee of several conferences including the UK Circuits and Systems Workshop (UKCAS),  UK-China Emerging Technologies (UCET) Conference, IEEE SENSORS’16 and ’17, NGCAS’17, BioCAS’18, PRIME’15, ISCAS’23, and the organiser of several special sessions on the IEEE Conferences.

Dr Heidari has authored/co-authored over 180 peer-reviewed publications in top-tier journals or conference proceedings and acts as a reviewer for several journals and conferences. He has been the recipient of a number of awards including the 2020 IET Healthcare Technologies Early Career JA Lodge Award, 2019 IEEE Sensors Council Young Professional Award, and the Rewards for Excellence prize from the University of Glasgow (2018).

University of Glasgow 

Hamza Shakeel is Lecturer at the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University, Belfast. He completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech, USA with focus on micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) and nanotechnology based chemical sensors. Afterwards he worked as a post-doctoral associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), USA for two and a half years utilizing MEMS oscillators for mass metrology. His interests are in the areas of electronics, solid state physics, and MEMS based sensors.

Queen’s University Belfast

Ivona Z. Mitrovic (BSc EE, MSc, PhD) is a Reader in sustainable nanoenergy at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics at the University of Liverpool, UK. Dr Mitrovic’s current research is into cutting-edge areas of emerging nanoelectronics technologies. The principal goal of her research has been to further the fundamental understanding of materials on the nanoscale, in particular oxides, relevant to mainstream CMOS electronics applications and, more recently alternative energy technologies. She has established a substantial track record in the area of thin (<10 nm) high-k dielectrics and played a pivotal leadership role in collaborative efforts to achieve ultimately scaled gate stack in the European PULLNANO and NANOSIL projects. She has been Principal Investigator on EPSRC EP/K018930/1 project on resonant tunnelling nanostructures and Co-investigator on EPSRC EP/1012907/1 on Ge CMOS devices and EP/K018884/1 on doped-ZnO for transparent electronics. She has also coordinated research on British Council UKIERI and EPSRC GCRF EP/P510981/1 projects on GaN and sustainable energy technology. She is a Senior Member of IEEE since 2014. Dr Mitrovic has authored over 100 scientific papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings and has delivered over twenty talks at premier international conferences in Europe and the USA.

University of Liverpool

Dr Jim Harkin is Head of the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems and a Reader in Embedded Systems. He is a member of the Computational Neuroscience and Neuromorphic Engineering team in the Intelligent Systems Research Centre (ISRC) and previously worked as a post-doc researcher in embedded systems design at Ulster (2001-2004) on the EPSRC funded project (GR/N26753). His current teaching interests relate to embedded systems encompassing digital systems design, VHDL for FPGAs and system testing. Dr. Harkin leads research on the design of intelligent embedded systems and focuses on developing electronic computing systems that can self-repair under the presence of errors. In particular, his work explores how computer models of neural networks (brain like-repair) can be mapped to hardware to build highly efficient and reliable embedded computers. His work has seen innovations in Networks-on-Chip strategies and the hardware implementation of self-repairing Spiking Neural Networks, and is Co-founder of the medical analaytics start-up company Airbrio. He has secured grant funding of +£2.5 million from several sources including EPSRC, Innovate UK, HSC R&D, MRC, InvestNI and DEL and has published over +130 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He was included in the University’s Computer Science (UoA 23) submission to the RAE 2008, and also UoA 11 in REF2014.

Ulster University 

Kerstin Eder research activities are focused on specification, verification and analysis techniques which allow engineers to design a system and to verify/explore its behaviour in terms of functional correctness, safety, performance, power consumption and energy efficiency. Her work includes both formal methods and traditional simulation-based approaches. She has a strong background in computational logic, especially formal verification, declarative programming languages and their implementation, abstract machines, compilation techniques and meta programming.

Now that she is fully back after parental leave, she has re-started her research with three new funded research projects.

She is engaged in new research that explores Energy Transparency from hardware to software over the entire system stack. The ENTRA (Whole Systems Energy Transparency) project is funded by the EC under the recent FP7 FET call on Minimizing Energy Consumption of Computing to the Limit (MINECC).

