The School of Engineering and Digital Arts’ Biennial Research Conference took place on 8th January, 2020, in the Sibson Building on the University’s Canterbury campus. The event had some 100 attendees in total, including a number external to the School, who heard from invited industry speakers, researchers and research students, and who participated in many lively discussions based around poster sessions.
The opening session saw a Keynote speech from Professor Erol Hepsaydir, Head of RAN and devices strategy and architecture at Three UK, who described a future vision of what might be developed for future 6G mobile networks, now that 5G deployment has commenced. The other Keynote speeches were in the final session of the day, given by Dr Shi Zhou of UCL, and Professor Tao Wang of Wasln Ltd. Dr Zhou described the challenge of detecting bots, especially now that many are now “one-time”, while Professor Wang explained how process instrumentation now needed to encompass gathering and analysing data from multiple measurements, following the expectations of Industry 4.0.
Most of the day was devoted to short 3-minute presentations by PhD students (mainly) and other researchers in the School, with these oral sessions being followed by poster sessions during which more detailed discussions could be held. The 34 PhD students who made the 3-minute oral and associated poster presentations were judged by a panel of academics, and at the end of the day, Elakkiya Ellavarason was announced as the winner of the Best Presentation Prize.