Thought Leadership Event: Dr Sandy Brownlee on "Improving trust in the results of search-based optimisation"

 Date: 21st January 2021, 14:00 - 15:00

Speaker: Dr Sandy Brownlee, University of Stirling
Title: Improving trust in the results of search-based optimisation 

The event was hosted by BT Applied Research's Dr Gilbert Owusu and his team.

Search-based methods, including techniques like metaheuristics, local search, and evolutionary algorithms, are powerful tools for finding good solutions to difficult optimisation problems. Usually the problem is formulated as a representation (what a solution looks like) and a fitness function (which measures the quality of solutions). The algorithm will explore the space, generating new solutions through a variety of randomised processes, and eventually settle on a good solution. Sometimes the solutions found by these processes can be a little unexpected or "outside the box", which can make acceptance difficult. 

In this talk, I looked at a few approaches I've taken to using visualisation for trying to improve trust in the solutions of search-based optimisation. These are about trying to understand what the algorithm has learned about the problem during the search, and how robust the solutions it found really are. 

The example applications are a software tuning problem and some problems in building design, but the general principles should be much more widely applicable. 

Dr Sandy Brownlee joined the Division of Computing Science and Mathematics at the University of Stirling in 2013, where he is currently a Lecturer. He gained BSc and PhD degrees from Robert Gordon University in 2005 and 2009 respectively, and has also worked at Loughborough University, and as a software engineer in the energy industry. He is interested in "explainable" optimisation: techniques that find good solutions for optimisation problems but also reveal underlying information about the problem to help people make informed decisions. 

His main focus is in metaheuristics, including evolutionary algorithms and estimation of distribution algorithms; related issues such as fitness modelling (and mining such models), handling constraints and multiple objectives, decision support, and what makes particular algorithms suited to particular problems. This work has resulted in over 60 publications in peer-reviewed venues, and has found applications in areas including scheduling and simulation-based optimisation in civil engineering and transport, software engineering, healthcare, and art. 

Thought Leadership Event: Prof M Jones, Prof D Archambault, Prof X Xie on "Data Visualisation Techniques"

Date: 26th November 2020, 13:30 - 14:30
Speakers: Professors from the Computational Foundry at Swansea University.
Title: Data Visualisation Techniques 
Registration is closed now

The event was hosted by BT Applied Research's Dr Anasol Pena Rios (2020 WeAreTechWomen100 Award winner).

Prof Mark Jones

"Interesting algorithms, techniques and visualisations!"

In the past few years I’ve been interested in developing new approaches for rendering, accelerating algorithms and immersing human experts in their data. Some of the areas I’ve been deeply involved with have involved the following techniques: photon mapping, ray tracing, global illumination, visualization, kernel density estimation, accelerometry data, Machine Learning, lossless data compression, transfer functions, probability density functions, clustering, Monte-Carlo techniques, statistics, GPU acceleration, distance measures, Lloyd’s relaxation, Voronoi diagrams, vector/chamfer distances, volume rendering, data structures (kd-trees). 

I will show some work in these areas and adapt the talk as we go along depending on the kinds of research you’d like to hear about.

Mark W. Jones received B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Swansea University. He is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Swansea University. His research interests include global illumination, visualization, data science, and associated algorithms and data structures.

He has published over 25 journal papers since 2013 in the area of Visual Computing, Data Analysis, and Machine Learning, received Best Paper and ACM Computing Reviews Best of 2013 awards. He has been an investigator on six EPSRC projects (including three multi-site, and four as PI in the complementary areas of Computer Graphics and Visualization) and has been an active member of the UK Visual Computing community for 25 years, including programme chair of BMVC 2015 and conference chair of the EGUK conference in 2002 and 2003. He has over 80 papers in the area of Visual Computing, and a patent.

Daniel Archambault
"Visualising and Clustering Networks and Text"

Networks and text are important data types in data science, but as their scale increases it is difficult to visualise all of the information directly. 

In this presentation, I present some of my research on visualising and clustering this information for effective analysis. In particular, an analysis of the Irish blogosphere and an experiment to compare automatically detected and human-generated clusters in social media networks.

