The world’s leading computer scientists descend on Imperial for inaugural conference

Imperial scientists share their research at computing conference <em>–News</em>

By Colin Smith
Friday 19 September 2008

The latest research in computing technology to help in the fight against crime and programs to develop microscopic medical tools will be discussed next week at a meeting (22-24 September 2008).

The British Computer Society’s inaugural ‘Visions of Computer Science’ (BCS) conference, hosted by Imperial College London, brings together academics from around the world to discuss the latest research advances and challenges in computer science.

Seven recipients of the Turing Award, viewed as the ‘Nobel Prize’ in computer science, will address the conference with more than 100 scientists, including Imperial researchers, speaking at the event.

Professor Erol Gelenbe and his post-doctoral fellow Dr Edith Ngai, from Imperial’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, will present their research on novel computer algorithms for managing networks of wireless sensors.

Wireless sensors can include a range of devices used to collect audio, visual and environmental information and examples include surveillance cameras or environmental sensors designed to measure temperatures.

These algorithms organise the data that the sensor networks collect, separating the critical or urgent information from background or routine data.

Algorithms to detect car crime could become a reality

In an emergency, for example fires or home break-ins, these algorithms can tell which data collected from sensors represents a crisis and react to the situation by shunting the more routine data to secondary network paths, reserving the best paths for the urgent data. This enables an alert or warning to be delivered to its recipient quickly.

Professor Gelenbe believes his technology has a number of applications which could include assisting in law enforcement. He explains:

“Suppose a network is monitoring the number plates of all cars in a large city; most of the data is routine and not important. But when the number plate of a stolen car is recognised by a camera this data could be forwarded very urgently over the computer network to the police to help them apprehend the suspect."

A technology for automating scientific experiments in synthetic biology, a field of science that seeks to create biological ‘machines’ using design approaches from engineering, will also be discussed.

Professor Stephen Muggleton, from Imperial’s Department of Computing, is developing an automated process for conducting experiments to cope with the masses of data generated by increasingly complex experiments.

He is designing a computer program, linked to silicon circuitry, that can carry out experiments by testing and assembling cells into functioning parts. These parts can then be used in a range of applications, including new medical tools to detect infections.

In addition, Dr Andreas Fidjeland, Professor Wayne Luk and Professor Stephen Muggleton, from Imperial's Department of Computing, will discuss their research into new computer hardware that can be adapted, or reconfigured, to solve complex scientific problems rapidly. This is achieved by operating multiple computer processors in tandem.

The team believe their multiple processors, which fit on a computer chip, will be ten times faster in comparison to conventional processors, and could be used to analyse a range of biological problems such as how genes might mutate and develop into cancer.

The conference, conceived by British Computer Society conference chair Professor Erol Gelenbe in collaboration with Professor Samson Abramski ,of the University of Oxford, and Professor Vladimiro Sassone, of the University of Southampton, also aims to improve the links between the UK, the international academic community, and the British Computer Society.

The British Computer Society is the chartered industry body for IT professionals, the Chartered Engineering Institution for Information Technology and the Chartered Science Institution.

Information about the conference can be accessed at: http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.9878