Watch Again | IEEE WIE UKI Ambassadors’ Scheme Early Career Talk 5 – An Inspirational and Empowering Webinar for Women in Engineering

IEEE WIE in Engineering is an initiative with the goal to facilitate the recruitment and retention of women in technical disciplines globally. We envision a vibrant community of IEEE women and men collectively using their diverse talents to innovate for the benefit of humanity.

Speaker:Gabriela Morillo

Area of career: Academia

Research interest: Cybersecurity for IoT & Networks & Software Systems

Talk topic: Jamming of NB-IoT Synchronisation Signals

Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a relatively novel Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) radio technology used to deploy Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures at scale. It is important that such deployments are resilient to attacks. In this work, we describe how interference on the NB-IoT synchronisation signals – the initial communication steps – can be used to implement an effective Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

Interference with the synchronisation prevents communication and may also allow an attacker to force a device to connect with a specific base station.

Biography: Gabriela Morillo is a PhD student at The Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Centre for Research Training in Advanced Networks for Sustainable Societies – ADVANCE CRT. She received her Master of Science in Computer Communication Networks at Brunel University London in the United Kingdom and her Engineering in Electronics and Network Information at The National Polytechnic School in Ecuador. Her experience includes five years in Telecomms. industry.

At ADVANCE CRT, she focuses on the security issues for the Internet of Things that will safeguard the end-users sensitive information, avoid attacks of capacity and data theft, and allow location privacy and data security.

Speaker:Mary Gowen

Area of career: Industry

Research interests: Photonics, Optical Communications, Wireless Networks, Domain Applications. ORCID Summary: Photonics Circuits & Systems Optical systems Communications Network adaptions

Talk topic: The talk covers the topics: Optical Engineering, Fiber Optics, Quantum Electronics, Photonics, Industrial and non-invasive Lasers, and Cascaded IC Systems. It discusses the concepts related to high-speed networks, design application and project management, funding and career opportunities.

Biography: Mary Gowen, BE, PhD completed her PhD dissertation the field of Electronic & Computer engineering, which encompassed network design, optical engineering, photonic applications and 6G/Thz regime network integration.

As part of her dissertation, she completed significant research output, IC design, network implementation and waveguide manipulation techniques. Her previous professional experience relates to financial services, engineering consultancy and continuous improvement.

Currently Mary is employed as a consultant leading projects across FinTech, HealthCare and CyberSecurity. She also specialises in technical communications.

Speaker: Nadia Djaid

Area of career: I have a strong interest in electronic engineering, and I have been working in electronics and robotics for more than twelve years. I am passionate about electronics and robotics, and I have always been keenly interested in developing new approaches in the field.

During my engineering studies, I have specialised in control engineering with work on embedded systems, sensors and actuators, and control systems. I have then specialised in Robotics for my master’s degree and PhD where I designed a multimodal architecture for a robot-human communication system. I have been working in academia for more than 9 years, my teaching experience was acquired from the different positions I have worked in within the UK and abroad.

Talk topic: Fusion and fission engine for an assistant robot using an ontology knowledge base

The talk will present PhD research work on designing a multimodal fusion and fission engine for an assistant robot using an ontology knowledge base. The aim of the research work was to build a system for helping people with disabilities to enhance the interaction with the ambient intelligent environment using natural communication skills, such as speech and gesture.

The fusion engine combines various input modalities to determine the overall context of a given situation. The action determined by the fusion engine is then subdivided into smaller tasks by the fission engine and sent to actuators, gadgets and other output modalities for implementation.

Biography:

Nadia Djaid gained an engineering degree in control systems and automatism in 2008 from USTHB, the University of Algiers. she then specialised in robotics for both her Masters and PhD degrees.

Nadia acquired her master’s degree from the University of Algiers in 2011. Her PhD was a joint thesis between USTHB University of Algiers and the University of Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, Paris (France) which was defended in December 2017.

She started her academic teaching career at the University of Algiers as an hourly paid lecturer in electronics, teaching undergraduate students modules on control systems and Petri nets.

Nadia joined the University of West London in early 2020 where she taught instrumentation, measurement and engineering software 2. she is currently a leader of different undergraduate modules at various levels. She is also the final year project supervisor of three students working on robotic vehicle and sensors.

Speaker: Saumya Kareem Reni

Area of career: Academia

Talk topic: Image Analysis and Feature Extraction for Pathological Disease Diagnosis

The talk describes pioneering interdisciplinary research involving image processing solution for pathological disease diagnosis. The clinical analysis and investigation of human samples are a key feature involved various disease diagnosis.

Many blood-borne and parasitic infections are diagnosed using pathological analysis of human samples using a microscope and laboratory facilities. Significant research is being conducted to automate this manual, highly labour intensive and time-consuming procedure. This talk will discuss some of the image processing-based feature extraction procedures that are developed for disease diagnosis.

The research is significant and relevant in terms of its novelty and its potential to integrate with machine learning to produce a fast and reliable mass monitoring and analytical tool for clinical pathology.

Biography:  Dr Saumya Kareem Reni is an active researcher and senior lecturer in the Applied DSP and VLSI Research Group, School of Computer Science and Engineering, at University of Westminster.

Her active research area is image processing for medical imaging, specialising in morphological image processing algorithm development. Saumya’s current work focuses on analysis and processing of microscopic images of thin blood slides and other clinical slides used in parasitology to diagnose infectious diseases.

She is a trained microscopist for manual diagnosis of malaria. She has been supervising and co-supervising cross-disciplinary projects, both on undergraduate and postgraduate level, as well as collaborative research, involving design and development of optical imaging algorithms, mobile application development and design, development and implementation of morphological image processor chip on FPGA and Artificial Intelligence based image analysis systems , and has authored and co-authored a dozen peer-reviewed publications in the field. Saumya has been the co-investigator of the prestigious UK India Educational Research Initiative grant (UKIERI) and has also received multiple internal grants including the Competitive Developing Researcher Grant and the Mini Enterprise Grant from University of Westminster.

Saumya is a technical committee member and reviewer of numerous IEEE and IET transactions and conference publications. Saumya has also been an invited participant in numerous prestigious forums including British Society for Parasitology Exhibition at the University of Cambridge as well as the Pathology Visions Conference conducted by Digital Pathology Association USA.