Daniel Archambault is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Swansea University. His main area of research is visual analytics, in particular for networks, and human-centred perspectives of visualisation. In this talk, he will present some projects on network and document clustering and visualisation. 

Prof Xianghua Xie

Visual Learning and Graph Deep Learning” 

Xianghua Xie is a Professor in the Visual Computing Group at the Department of Computer Science, Swansea University. He was a recipient of an RCUK Academic Fellowship (tenure-track research-focused lectureship) between September 2007 and March 2012. He was appointed as a Senior Lecturer from October 2012, then an Associate Professor in April 2013, and a full Professor from March 2019. Prior to his position at Swansea, he was a Research Associate in the Computer Vision Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, where he completed both his PhD (2006) and MSc (2002) degrees.

Professor Xie has strong research interests in the areas of Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence and their applications to real-world problems. He has been an investigator on several research projects funded by external bodies, such as EPSRC, Leverhulme, NISCHR, and WORD. 

Among his research works, those of significant importance include detecting abnormal patterns in complex visual and medical data, assisted diagnosis using automated image analysis, fully automated volumetric image segmentation, registration, and motion analysis, machine understanding of human action, efficient deep learning, and deep learning on irregular domains. 

By 2020, he has published over 150 fully refereed research publications and (co-)edited several conference proceedings. He is an associate editor of IET Computer Vision and an editorial member of a number of other international journals and has chaired and co-chaired several international conferences, e.g. BMVC2015 and BMVC2019. More information is here

Thought Leadership event, NG-CDI series: Dr Ajith Parlikad on “Intelligent Asset Management for Service Assurance & Infrastructure Management"

3rd in a series on "NG-CDI: Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure" 

Video replays of the first two events: NG-CDI Archive

Thought Leadership events overview

Date: 8th December 2020, 13:00 - 14:00
Registration is closed now

Speaker: Dr Ajith Parlikad. Reader in Asset Management, University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacture.

Introduced by: Arjun Parekh. Self-Learning Networks, BT Applied Research.

Title: “Intelligent Asset Management for Service Assurance & Infrastructure Management”

“Adding intelligence to network assets offers the possibility that the infrastructure can trigger appropriate maintenance processes. Prognostic maintenance scheduling concentrates engineering effort on reducing the risk to customer service and costs. Assets can learn from their own experiences, or from swarms of similar assets to anticipate their remaining useful life and co-operatively decide the best means to maintain service, reconfiguring themselves or calling for human help. Risk models embrace the likely propagation of problems across the regions of the network and between other networks such as the power network. The prospect is offered of determining the best action at the time, based on the dynamics of the existing traffic pattern.”

BT-Pembroke Lecture: Dr Richard Caddis, BT on "Black swan or new normal? The changing face of managing during COVID-19"

Speaker: Dr Richard Caddis, Director of Health, Safety & Wellbeing, and Chief Medical Officer at BT

Date: Monday 16th November 2020, 6pm - 7pm. 

Registration: Open, 

The annual BT-Pembroke Lecture, which will be held via Zoom on Monday 16th November from 6pm to 7pm. The lecture will be given by Dr Richard Caddis, Director of Health, Safety & Wellbeing, and Chief Medical Officer at BT. Richard will present ‘Black swan or new normal? The changing face of managing during COVID-19’. 

BT has been a member of the Pembroke College Corporate Partnership Programme since 2003. This longstanding and mutually beneficial partnership is celebrated annually at the BT-Pembroke Lecture.

This year’s lecture focusses on the COVID-19 pandemic and the huge implications for us all. How should companies respond to a pandemic and what does that response mean for their employees? Dr Richard Caddis will explain the role of a chief medical officer in a large corporation and how BT has responded to the pandemic. He’ll delve into the role of companies in ensuring their employees’ health, safety & wellbeing, and will explore what this and past pandemics can tell us about pandemics in the future.

Please register to attend attend here and joining instructions will be sent nearer to the time. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Pembroke College at Corporate@pem.cam.ac.uk

Frank Carver: Speaker at the TFNetwork Lightning Talk competition

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
PGR SPOTLIGHT DAY
Held on 12th - 16th October 2020: Five days of Physics goodness on

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Frank Carver has over a quarter of a century of experience in the software industry as an employee, consultant and entrepreneur, and is also a qualified teacher and trainer with experience teaching at college and university level. Recently, Frank has become increasingly concerned with the huge environmental impact of computer technology, combined with a general disregard for such issues in business and academia, and has taken a few years off work to research for a PhD in the area. Frank lives in Ipswich with his family and currently survives by coaching students on how to thrive in the complex and unfamiliar world of today’s university. 

