The lecture is free to attend and open to all, but registration is required in advance – book your seat via Eventbrite (external link).
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Meet our new professors
Julie McCann, Professor of Computer Systems at Imperial College London
Chirping, self-organising, adaptive and intelligent tiny computers are beginning to enter both the market and people’s homes, performing various monitoring and control duties. From Google’s self-drive cars to the walls of modern office blocks, these simple devices are talking to each other in highly intelligent ways, mimicking the collective behaviour of insect colonies to overcome individual failures or changes in the local environment.
After a decade as an academic pursuit, there is now a strong belief that these dust particle sized sensors could enable whole new computer architectures, complementing cloud-based systems but pushing processing power out to these small devices in the field and bring about The Diamond Age of nanotechnology described in Neal Stephenson’s award winning novel of the same name.
But are we getting ahead of ourselves? Whilst the technology advances, underlying research into their behaviours, security, reliability and resistance to failure mustn’t be left behind. In her inaugural lecture Professor Julie McCann will talk through attempts to not only scale this technology to larger systems but to also make them more resilient.
About the speaker
Professor Julie McCann heads the Adaptive Embedded Systems Engineering group and is Co-Director of the Intel Collaborative Research Institute on the Urban Internet of Things. She is Co-Principle Investigator for both the NEC Smart Water Lab and the EPSRC Science of Sensor Systems Programme. She has been a Fellow of the British Computer Society since 2012 and is a member of the ACM and IEEE. McCann is regularly invited to talk on sensing, IoT and self-adaptive computing to a broad range of audiences.