Welcome to the 2021 Annual Report from the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Embedded Intelligence. You can read here what our students and researchers have been working on this year, of great challenges due to the global pandemic. Despite that, there are great stories inside.

You can read the report about the Centre here. 

This Annual Report gives an overview of all the activities for the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Embedded Intelligence for 2021. It includes information about our:

  • Cohort of students: graduated researchers, those wrapping up their degree now, and the active cohorts.
  • Training and Dissemination of Research events attended by our students.
  • Stories from our graduating students; their reflections on what their PhD journey was and how they experienced it.
  • Our Alumni: where they are now
  • Selected Publications
  • Advocacy of the Centre for Manufacturing and Digital technologies.  

If you have any questions about what you read today, or would like to know more, do not hesitate to get in touch. 

Cohort 4 researcher, Maren Schnieder, presented at the IEEE Forum on Integrated and Sustainable Transportation Systems (Forum-ISTS2020) and moderated a session about traffic modelling and control. The conference was an opportunity for academia, industry, and public authorities to discuss the future of mobility especially electrification, sharification, and connected automation.The virtual the conference included a range of activities from pre-recorded presentations, live key notes to a live demo of an autonomous vehicle and social activities such as pub quiz and an online social dinner.  

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Cohort 4 student, Matt Smith attended the Doctoral Consortium on 9th and 10th of July 2020 which took place online due to the pandemic. The event was hosted by Kristina Höök (KTH), Mark Blythe (Northumbria University), and Caroline Hummels (TU/e).

 

Matt says ‘The Doctoral Consortium consisted of going through each of the twelve student attendees’ work, discussing, offering ideas, references, and asking questions about the contributions of the work and next steps. There was also time spent discussing general elements of PhDs and career planning beyond the PhD.

This event was hosted during the Designing Interactive System (DIS) conference. The theme of this conference was “beyond human-centred design” which align exceptionally well with my work. The Doctoral Consortium provided me with contacts (which may already be turning into collaborations), they helped me to reflect on how my PhD is going to constitute a contribution to knowledge, and began the process of considering post-PhD/postdoc opportunities and strategies.’

 

The paper Matt submitted was also put into the companion proceedings, it can be found here:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3393914.3395832

 

ILM

9 November 2020

Our cohort 2 student, Melanie Zimmer has completed her ILM Level 3 Certificate in Leadership and Management! Congratulations Melanie! 

ILM

2 November 2020

A huge congratulations to cohort 3 student, Marcus Pollard on completing his ILM Level 2 Enterprise Awareness and Level 3 Managing Workplace Projects! Way to go Marcus!!

 

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In May, Matthew Hammond presented at the Oil & Gas Focus Group Meeting. The meetings are normally run two to three times a year by TUV-SUD, switching between venues in Norwich and Aberdeen.

Matthew says: "I presented at last years’ meeting in Norwich and was selected to present at this year’s event alongside two other presenters. This year, the meeting was held online for the first time using Microsoft Teams. I presented on a slightly different topic to my PhD project; gas quality measurement challenges in a hydrogen economy. It was quite relaxing presenting from my own home but strange not being able to see the audience. Martin Hanton from TÜV SÜD National Engineering Laboratory also gave a presentation on hydrogen which shows that emphasis is shifting towards renewable energy even in the Oil & Gas sector. Martin talked about hydrogen measurement but from a flow metering perspective, so it was interesting to hear a different side to that topic. At its peak, the number of participants reached around 60 which was a good turnout for the first virtual meeting. The downside of virtual conferences is not being able to talk face to face with the other participants. Overall, everything went smoothly, particularly with the presentation handovers which can sometimes be a technical challenge. I look forward to attending or presenting at future Oil & Gas Focus Group meetings, virtually or in person."

 

 

 

One of our PhD students, Melanie Zimmer, recently had the opportunity to present some of the Intelligent Automation Centre’s and her work at the 17th edition of INDIN2019 held in Helsinki-Espoo, Finland. This year’s conference took place 22nd to 25th July and was hosted by Aalto University. Overall, the conference was well attended and received.

It offered a wide variety of activities: Covering 14 special sessions and three Industry Forum sessions across the three days of the conference, including an additional day on Monday with workshops and hands-on tutorials under the theme of Industrial Applications of Artificial Intelligence. In addition, a Women in Engineering workshop was held on Wednesday afternoon to promote the involvement of women in science, and on Thursday morning attendees had the opportunity to visit ABB in Helsinki or Konecranes in Hyvinkää.

More information about the conference and the Intelligent Automation Centre can be found here:

 

Indin2019

 

3rd UK-RAS Conference

10 October 2020

On 17th April, the University of Lincoln hosted the 3rd EPSRC UK-Robotics and Autonomous Systems (UK-RAS) Network Conference. Due to the current situation of the Covid-19 outbreak, the conference was held virtually. The conference is in particular aimed at PhD students & early-career robotics researchers and offered current insights into work around the topic of “Robots into the Real World”. Besides invited speakers from the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, and the University of Edinburgh, researchers got a chance to present their work in oral and poster presentations. Overall, the conference had 64 submissions, with 15 oral and 41 poster presentations accepted – including some of our research students:

Rankin, J, Justham, L, Goh, Y.M., Morley, J: Task Delegation and Architecture for Autonomous Excavators

Foley, B, Ferreira, P, Zimmer, M: Towards Gamification of the Ramp-up Process for Industry 4.0.

Zimmer, M, Al-Yacoub, A, Ferreira, P, Lohse, N: Towards Human-Chatbot Interaction: A Virtual Assistant for the Ramp-up Process.

More information can be found here:

www.ukras.org/news-and-events/uk-ras/

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