She is also active at the Bristol Robotics Lab advancing the state of the art in verification of autonomous assistive robots, including robotics directly involved in interactions with humans. The EPSRC is funding two new projects in this area.

An area of ongoing research interest of hers is the application of machine learning techniques in order to automate the parts within the verification process that consume large amounts of engineering time, such as test generation and debug.

Teaching

She teachs leading edge Design Verification techniques and methods using industrial strength tools including both state-of-the-art coverage-driven simulation/test-based verification and formal verification. You may want to watch an interview she gaves at DAC 2012 in San Francisco on the content of the Design Verification unit.
Since 2007 Bristol has been selected as lead university to head the Cadence Academic Network in the area of Advanced Verification Methodology. (local CAN info)

In collaboration with a consortium of local microelectronic design companies she has initiated the introduction of the MSc in Advanced Microelectronic Systems Engineering in 2006. She has been the Director of this MSc programme until 2010. The programme is now one of our established Advanced MSc programmes; it attracts excellent students and provides qualified graduates for the local and international microelectronics design industry.

Expertise

She has established Design Automation and Verification as a research and teaching area of international recognition here at Bristol. She sets up and now chairs the Energy-Aware COmputing workshop series and research initiative. She also leads the “Verification and Validation for Safety in Robots” research theme at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Her research activities are focused on the development of system modelling, verification and analysis techniques which allow designers to define a system and to verify or explore its behaviour, e.g. in terms of functional correctness, performance, power dissipation and energy efficiency. Her work includes both formal methods and state-of-the-art test-based approaches.

  • Verification; validation and test
  • Design automation and verification
  • Formal verification and specification
  • Energy aware computing
  • Energy efficient computing
  • Robotics
  • Autonomous systems safety and trust

Keywords

  • Verification
  • Simulation
  • Test
  • Formal methods
  • Modelling
  • Certification
  • Robot safety

University of Bristol

Olayiwola Alatise (Senior Member, IEEE) received the B.Eng. (first class Hons.) degree in electrical and electronics engineering and the Ph.D. degree in microelectronics and semiconductors from Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K., in 2005 and 2008, respectively. In 2004 and 2005, he briefly joined ATMEL North Tyneside where he worked on the process integration of the 130-nm CMOS technology node. In June 2008, he joined the Innovation Research and Development Department, NXP Semiconductors, as a Development Engineer where he designed, processed and qualified discrete power trench MOSFETs for automotive applications and switched-mode power supplies. In November 2010, he joined the University of Warwick, Coventry, U.K., as a Science City Research Fellow to investigate advanced power semiconductor materials and devices for improved energy conversion efficiency. Since February 2019, he has been a Professor in electrical engineering with the University of Warwick. He is the author or coauthor of more than 90 publications in journals and international conferences. His research interests include investigating advanced power semiconductor materials and devices for improved energy conversion efficiency. Prof. Alatise is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics.

University of Warwick

Martin Trefzer is an Anniversary Research Lecturer in the Department of Electronics at York. His research interests include variability aware analogue and digital hardware design, biologically motivated models of hardware design, evolutionary computation, and autonomous fault-tolerance. His current focus is on using bio-inspired techniques to create adaptive, self-healing multi-reconfigurable architectures to tackle nano-scale CMOS design challenges. Martin is co-investigator on 3 currently running EPSRC projects Platform Grant – Bio-inspired Adaptive Architectures and Systems (EP/K040820/1), Graceful (EP/L000563/1) and PAnDA (EP/I005838/1). He is a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the DPG, co-chair of the International Conference of Evolvable Systems (ICES), and vice chair of the IEEE Task Force on Evolvable Hardware.

University of York

Matt graduated from the University of Liverpool after completing a Degree and PhD in Physics. He went on to join EPSRC in 2006, occupying a number of roles across Functional Materials, ICT and finally as Head of Business Engagement, responsible for the strategic relationship management model for business partners and launching the Business Engagement Forum which continues today. After a 12 month secondment to WMG at the University of Warwick, Matt joined Thales in 2017. As Chief Scientist, he is responsible for the academic engagement strategy for Thales Group in the UK, working across the UK business domains and Thales Global R&T community to deliver an effective network of high value partnerships for mutual advantage. He brings a wealth of experience working at the business/university interface from both a government and a private sector perspective.