LinkedIn

Poster presentation

What do Software Developers Know About Sustainability?

Exact values vary, but some 2019 sources estimate that the internet and its associated technology consumes as much as 10% of the world’s electricity and has an environmental impact equivalent to the aviation industry. While the use of aviation has drastically reduced because of the COVID19 pandemic, use of the internet has greatly increased, so the current usage is probably considerably higher. The aim of this ongoing PhD research is to educate and inform developers to make smarter choices about the impact of their work, but in order to do that it is important to understand how software developers learn their skills and attitudes in the first place. That means examining how, and what, they are taught.

Download slides (.pdf)

 

Hannah Steventon: Speaker at the TFNetwork Lightning Talk competition

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
PGR SPOTLIGHT DAY

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020: Five days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Dr Hannah Steventon is a Research Associate at the University of Suffolk, working on the DfT-funded Smarter Suffolk project with Suffolk County Council, BT and other partners. Smarter Suffolk is building a county-wide Live Lab of thousands of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, measuring environmental and traffic conditions across the county to showcase competing innovative technologies. Big Data sets will be accumulated in a vendor-neutral data exchange for analytics applied to a range of Local Authority services. Existing and new communications networks are enabling the IoT deployment, in part using the existing powered lighting column infrastructure.

Initially a hydrogeologist, in her early career Hannah led regeneration projects for large civil engineering firms to assess and remediate contaminated land. Her professional experience includes sophisticated software analysis and modelling of large data sets, site project management of civils contractors, and laboratory chemical analysis. Her doctoral research showed how natural organic matter affects the movement of contaminants through the ground, and she taught Hydrogeology and Pollution at Birkbeck, University of London.

In recent years, as a computing educator and STEM Ambassador, Hannah taught hundreds of children coding, electronics and control systems, using the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Crumble and Micro:Bit. Projects have included running children’s code on the International Space Station; developing an IoT device to win a major national competition; robots in school corridors; and a large class of 10 year olds soldering self-built games consoles.

Hannah holds a MA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, and an MSc and PhD in Hydrogeology from University College London. She is a Chartered Geologist and Fellow of the Geological Society, and a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator.

Interesting fact

When Hannah used to teach computing to ten year olds, the children wrote Python programmes to run on a Raspberry Pi to measure temperature and warn when it was too hot or cold. The children’s code was sent to run in space measuring temperature on the International Space Station and displaying the outcome to the astronauts. 
LinkedIn
Poster presentation

Smarter Suffolk: Sensors and data for public services
Download slides (.pdf)

Daniel O'Connor, UCL: Speaker at the TFNetwork Lightning Talk competition

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
PGR SPOTLIGHT DAY

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020: Five days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Daniel O'Connor is a University College London (UCL) PhD student sponsored by BT, researching quantum annealing and its potential for practical implementation. 

He enjoys a good cup of coffee, and a game of football.
LinkedIn

Quantum annealing for network optimisation
Download slides (.pdf)

Yi-Tun Lin: Speaker at the TFNetwork Lightning Talk competition

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
PGR SPOTLIGHT DAY

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020: Five days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Yi-Tun (Ethan) Lin is a Ph.D. student in the Colour & Imaging Lab, School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, UK. 

He received a joint M.Sc. degree in Colour Science in 2018, from University Jean Monnet (France), University of Granada (Spain) and University of Eastern Finland (Finland), and a B.Sc. degree in Physics in 2016, from National Taiwan University, Taiwan. His research interest is physics and machine learning-based spectral reconstruction.
LinkedIn

Physically Plausible Spectral Reconstruction
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Kakia Chatsiou, University of Essex: Speaker at the TFNetwork Lightning Talk competition

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
PGR SPOTLIGHT DAY

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020: Five days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

I am currently working as a Senior Researcher, at the ESRC Business and Local Government Data Research Centre. 

