IEEE WIE UKI Early Profession Programme | 2023 Challenges and Opportunities: Enabling Technologies for Connected Smart Cities
About this Event
IEEE Women in Engineering is an initiative with the goal to facilitate the recruitment and retention of women in technical disciplines globally. We envisage a vibrant community of IEEE women and men collectively using their diverse talents to innovate for the benefit of humanity.
The Industrial Internet of Things research group (IIoT) at the University of West London is hosting this year’s IEEE WIE 2023 Challenges and Opportunities event, organised by the IEEE Women in Engineering UK&I Affinity Group – Early Profession programme. This 2023 workshop with the theme “Enabling Technologies for Connected Smart Cities” is organised by women and open to all.
It will be a full-day event including six technical talks and panel discussions by speakers from industry, academia, regulators and policymakers. The event will introduce the participants to state-of-the-art research in the smart cities field, highlighting the challenges and opportunities and is aimed at anyone with an interest or experience in the subject. We particularly welcome graduate students, early career researchers (ECR), and final-year students from STEM subjects.
Speaker: Prof Tatiana Kalganova
Talk title: Towards Environmentally Friendly AI: Useful Data Lead to Higher Accuracy
Talk topic: Nowadays AI is being gradually integrated into everyday life. The current tendency in AI to use as much data as possible to get better accuracy leads to an exponential increase in required computational resources and consequently in CO2 emissions. Understanding the data, its value, and its usefulness will lead to reduced computational resources while maintaining accuracy.
In this talk, the environmentally friendly green AI approach is discussed.
Biography: Prof Tatiana Kalganova BSc (Hons), PhD, is a Professor of Intelligent Systems at Brunel. She has over 25 years of experience designing and implementing applied Intelligent Systems. She led the Brunel team to success in collaboration with Supply Dynamics and Blue Roofs, becoming a champion of the 2019 AFWERX Microelectronics Supply Chain Provenance Challenge. Her novel ensemble-based deep learning approaches are ranked No 1 between 2020-2022 in terms of the number of trainable parameters at papers with code for MNIST dataset and lately ranked No 2 overall.
Her work on hybridisation of LSTM and capsules is ranked No 1 for change point and outlier detection for SKAB dataset. Her research into Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and graph mathematics have been deployed into Caterpillar’s current GEMSTONE supply chain optimisation process. This invention led to multiple internal and external international awards, including the 2016 Caterpillar Chairman’s Award for Process/Business Innovation, the 2016 Global Excellence in Analytics Award by the International Institute of Analytics, the 2017 Finalist for the INFORMS Innovation in Analytics prize, and 2020 Winner of Brunel’s Research Impact Awards.
Inventor of six patented technologies and author of over 120 peer-refereed papers in highly respected journals and in conference proceedings, Prof Kalganova’s work has attracted research funding from a combination of industrial, national, and international research entities. She serves on the editorial board for several journals, including Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines.”
Speaker: Dr David McKee
Talk title: Capabilities to Twins for Smart Cities
Talk topic: In this talk, Dr David McKee will take us through the capability selection process and technology selection for digital twins in smart cities. Using the OMG Digital Twin Consortium’s capability periodic table, we will discuss the selection of system and organisational capabilities through technology selection using the digital twin reference architecture that is being universally adopted across industries.
Biography: Dr David McKee is the CTO and founder at Slingshot Simulations which specialise in building digital twin solutions for cities to support their net zero journeys. He is also the OMG Digital Twin Consortium Capability and Technology working group chair. He has led their work on defining the best practice reference architecture. David is also one of the leading members of the Responsible Computing initiative. He is a Royal Academy of Engineering enterprise fellow and alumnus from the University of Oxford Said Business School Creative Destruction Lab. David is also a guest lecturer on digital twins at the universities of Leeds and Oxford.
Speaker: Dr Aisha Naseer
Talk title: Future Sustainable Societies with Ethical and Trusted Excellence
Talk topic: The future of smart cities beholds enormous potential for innovative and autonomous systems. Most innovations are realized for sustaining social responsibilities, which by-design are not negligent towards the societal obligations. For industry sector, it is imperative to focus on interpolation of actors within the AI ecosystem so that sustainable research is conducted to address the socio-economical needs of the future societies. In doing so, it is essential to understand how the ecology is set-up to strike the right balance among various factors and paradigms. This talk focuses on ushering an era where smart cities are encouraged rather than constrained in yielding sustainable societies.
