Speakers
‘Cognizant Convergent Connectivity and the CHEDDAR Hub’
By 2050, connectivity will be radically transformed, enabling applications far beyond today’s imagination. Networks will become self-aware and autonomous, supporting interactions not only between machines but potentially between human brains through advanced neural interfaces. Cognizant connectivity will be the norm - the network will be fully self-aware of its behaviours, its physical embodiment, its environment and its purpose. Beyond the mere intelligence or autonomy, that we discuss today, it will evolve from simple data-transfer pipes into multifunctional substrates providing more than communication by providing sensing and physical computation. However, there are many challenges for the network to be able to survive all these requirements. This talk will provide an overview of what the CHEDDAR Hub is doing to address these challenges.
Julie A. McCann is a Professor of Computer Systems with Imperial College London and is currently Co-Director of the School of Convergence Science in Space, Security and Telecoms and Director of the national CHEDDAR communications research hub. Formerly Vice Dean Research in the Faculty of Engineering, she has published extensively on decentralized and self-organizing scalable algorithms and protocols for Wireless/RF Sensor-based systems, Internet of Things, and Cyber-physical systems. She leads the Adaptive Emergent Systems Engineering Research (AESE) research group, and between 2015-2022 was the Deputy Director of PETRAS IoT Cybersecurity Hub, Critical Ecosystems Lead for the Alan Turing Institute, and Imperial PI on the EPSRC programme grant Science for Sensor Systems Software. She has a number of international research collaborations including Singapore NRF funded Eco-Cities (until March 2024 she had a sub-lab in Singapore with I2R and HDB), between 2012-2017 directed the Intel Collaborative Research Institute (ICRI) for Sustainable Cities, and NEC Japan on smart communications technologies, as well as other projects though EU FP7/H2020 programmes. McCann is an elected Member of the Council of Computer Science Professors and Heads of Computing, and was elected to the membership committee of the UKCRC, she holds the 2018 UKRI Suffrage Science Award for Computing and Mathematics, President’s Medal for Research Excellence 2020, and is a Fellow of the BCS and Chartered Engineer.