Organising Committee
Organising Committe
General Chair
Prof. Seán McLoone is currently Director of Research for the Energy Power and Intelligent Control Research Cluster in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Prof. McLoone returned to Queen’s in January 2013 having spent the previous 10 years at the Department of Electronic Engineering in NUI Maynooth, where he served as Senior Lecturer (2005-2012) and Head of Department (2009-2012). His research interests are in computational intelligence techniques and data analytics with applications in smart-grid and advanced manufacturing informatics. Specialist areas include predictive modelling, unsupervised sparse feature selection, clustering and blind identification. His research activities to date have been supported by Science Foundation Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, EPSRC, FP7 (Europe) and industry. His research has a strong application focus, with many projects undertaken in collaboration with industry including Intel, Seagate, Pfizer, Amgen, Vistakon and Trend Technologies. Prof. McLoone is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the IET, a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Past Chairman of the UK and Republic of Ireland Section of IEEE. He serves on the editorial board of Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and the Transactions of the Institute of Measurement and Control. He is also a member of the Accreditation Board of Engineers Ireland and the IET Academic Accreditation Committee.
Professor Kang Li
Program Chair
Kang Li is a Professor in Intelligent Systems and Control at the Energy, Electric Power and Intelligent Control Research Cluster, Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests include nonlinear system modeling, identification, and control, and bio-inspired computational intelligence, with applications to power systems and renewable energy, polymer extrusion processes, and electric vehicles. He is particularly interested in the development of a new generation of control technologies, systems and platform for decarbonising the whole energy system from head to tail, considering generation, transmission and distribution, and user demands (http://igive.wikidot.com/, http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/sciencebridge/, http://pointenergy.org/). He has published over 250 papers in his areas of expertise, and edited 12 conference proceedings (Springer) as one of the main organizers of several international conference series on sustainable energy and environment (ICSEE), computational intelligence (ICIC), and life system modelling and simulation (LSMS). He chairs the IEEE UKRI Control and Communication Ireland chapter, and was the Secretary of the IEEE UKRI Section. He is also an Observer in the Executive Committee of the UK Automatic Control Council, a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Computational Intelligence in Control, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Neural Network Technical Committee, and IEEE Adaptive Dynamic Programming & Reinforcement Learning Technical Committee.
Dr Wasif Naeem
Local Organising Chair
Wasif is a Senior Lecturer in the EPIC cluster within the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at QUB. His research interests span optimal control, robotics and autonomous systems, system identification, and systems engineering. Wasif is a Fellow of Higher Education Academy and a member of the EPSRC College.
Professor Sarah Spurgeon
International Program Committee Chair
Professor Sarah Spurgeon graduated in Mathematics with first class honours from the University of York in 1985. Her DPhil was awarded for a study of the design and assessment of non-linear control systems for aircraft in 1988. She was appointed Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Loughborough University of Technology from September 1988, and moved to the Department of Engineering, University of Leicester in April 1991. Made a Senior Lecturer in October 1995, she was promoted to Reader from 1/10/2000 and was awarded a personal chair in April 2002. She has held a Visiting Professorship at the Ecole Centrale de Lille, a French Grande Ecole and was appointed Head of the Department of Engineering at Leicester University in August 2005. In July 2008 she was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering for her "fundamental contributions to the development of nonlinear control and estimation methods, from theoretical developments through to trials and subsequent industrial support of technological exploitation". In August 2008, she moved with her research team to take up a Chair in Control Engineering and Head the Department of Electronics (now the School of Engineering and Digital Arts) at the University of Kent.
Dr Stefano Longo
Special Sessions Chair
Stefano Longo (MIEEE, CEng, MIET, FHEA) is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Vehicle Electronic Systems at Cranfield University and Course Director for the MSc in Automotive Mechatronics. He received his M.Sc. from the University of Sheffield in 2007 and completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in 2011, both in Control Systems. His PhD thesis was awarded the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Control and Automation Prize for significant achievements in the area of control engineering. In November 2010 he was appointed to the position of Research Associate at Imperial College London which he still holds with an honorary status. He conducts research in the intersection of control systems and vehicular applications.
Contact details - email: s.longo@cranfield.ac.uk, phone: +441234 758581, address: Centre for Automotive Engineering, Cranfield University, MK43 0AL, UK
Dr Eric Kerrigan
UKACC Chair
Dr Eric Kerrigan is a Reader in Control Engineering and Optimization at Imperial College London. His research is on efficient numerical methods and computer architectures for solving optimization, control and estimation problems in real-time, with applications in aerospace, renewable energy and computing systems. He is Chair of the United Kingdom Automatic Control Council and on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, Control Engineering Practice, the European Control Conference and IEEE Control Systems Society Conferences.