Biography: Dr Aisha Naseer provides strategic direction and expert advice in various industries with a particular focus on AI ethics. Dr Naseer was celebrated as one of the top 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ for 2022 in global recognition of her work in this field. She is a member of the MIT Sloan Management Review Responsible AI Expert Panel and also a member of several AI Standardisation Bodies including the International (ISO/IEC/JTC 1) and European (CEN/CLC/JTC 21) standardisation Joint Technical Committees (JTC) at the British Standards Institution (BSI). She is the Director of Research at Huawei R&D UK, where she provides strategic direction on AI research and innovation as part of the company’s work around the development of responsible AI.
Dr Naseer is a founding Editorial Board member of the Springer Journal on AI and Ethics, sits on All-Party Parliamentary Group on Data Analytics. Her profile interview has been published as Inspirational Women @We are Tech Women amongst inspirational tech advocates: https://wearetechwomen.com/inspirational-woman-dr-aisha-naseer-director-of-research-huawei-rd-uk/
Speaker: Eng Armelle Boisset
Talk title: Spectrum Regulation for Smart Cities
Talk topic: As the UK’s telecoms regulator, Ofcom’s Spectrum Group engages with existing and new users of spectrum to understand their evolving needs and enable wireless services in the wider economy. We continually look to make spectrum available in different ways to promote innovation and competition whilst taking account of technical capabilities and varying stakeholder requirements. This talk will give an outline of spectrum regulatory aspects in the context of smart cities and urban environments.
Biography: Armelle Boisset is a director in the Spectrum Group at UK communications regulator Ofcom. She leads the Engineering team in support of Ofcom’s regulatory spectrum work, providing technical policy insight, test and measurement capabilities and contribution to international standards.
Armelle holds a degree in engineering and has been working in the telecoms industry for over 20 years, in operational and leadership roles in the UK and internationally.
Speaker: Eng Greg McSorley
Talk title: Telco Network Cooling Infrastructure
Talk topic: A talk on understanding cooling infrastructure energy requirements across large telecommunication estates. This talk will focus on how an understanding of energy use, based on weather data, can be used to estimate and forecast energy required to keep network faults to a minimum while being as sustainable as possible; how this forecast can be used to predict minimum on-site back up power storage needed, and how excess power reserves can be used to benefit the wider network and even a national power grid.
Biography: Greg McSorley, AI and Sustainability Researcher, BT. has many years of experience working in geospatial science for a county council local authority, I have more recently begun working on Digital Shadows, network infrastructure and sustainability for BT.
Speaker: Eng Kristy Yiu and Eng Jane Wright
Talk title: Connected London: Past, Present and Future
Talk topic: Transport for London (TfL) is a relatively young organisation. It was established to implement the Mayor’s transport strategy and manage transport services in London. In the past 23 years, what has TfL accomplished to keep London moving? We will also explore what is there in the future of transport.
In this short presentation, Kristy and Jane will talk about:
- Past: Where TfL have come from?
- Present: How TfL has achieved and implemented Mayor’s transport vision sustainably, physically, and technologically?
- Future: How data can help connect, transform and optimise the way we travel.
Biographies:
Eng Kristy Yiu is an Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) engineer with over 7 years’ experience in the industry. Prior to joining the ITS team within TfL Engineering, she begins to put her engineering knowledge to work and polish project management skills in Arup, an engineering consultancy firm, after graduating with a Master’s degree in Transport. Her current role involves implementing and upgrading transport technologies on London’s roads and Keeping London Moving.
In the past years, she has had the opportunity to contribute to a wide variety of projects such as electrical vehicle on-street charging on TfL Road Network, TfL traffic signal fault reporting system, replacement of tunnel CCTV cameras, National Highways’ Travel Demand Management and Toolkit, Severn Crossing Concessionaire, free flow charging in Hong Kong and major international airport drop-off charging system.
Eng Jane Wright is a Systems Engineer leading the development of Carbon Capability in Transport for London’s Engineering and Capital Programmes Directorate and supports the development of TfL’s Zero Emission Bus Strategy. She is an ICE Carbon Champion and was named one of the Women’s Engineering Society’s Top 50 Women in Engineering in 2022.
Feel free to speak to Kristy and Jane on their career journey and any projects that interest you!