Chief Scientist, Thales

Merlyne de Souza graduated with a BSc in Physics and Mathematics (1985) from the University of Mumbai, a BE. in Electronics and Communications Engineering (1988) from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and a PhD from the University of Cambridge (1994).

She joined as a Junior Research fellow in ‘95, was promoted to a Senior Research fellow in ‘98 and was appointed Professor in Electronics and Materials at the Emerging Technologies Research Centre, De Montfort University in 2003.

She joined the EEE department at Sheffield as Professor of Microelectronics in 2007. She works in multi-disciplinary research focused on the physics of devices, materials and their microelectronic applications in computing, communications and energy conversion.

Until now, microelectronics has relied on the versatility of silicon CMOS to deliver enhancement in performance by scaling the MOS transistor. She has worked on various aspects of CMOS such as reliability, high-k gate oxides and Indium for retrograde channels, first introduced in production at the 65 nm node. However, scaling (as we know it) is now nearing an end and alternate materials and device architectures are required for future semiconductor applications.

Supervised learning for image and speech recognition, autonomous driving and medical diagnosis in Artificial Intelligence (AI) presently rely on CMOS based deep neural networks. These are inherently power-hungry due to a continuous exchange of information between the required large volume of memory and processing units. It is expected that such Von Neumann architectures will be replaced by neuromorphic systems that are more akin to a biological brain. Prof de Souza team’s has recently demonstrated ZnO/Ta2O5 solid electrolyte thin film transistors with synaptic capabilities.

She is interested in exploring such memristive devices in neuromorphic applications, electrochemical storage and flexible electronics for health.

Her interest in more efficient semiconductors, smart materials and systems that leave a smaller footprint on the environment, spans to GaN for power and RF applications, that she has previously explored in equivalent silicon- based device technologies such as the IGBT and the RF LDMOSFET. These are driven by the automotive, aerospace, space, renewables, telecoms and consumer/industrial electronics sectors.

Her team’s recent work includes a new class of harmonic RF power amplifiers with record efficiency and output power prototyped using commercial GaN devices. They are also working towards a p-type MOSHFET and magnetic thin films for “CMOS in GaN” in power management integrated circuits and current sensors.

University of Sheffield

Michael Hill-King joined Huawei Technologies in June 2015 as Collaboration Director, UK R&D Centre. Michael now leads the team that builds partner relationships, drives technology planning, scouts for great technology, identifies acquisition opportunities and manages a broad portfolio of technology cooperation projects in the UK – to build a better connected world. Important aspects of this role are building and maintaining strong relationships with UK partners, especially universities, and communicating the strengths of UK research and technology to Huawei’s R&D team.

 

Prior to joining Huawei, Michael served as Director of Partnerships & Consultancy at King’s College London. There, he led a portfolio of functions for the university including major commercial partnerships, and knowledge transfer and entrepreneurial schemes. Michael joined King’s in September 2009 from Imperial College London where he led the College’s business development activities in Engineering and Technology, having joined the College in 2003 to manage major research bids and projects.

 

His areas of expertise are in business growth and technology development, knowledge transfer, collaborative research, intellectual property and industry-academic relations. Previously, Michael spent over fifteen years in business, primarily in sales and marketing roles with industrial and scientific equipment companies. Michael read Physics at the University of Sheffield and holds an MBA with distinction.

 

Michael’s achievements in Huawei include strengthening relationships with many leading universities and helping to establish hundreds of research projects with over 30 universities in the UK. He is always searching for cutting-edge technologies that can be foundational for new innovations that can deliver societal benefits. In recent years, he has taken an interest in science and technology policy.

Collaboration Director, Huawei Technologies

Pantelis Georgiou currently holds the position of Professor in Biomedical Electronics at Imperial College London within the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. He is the head of the Bio-inspired Metabolic Technology Laboratory in the Centre for Bio-Inspired Technology; a multi-disciplinary group that invents, develops and demonstrates advanced micro-devices to meet global challenges in biomedical science and healthcare. His research includes ultra-low power micro-electronics, bio-inspired circuits and systems, lab-on-chip technology and application of micro-electronic technology to create novel medical devices. Application areas of his research include new technologies for treatment of diabetes such as the artificial pancreas, novel Lab-on-Chip technology for genomics and diagnostics targeted towards infectious disease and antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and wearable technologies for rehabilitation of chronic conditions.