My research focuses on automated, quantitative methods of processing large amounts of textual and other forms of unstructured data – mainly political texts and social media – and the methodology of text mining for social science. I have published on applications of measurement and the analysis of text as data on machine learning methods and deep learning. I am also applying machine learning and natural language processing techniques to the analysis of public policy. My substantive research interests centre on resilience and the role of public policies and institutions at different levels of governance in shaping it. 

I am a member of the Natural Language and Information Processing Research Group, the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences.
LinkedIn

Recent publications:

• Chatsiou, K. and Mikhaylov, SJ., (2020). Deep Learning for Political Science. In: The SAGE Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations. Editors: Curini, L. and Franzese, R., . SAGE Publications Ltd. 1053- 1078. 9781526459930
• Chamberlain, J., Turpin, B., Maged, A., Chatsiou, A. and O'Callaghan, K., (2020) Designing for Collective Intelligence and Community Resilience on Social Networks. Human Computation 
• Yannitell Reinhardt, G. and Chatsiou, K., (2019). Using community education interventions to build resilience and avert crises: how accidental dwelling fires decreased in Essex County, UK. Local Government Studies. 45 (3), 394-412

Political text classification using Neural Networks

We build a sentence-level political discourse classifier using existing human expert annotated corpora of political manifestos from the Manifestos Project (Volkens et al.,2020a) and applying them to a corpus of COVID-19 Press Briefings (Chatsiou,2020). We use manually annotated political manifestos as training data to train a local topic Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier; then apply it to the COVID-19 Press Briefings Corpus to automatically classify sentences in the test corpus. We report on a series of experiments with CNN trained on top of pre-trained embeddings for sentence-level classification tasks. We show that CNN combined with transformers like BERT outperforms CNN combined with other embeddings (Word2Vec, Glove, ELMo) and that it is possible to use a pre-trained classifier to conduct automatic classification on different political texts without additional training.

Download slides (.pdf)

Eleanor Crane, UCL/IBM: Speaker at the TFNetwork Lightning Talk competition

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
PGR SPOTLIGHT DAY

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020: Five days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

I'm a PhD student researching quantum computer entangling gates in silicon at the London Center for Nanotechnology. Being part of the Advanced Characterisation of Materials CDT has linked me up with many like-minded PhD students here at University College London and Imperial College London. I'm also on IBM's community team for the open source quantum algorithm software Qiskit.

LinkedIn

From two qubit entangling gates to quantum algorithms, and the steps in-between

 

Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, CEO Nu Quantum: Speaker at our virtual Autumn 2020 conference "Let's get Physical"

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
QUANTUM

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020 - 5 days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Carmen Palacios-Berraquero is CEO of Nu-Quantum. 

Nu Quantum aims to be the platform technology for the Quantum Internet. Our key is that we have technology that can generate quantum light: this means single particles of light (single photons) that will carry single quantum bits of information, and this will be the medium through which links are established between the nodes of a quantum network. This network, the so-called Quantum Internet / Quantum Cloud, is the predicted parallel network of the future, where super secure and super powerful computations will be done. 

Before starting her company, Carmen was a research scientist at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD thesis title was: 'Quantum-confined Excitons in 2-dimensional Materials'. The family of 2D materials she studies are transition metal dichalcogenides (2D-TMDs). She won the 2018 Jocelyn Bell Burnell prize for discovering and patenting a method to create single-photon emitting sites in atomically-thin materials and for using a 2-dimensional decive to all-electrically induce quantum emission from these sites.

Read more about Carmen here.
LinkedIn

Quantum, an Industry Perspective
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Prof Robert Piechocki, University of Bristo: Speaker at our conference "Let's get Physical"

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
WIRELESS

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020 - 5 days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Robert J Piechocki is Professor in the School of Computer Science, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and Engineering Maths. His research interests span all areas of connected intelligent systems. His domain expertise is Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV), and wireless sensing for eHealth.  

