Highlights from the “Engage lectures” 2023

Engage – is a series of lectures on a range of Engineering, Computing and Design topics, organised by Bangor University's IEEE Student Branch and School of Computer Science and Engineering. The first series of “Engage” took place October through December 2023. Lectures covered topics of engineering, computer, and design and were organised. Eight seminars took place this semester, and each were held on Wednesdays at 12 noon in the main lecture theatre, in Dean Street.

Led by the Bangor IEEE student branch, we set up Engage to bring together students, researchers, and staff together, over interesting topics. They were enjoyable, fun, and we all learnt about a wide range of topics. The seminars were organised by the Bangor IEEE Student Branch and hosted in the School of Computer Science. This Semester saw, academics and leaders give fascinating lectures about core technologies, modern ideas, and key principles.

Profesor Jonathan Roberts

At the first seminar, October 4 2023, Professor Jonathan Roberts, spoke on heritage visualisation. He explained his work on harnessing Photogrammetry to Create Alternative Visualisation Models of Heritage. Jonathan spoken on heritage visualisation, focusing on several research questions including asking how to record heritage sites in 3D, create 3D models of the site and visualise the data such that the public and researchers understand and interpret the information.

Rob Shepherd

The second seminar, October 11, Rob Shepherd, spoke on Data and Internet of Things (IoT). Rob Shepherd is a graduate of Bangor University’s computing department and since 2009 has been running DataCymru Ltd, a bespoke computer systems development agency, and recently EvoMetric Ltd, a commercial IoT solutions company. He described these companies’ journey into remote monitoring and IoT – from wild and remote environmental monitoring, up to the weather on the summit of Snowdon, and on to commercial, industrial, agricultural, and even art!

Dr Michael Rushton

Wednesday the 25th October saw Dr. Michael Rushton speaking on nuclear power. His talk, titled "Inner and outer space: nuclear batteries and space reactors" enthralled listeners by explaining how nuclear power stations deliver substantial amounts of electricity to national grid, and how the technology could be made much more flexible to serve long-term mobile power source and needs, space probes and even moon bases.

Dr Cristiano Palego on "Tracking the Buzz"

On Wednesday, the 18th of October, at 12 noon, the special lecture was delivered by Dr Cristiano Palego on "Tracking the Buzz: Telemetry of Pollinator Insects". In this lecture Cristiano introduced some of the recent advances and challenges in this field, based on the work of several researchers who have explored different methods of tracking pollinator insects. He reviewed some of the recent developments in both tagged and tagless telemetry of pollinator insects, focused on three aspects: the design of the transmitter or sensor, the design of the receiver or detector, and the integration of the system with AI-based readout and behavioural classification techniques.

Glory Ogbonda

Wednesday, the 8th of November, saw Glory Ogbonda, a new PhD student on the AIMLAC (Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning and Advanced Computing) doctoral funded programme, speaking on "A journey from studying to publication – publishing project work”. Glory explained his experiences with studying on the MSc course in computer science and doing project work. He described how he extended three projects and presented them at the Computer Graphics and Visual Computing conference.

Dr John Story

15th November, saw Dr John Story speak on "FabLAB, The Why, The How and The What". He said “Like computing before it, digital fabrication is on a journey from highly specialist to ubiquitous. The fabLAB is a resource that lets people make 'almost' anything in one place.” Rob looked at the history of the fabLAB Network, motivations behind it, the current state and future plans coming out of the founders at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Dr Roger Giddings gave a lecture titled "DSP-based Technologies"

On the 22nd of November, Dr Roger Giddings gave a lecture titled "DSP-based Technologies for Future Communications Networks". Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is used extensively in the modern world to enable many advanced technologies that we now take for granted, such as speech recognition, augmented reality, medical scanning/imaging and radar systems. DSP is also one of the key enabling technologies for modern fixed and wireless communications systems, your smart phone for example is completely reliant on super-fast DSP algorithms for its exceptional functionality and network connectivity. The DSP Centre at Bangor University is a multi-million-pound research centre, established in 2019. Roger said “Our vision is to become a world leader in DSP-based digital communication technologies for future 5G and 6G networks. Bringing together expertise in optical fibre networks, optical wireless networks, RF/Microwave networks and DSP, we undertake advanced DSP-based research to achieve flexible and dynamic solutions at the sub-system, system and networking levels to meet the evolving demands of tomorrow’s networks.”

Dr Peter Butcher

On the penultimate talk, on 29th November, Dr Peter Butcher spoke on The Making of Wizualization: A "Hard Magic" visualization system. Pete spoke on first reality, augmented reality, and immersed reality, and gave a demonstration of his immersive visualisation system.

Pete Butcher giving the Engage seminar
Credit:JC Roberts

Professor Nathan Abrams, spoke on “Technology in film"

Finally, on Wednesday, the 6th of December 2023, Professor Nathan Abrams, spoke on “Technology in film.” He excited the audience by talking about technology in films, and how technology is used in the creation of films. As many examples, video clips and breadth of knowledge of the films made a fitting and to the 2023, engage seminar series.

This has been an exciting year of talks from a variety of people. They have excited us (the audience) and enthused us to think about the world, about research, and technology in diverse ways. We have had talks on heritage, nuclear engineering, digital systems, Internet of things, and immersed reality. These topics have addressed research questions in sustainability, environmental issues, to entertainment, games, and films. I cannot wait to learn more about these topics and others in the next series of Engage lectures.