Dr. Georgiou graduated with a 1st Class Honours MEng Degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering in 2004 and Ph.D. degree in 2008 both from Imperial College London. He then joined the Institute of Biomedical Engineering as Research Associate until 2010, when he was appointed Head of the Bio-inspired Metabolic Technology Laboratory. In 2011, he joined the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, where he currently holds an academic faculty position. He has made significant contributions to the development of integrated chemical-sensing systems in CMOS for Lab-on-Chip applications. He has pioneered the development of the Ion-Sensitive Field Effect Transistor, an integrated pH sensor which is currently being used in next generation DNA sequencing machines and rapid diagnostic systems for detection of infectious diseases. Dr. Georgiou is a senior member of the IEEE and IET and serves on the BioCAS and Sensory Systems technical committees of the IEEE CAS Society. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Sensors and TBioCAS journals. He is also the CAS representative on the IEEE sensors council. In 2013 he was awarded the IET Mike Sergeant Achievement Medal for his outstanding contributions to engineering and development of the bio-inspired artificial pancreas. In 2017, he was also awarded the IEEE Sensors Council Technical Achievement award. He is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer in Circuits and Systems.

Imperial College London 

Paul provides support for the technical communities in the power electronics, machines and drives (PEMD). He works across the supply chain from semiconductor materials companies to system integrators.

Paul works with people and organisations who are interested in the field of PEMD from all the sectors, with interests in electrification for a Net Zero economy.

He can help fast track innovative projects in a range of sectors including power electronics, drives, machines, semiconductors, electrification, rail, marine, aerospace, automotive, agritech and energy.

Paul also assists innovators and large industrial partners navigate the path to successful exploitation within a Net Zero economy, across all sectors.

Paul is the Lead on the ISCF Wave 3 Driving the Electric Revolution (DER) programme and works closely with the Innovate UK DER business team. The challenge represents an investment of up to £80 million over 4 years, set up to help UK businesses seize the opportunities presented by the transition to a low carbon economy.

Prior to joining KTN, Paul worked in semiconductor and photonic companies in the UK, Europe and the USA. He has a BSc and PhD in Chemistry.

Interim Head of Enabling Technology, KTN

Professor Piotr Dudek received his mgr inz degree from the Technical University of Gdańsk, Poland, in 1997 and the MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in 1996 and 2000 respectively. He worked as a Research Associate, and since 2002 as a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader at UMIST/The University of Manchester. He is currently a Professor of Circuits and Systems in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Manchester.

He was a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2008/09, a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics at the Gdansk University of Technology in 2015, Royal Academy of Engineering Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow in 2015/2016 and visiting researcher at the Sorbonne University in 2017/18.

He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and a member of IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Technical Committees on Neural Systems, and on Cellular Neural Networks and Array Processing. We was the Chair of the IEEE CAS Technical Committee on Sensory Systems (2015-17). He was an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II (2016-17), Review Editor for Frontiers in Neuroscience and an active reviewer for many journals and funding agencies. He has been a member of Scientific Committees, Track Chair or Session Chair at many international conferences, including IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. His work received several Best Paper and Best Demo awards at international conferences (ISCAS, IJCNN, CNNA, ICDSC), and he has given many keynote and invited talks, and acted as external examiner to numerous PhD theses worldwide.

His research interest are in the area of integrated circuit design, especially vision sensors, cellular processor arrays, analogue and mixed-mode processing hardware, neuromorphic engineering and brain-inspired systems. He has published over 100 scientific papers and has current research grant funding of over £1.5M in these areas.