He has published over 200 papers in peer-reviewed international journals and conferences and holds 13 patents in these areas. Robert is leading wireless connectivity and sensing research activities for the IRC SPHERE project (winner of 2016 World Technology Award). Robert is also a PI for several current high-profile projects in networks, connectivity and sensing funded by industry, Innovate UK and EPSRC such as VENTURER, FLOURISH, NG-CDI, OPERA.
LinkedIn

Wireless Systems, Self-driving Vehicles and Digital Twins
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Autumn 2020 virtual conference: All video recordings in one place

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020
Held on 12th - 16th October 2020. 5 days of Physics goodness on

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Watch on YouTube: Playlist "Let's get Physical" conference, Autumn 2020

Opening Keynote

Prof Tim Whitley, BT, MD Applied Research and MD of ‘Adastral Park’

"Purposeful Innovation in the age of digital transformation"

Download slides (.pdf)

 

OPTICS

The full OPTICS session

 Full recording of Opening Keynote, Optics presentations and forum discussion

 

Recordings of individual Speakers

Prof Andrew Ellis, Aston University
"An 'academic' career in photonics"
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Ardel Iddin, ADVA
"Total Internal Reflections"
Download slides (.pdf)

Neil Parkin, BT, Optics Team

"Optical Research at BT"
Download slides (.pdf)

 

 

WIRELESS

The full WIRELESS session

 Full recording of  Wireless presentations and forum discussion

 

Recordings of individual Speakers

Maria Cuevas, BT, Mobile & 5G team

"Wireless Technologies: Emerging Challenges and Opportunities"

Download slides (pdf)

Francis Mullany, Nokia Bell Labs, E2E Networking & Service Automation Lab 

"Why Can't Wireless Hardware Be more like Software?"

 Download slides (pdf)

Prof Robert Piechocki, University of Bristol 

"5G networks, self-driving vehicles, and digital twins”

Download slides (pdf)

PGR SPOTLIGHT DAY 

The full PGR Spotlight session

Full recording of  the PGR Spotlight day

Recordings of individual Speakers

Opening Keynote

Richard Burguete, NPL, Postgraduate Institute Director

"The Postgraduate Institute of Measurement Science: Celebrating 5 Years of Collaboration "

Download slides (.pdf)

Lightning Talks

Frank Carver, University of Suffolk

"What do Software Developers Know About Sustainability?"

Download slides (.pdf)

Kakia Chatsiou, University of Essex 

"Political text classification using Neural Networks"

Download slides (.pdf)

Eleanor Crane, UCL/IBM

"From two qubit entangling gates to quantum algorithms, and the steps in-between"

no slides available

Yi-Tun Lin, University of East Anglia

"Physically Plausible Spectral Reconstruction" 

Download slides (.pdf)

 

Daniel O'Connor, UCL

Quantum annealing for network optimisation

Download slides (.pdf)

Hanna Steventon, University of  Suffolk

Smarter Suffolk: Sensors and data for public services

 Download slides (.pdf)

 

Closing Keynote

Prof Mike Payne, Cambridge University, Department of Physics, The Cavendish Laboratory

"Reflections on a career in science"

 Download slides (.pdf)

 

 

QUANTUM

The full Quantum session 

Full recording of the Quantum presentations and forum discussion

Recordings of individual Speakers

Prof Kai Bongs, University of Birmingham

"Quantum Technology - Sensors that Change the World"

 Download slides (.pdf)

Cathy White, BT, Quantum Technology Research Team

"Quantum Technologies"

 Download slides (.pdf)

Marco Menchetti, BT, Quantum Technology Research Team

"Atomic Clocks: The most precise instruments in the world"

 Download slides (.pdf)

Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, CEO Nu Quantum

"Quantum, an Industry Perspective"

 Download slides (.pdf)

DATA SCIENCE & AI

The full Data Science & AI session

Full recording of the Data Science & AI presentations and forum discussion

Recordings of individual Speakers

Detlef Nauck, BT, Head of AI & Data Science

"Data Science and AI at BT"

 Download slides (.pdf)

 

Final Keynote

Prof Jesse Thaler

MIT, Director, NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions

"Collision Course - Artificial Intelligence meets Fundamental Physics"

Download slides (.pdf)

 

 

Maria Cuevas, BT: Speaker at our virtual Autumn 2020 conference "Let's get Physical"

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
WIRELESS

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020 - 5 days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Maria Cuevas is the head of the research core networks and services team in BT’s Research and Technology organisation. 

