A hope you all managed to have a bit of a break over the summer.
First off, a very warm welcome to our two new colleagues, Davide Bertozzi and Chenghua Lin. David has joined as a Reader in the APT group. Previously he worked at the University of Ferrara. In 2018 he was awarded the Wolfgang Mehr Award from IHP Microelectronics, a Leibniz Institute for innovative microelectronics in Germany, for his capability to link emerging technologies to system-level design. The mission of his research is to stay at the forefront of system innovation by leveraging the enabling features of interconnection architectures and technologies. His current interests concern emerging computing and interconnect technologies, ranging from neuromorphic computing to analog accelerators, and from asynchronous networks-on-chip to silicon nanophotonic networks. He is a member of the Hipeac Network-of-Excellence on high-performance embedded architectures and compilation. Davide’s office is IT208.
Chenghua has joined us as a Professor of Natural Language Processing. His research centres on Natural Language Processing and Generation (NLP/NLG), Machine Learning, and the intersection between them, with specific interests encompassing large language models (LLMs), data-to-text generation, dialogue systems, text summarisation, metaphor processing, as well as representation learning for music and speech. Currently, he serves as the Secretary of the ACL SIGGEN Board and has recently been elected as a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee. He also serves as Associate Editor for the journals Neurocomputing and Computer Speech and Language. Chenghua’s office is Kilburn 2.28.
Congratulations to Lucas and to Christoforos
Congratulations to Lucas whose 2009 paper “SMT-Based Bounded Model Checking for Embedded ANSI-C Software" has been selected by the steering committee of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering as recipient of one the ASE Most Influential Paper awards (for papers published between 2009-2011). The paper has been selected for its breakthrough contribution on the verification for embedded ANSI C-C software.
Congratulations to Christoforos as the consortium he leads (which includes CNRS and Thales) was recently successful in securing significant European funding for their Skyrmionic Artificial Neural Network (SkyANN) project. SkyANN proposes a groundbreaking paradigm for neuromorphic computing, closely emulating brain neurophysiology by combining skyrmionic quasiparticles, which mimic neurotransmitters and facilitate complex computations at the synapse level, with electrical CMOS connections that simulate the propagation of action potentials among neurons for rapid and dense inter-layer connectivity.
Update on posts
To update you on the recent round of Robotics interviews, we ended up offering two positions - one in EEE and one in CS. Negotiations with our top candidates are ongoing. Additionally, we have received 144 applications for the recently-advertised L/SL-level ML position and are aiming to have the interviews complete by mid-October.
UG Numbers
Our target was for 310 students to be admitted to our UG degree this year - split as 170 Home (H) and 140 Overseas (OS). On A-levels results day we had enough acceptances to hit the overall target. We got close to the targets by fee status (OS and H) although we slightly over-recruited at H to compensate for not hitting the OS target. Right now, we are monitoring registrations as the exact numbers won’t stabilise until late September. The models assume some students won’t turn up despite being accepted, hence the uncertainty on the final numbers – but we should be close to 310. A huge thank you to Markel, Ellie, Jake and the rest of the admissions team.
Hopefully I’ll see many of you at our next departmental meeting and ‘Welcome back’ party on the 14th.
Andrew
Erika Buzink-Wallis
Ruth Maddocks
Sarah Chatwin
Sarah Millington