University of Manchester

Dr Rishad Shafik is a Senior Lecturer within the µSystems Research Group at Newcastle University. He is internationally recognised for his research on hardware/software co-design in autonomous electronic systems. He has co-edited one book and published 110+ top-tier refereed articles in relevant areas, with 3 best paper award nominations. He is currently PI of a number of projects funded by Lloyd’s Register Foundation ICON, Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering, EPSRC and HiSilicon; he is also involved in several other projects, e.g. as a Co-I of the AIEverywhere project funded by The Research Council of Norway and as a Steering Member of eFutures v2.0. Previously, he had been Co-I in 4 EPSRC- and ERC-funded projects, including the PRiME Programme. He is an active contributor in international conference technical programme and journal editorial committees. He was the General Chair of DFT’17; currently a TPC Member of Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) since 2018, the Track Chair of ISVLSI2020, the General Chair of UKCAS2020 and a Guest Editor of Royal Society Philosophical Transactions special theme issue on “Harmonising Energy-Autonomous Computing and Intelligence”. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a Member of IET.

University of Newcastle

Robert Mullins is a Reader in Computer Architecture at the Department of Computer Science and Technology. His current research is focused in the area of hardware accelerators for machine learning, chip multiprocessors and open-source chip design.

He is a founder and director of lowRISC. lowRISC is a not-for-profit company using collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open-source silicon designs and tools. lowRISC stewards the OpenTitan project.

He was also a founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a UK charity that promotes the study of computer science and electronics at the school level.

Dr. Mullins is a Fellow of St. John’s College and Director of Studies for Computer Science at St. John’s College and Peterhouse College.

University of Cambridge 

Srinjoy Mitra received his B.S. degree in physics and electronics from Calcutta, India and his M.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. After spending a short time in the electronics industry in India and in Japan, he received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH Zurich in 2004.

During his PhD he worked on neuromorphic systems, a research track that uses state-of-the-art electronics technology to build artificial systems inspired by the brain.

Between 2008 and 2010 he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), Baltimore, USA. At JHU he was part of a DARPA funded project that intended to provide sensory feedback to amputees with prosthetic limbs.

He then joined the medical electronics team at IMEC, Belgium and worked there as a senior scientist until January 2016. At IMEC he had taken up lead roles in various industrial and public funded projects primarily related to bio-potential recording. Electro-encephalography (EEG) measurement ICs developed by him have been successfully validated in clinical environment and is now commercialized.

For the last few years Dr. Mitra led multiple projects on neural implants for central and peripheral nervous system. This resulted in the development of generations of CMOS neural recording probes with the highest electrode density. His work helped launch a spinoff (neuopixels.org) that provides this novel neural recording hardware to neuroscience labs around the world.

Dr. Mitra returned to academia as a faculty member in the Biomedical Engineering division at the University of Glasgow in 2016; and he moved to the Integrated Micro and Nano Systems, University of Edinburgh as a Senior Lecturer, the following year.

Srinjoy specialises in neuromorphic engineering and analog circuit design; but has published widely across his main research interests of low-power analog circuit design, medical electronics and neurotechnology.

He is also the co-inventor in 3 patent applications and was the recipient of Swiss National Science foundation (SNF) Prospective Researcher award in 2008.

He is currently working on multiple projects related to wearable/implanted medical devices and also on environmental sensors.

Srinjoy is an elected member of Global Young Academy (GYA), an international society of young academics that bring them together to address topics of global importance. He co-leads the working-group on Open-Science at GYA. He is also the co-chair of the Diversity and Inclusion committee at the School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh.

University of Edinburgh

Tiffany joined Queen’s University 4 years’ ago as a PA to Professor Roger Woods and Professor Sean McLoone, working within Electronics, Computer Engineering and Energy Power and Intelligent Control Clusters. She also works in the Pioneering Research Program; Intelligent, Autonomous Manufacturing Systems, iAMS

Tiffany started working with the eFutures team back in March 2019 taking on financial elements of the grant before taking on a more involved role as the project administrator working closely with Beth McEvoy.

Prior to joining Queen’s, Tiffany worked for Marie Curie for 9 years. Starting out as a facilities and finance administrator in the Belfast Hospice, Tiffany moved to a position in People and Organisational Development as a Practice Development Facilitator Administrator covering Northern Ireland and Eastern England whilst also working as the PA to the Head of Practice Development.

Clerical Officer, Queen’s University, Belfast

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