She has 17 years’ experience in the telecoms operator business, having held positions in design, architecture and research organisations. She has taken part in transformational projects in BT, including the development of an all-IP network architecture or the design of the first converged residential voice product offered by BT to their customers, amongst others. 

She has also participated in standards organisation, including ETSI and is a regular speaker at public conferences. At present, her team focuses on the evolution of 5G technologies to ensure that key requirements like convergence are supported by the next generation of telecoms networks, to ensure that operators can offer an excellent and seamless quality of experience to their customers.
LinkedIn

Wireless Technologies: Emerging challenges and opportunities
Download slides (.pdf)

Francis Mullany, Nokia Bell Labs: Speaker at our virtual Autumn 2020 conference "Let's get Physical"

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
WIRELESS

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020. Five days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Dr Francis (Frank) Mullany is an end-to-end communications research strategist with Nokia Bell Labs.  He is fascinated by the connection between innovative research and real-world impact. A key question for him is, how can communications technologies change the world for the better.

He received B.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electronic Engineering from University College Dublin, National University of Ireland, in 1992 and 1998, respectively.  In 1998, Frank joined Bell Labs, first with the Wireless Research Laboratory in the UK and then helped to establish, in 2004, Bell Labs Ireland in Dublin.  Between 2006 and 2013, he built up the RF Antennas and Front-End Technologies department.  

In 2013, Frank established the Internet of Things research program, before moving across to the CTO organization to lead Network Compliance, Reliability, Security and Corporate Standards organization in 2014.  He was also the acting site leader for Bell Labs Ireland that year.  In 2015, he returned to Bell Labs Research to take up his current strategy role, now with the E2E Networking & Service Automation Lab.

Why Can’t Wireless Hardware Be More Like Software?

Virtualization, programmability, cloudification, software-defined networking … all key buzzwords for the on-going revolution in communication networks.  But underpinning all that software flexibility and scalability is the physical reality of the underlying hardware.  In particular, hardware for wireless access networks often stays stubbornly rigid and static, despite years of work on tunability, software-defined radio, and cognitive radio.  Why is that?

This talk explores the underlying physical constraints of wireless networking and the challenge they pose for increased flexibility and agility in RF and baseband hardware.   Various technology approaches are assessed against the harsh realities of those challenges, providing pointers to the future of RF hardware tunability and baseband agility.

Download slides (.pdf)

Thought Leadership event, NG-CDI series: Prof Ning Wang, Dr Charalampos Rotsos, Peter Willis on “Intent-Based Networking”

2nd in a series on "NG-CDI: Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure" 

Thought Leadership events overview

Video replay: NG-CDI Archive

Speakers

Prof Ning Wang
Networks University of Surrey
5G Centre

Dr Charalampos Rotsos
Lecturer in Computer Networks 
University of Lancaster

Peter Willis, BT

Title: “Intent-Based Networking”

Date: 3rd November 2020, 13:00 - 14:00

Professor Ning Wang (Networks University of Surrey 5G Centre), Dr Charalampos Rotsos (Lecturer in Computer Networks, University of Lancaster) and BT’s Peter Willis (Software-Based Networks), presented “Intent-Based Networking”. 

This is the second in the series of thought leadership events, sharing the NG-CDI vision of a virtualised and integrated service infrastructure.

Presentation Overview

Increasing the rate of delivery and value of new services will depend on smarter ways to capture customer needs and translate these into service definition and delivery. The research is investigating the capture of customer intents in machine-readable ways. The research covers not only service creation and DevOps, but also methods to maintain or re-negotiate service levels in real-time in the face of changing network dynamics, using autonomous distributed agent architectures.

Background 

The aim of NG-CDI is to ensure that the UK remains the leading digital economy. The existing network is recognised as a critical piece of national infrastructure, never more so than under the current lock-down, which has made very apparent the nation’s dependence on the network. As the major telecommunications infrastructure provider in the UK, BT takes responsibility for continuing to build this infrastructure fit for the future.     

New technological opportunities present the opportunity to transform the speed of definition, deployment and management of new services. Autonomic technologies will enable the growing scale and complexity to operate economically. Since the start of NG-CDI, BT has initiated automation programmes across the whole business, and has begun the deployment of 5G networks to make services more seamless and ubiquitous. These initiatives provide a range of key exploitation routes for the work of the project, working against a range of timescales.     

Over the course of the next few months, we will be holding a series of thought leadership events to provide the NG-CDI vision of a virtualised and integrated service infrastructure (also see pdf)

• Service Assurance & Infrastructure Management (8th December; 11:00 – 12:00) Register here

• Anomaly detection (January 2021) tba

• Culture and governance (February 2021) tba

• Ambitious deep learning, resource optimisation (March 2021) tba

Thought Leadership event, NG-CDI series: Professor Nicolas Race on "Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure (NG-CDI)"

1st in a series on "NG-CDI: Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure" 

Thought Leadership events overview

Video replay: NG-CDI Archive

Prof Nicolas Race

Date: 7th October 2020, 12:00 - 13:00

Speaker: Professor Nicolas Race, Network Systems, University of Lancaster. Principal Investigator for NG-CDI.

Introduced by: Stephen Cassidy. System Science, BT Applied Research.

Title: "Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure (NG-CDI)"

The UK’s Digital Infrastructure is critical to the commercial and social activities and success of the country. It is essential that this infrastructure continues to be world leading. To keep ahead we need an infrastructure which responds quickly to changing needs, and at minimum cost. 

Stephen Cassidy

The creativity of the whole ecosystem will give rise to opportunities that we cannot predict. This means that services need to be configured in software rather than hardware to reduce the barriers to experimentation and scaling. Distributed autonomic technologies offer the opportunity to manage the expanding scale and complexity, and support faster ways to assess opportunities and risks, make decisions, and simplify service delivery. The operation of such an infrastructure will require new skills, cultures and practices.

Nick introduced and described the research underway to deliver these aims. He described the approaches being taken and how the different aspect of the architecture fit together.

Alistair Poustie, Rushmere Technology: Speaker at the Optics Forum of our Autumn 2020 virtual conference

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
OPTICS

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020: Five days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Dr Alistair Poustie is CEO and co-founder of Rushmere Technology, an optoelectronics company developing innovative products for the optical communications industry. 

He has been active in optical comms for 30 years, working for blue chip and startup companies: BT, Corning, CIP Technologies, Huawei and Rushmere. His areas of technical expertise include optical access systems, photonics hardware technology and optical processing. He has published over 150 technical papers, over 25 patents and has worked on many collaborative R&D projects in the EU, USA and UK. 

He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a member of the IEEE and OSA. 

LinkedIn

Prof Andrew Ellis, Aston University: Speaker at our Autumn 2020 virtual conference

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
OPTICS

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020: Five days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
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Andrew D. Ellis was born in Underwood, U.K., in 1965. He received the B.Sc. degree in physics with a minor in mathematics from the University of Sussex, Brighton, U.K., in 1987. He received the Ph.D. degree in electronic and electrical engineering from The University of Aston in Birmingham, Birmingham, U.K., in 1997 for his study on all optical networking beyond 10 Gbit/s.

He previously worked for British Telecom Research Laboratories as a Senior Research Engineer investigating the use of optical amplifiers and advanced modulation formats in optical networks and the Corning Research Centre as a Senior Research Fellow where he led activities in optical component characterization. From 2003, he headed the Transmission and Sensors Group at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland, where he was also a member of the Department of Physics, University College Cork and his research interests included the evolution of core and metro networks, and the application of photonics to sensing. 

He is now 50th Anniversary Professor of Optical Communications at Aston University where he is also deputy director of the Institute of Photonics Technologies (AiPT), and he holds adjunct professorships from University College Cork (Physics) and Dublin City University (RINCE). He has published over 200 journal papers and over 28 patents in the field of photonics, primarily targeted at increasing capacity, reach and functionality in the optical layer.

Prof. Ellis is a member of the Institute of Physics and a Chartered Physicist and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. He served for 6 years as an associate editor of the journal Optics Express. Prof Ellis has been a member of the Technical Program Committee of ECOC since 2004 and two three year terms on the TPC of OFC. He is currently participating in the organization of ECOC 2019.
Photo credit to Jackie Ellis
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An "academic" career in photonics
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