Queen’s University Belfast Roadshow

Special thanks to Dr Charles Gillan, Senior Lecturer in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen’s University Belfast for hosting us, and organising the tour of the Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT) facilities. Thanks also to Peter Devine, Deputy Director of Research at Ulster University, for arranging speakers from his university.   

We would like to thank all our fantastic speakers as well as all the delegates who came from across industry, academia, government and other organisations across Northern Ireland and Ireland. 

Professor Helen McCarthy delivered our keynote for Day 1. She is Chief Scientific and Technology Adviser in the Northern Ireland Executive, working directly with Jean Brady, Head of the NI Civil Service. Helen’s key responsibilities include co-ordinating a regional strategy on science and technology. She also chairs the newly formed NI Science & Technology Advisory Network and holds the Chair of Nanomedicine in the School of Pharmacy at Queen’s University Belfast and is the Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Academic Business Development. 

She explained that an important part of the role of country-based Chief Scientific Advisers is to be neutral and to challenge government and give independent advice. The CSAs meet every week to discuss key topics in government, and the devolved CSAs combine to give a regional voice and are represented on Labour’s 5 mission boards. Helen has asked each government department to identify its science-related challenges and has asked universities to help the Executive to address these challenges. 

The first of our four lightning speakers from Queen’s University Belfast was Dr Ciara Rafferty of the Centre for Secure Information Technology, who spoke on “Exploring privacy-preserving analytics on encrypted data: Homomorphic Encryption”. She explained that fully homomorphic encryption was introduced in 2009, so is relatively new. A lot of development work has taken place since, and the technology is now in its 4th generation. She expects that in a few years the technology will be more widespread and we will be able to use it to share data more easily.  

Dr Terry McGrath, Chief Scientific Officer for Bia Analytica, presented on “Food fraud in supply chains”. He noted that food fraud costs the UK economy about £2bn/year and that it is a safety problem as well as an economic problem. It goes beyond the UK into the global supply chain, with economic, geopolitical and climate presenting as key threats now and for the future. A combination of rapid food testing solutions together with creating a pool of collected data and sharing models will allow firms to better identify future risks to the supply chain.  

Dr David Laverty of QUB, spoke on “Power system metrology”. He noted that measurements need to be taken at the same microsecond for them to be useful. This is important because as we move towards the greater use of wind and solar, the network is less stable and more prone to collapse. A transient event can cause a disturbance that quickly propagates over the network in just a few seconds. His work involves mapping from physical to conceptual, he highlighted that some of the phenomena that do occur are very very subtle and hard to spot, such as harmonic content and low frequency oscillations. 

Professor Ben Thornber of QUB spoke on “Real Time Digital Twins of Wind Farms” and the importance of efficient siting and design in order to maximise their use over their typical 25 years of operation. If you can start saving fractions of a percent on a wind farm’s operation, it can add up to millions of pounds a year, for example wind turbine shadowing can create wake losses of 5-20% of production. His work involves a digital twin to consistently integrate data into the fully physics-based model, leading to fast identification of faulty turbines and getting on top of issues earlier. He is aiming to achieve tractable predictive models with quantified uncertainty, using innovations in high fidelity computational physics to model complete wind farms at low cost in real-time. 

The first of our two project-specific talks was from Ulster University’s Patrick McGirr, Operations Manager at the Artificial Intelligence Collaboration Centre. The AICC represents a £16.3m investment by Invest NI and the Department for the Economy NI, set up to offer hands-on support for industry to help catalyse collaborative R&D, foster a talent pipeline and future workforce, help to uncover competitive advantage in the data, and to build a world class AI community through collaboration. The AICC wants to increase business confidence in using AI to help increase ROI through AI domain knowledge, and to increase adoption of AI in NI in NI businesses by 15%. 

Dr Stephen McCabe of Queen’s University Belfast gave our second project talk, on Momentum One Zero, an industry-facing economic development project that’s helping the commercialisation of deep tech research. It includes the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), Centre for Wireless Innovation, and a new Centre for Intelligent Sustainable Computing (CISC). Momentum One Zero aims to facilitates multidisciplinary innovation across key growth sectors and is co-designed with companies and stakeholders. Stephen explained, “Our ‘secret sauce’ is our commercialisation and engineering teams – our translation and innovation specialisms.” A digital tech and data innovation centre, Momentum One Zero wants to catalyse deep tech infrastructure and catalyse the skills agenda by growing a multidisciplinary workforce, to drive the creation of good jobs through a quadruple helix, partnering with university-industry-government-public for a sustainable innovation ecosystem. 

Our first lightning talk from Ulster University was from Professor Trevor Cadden, on ‘Freight connectivity and the challenges with barriers to data sharing across the supply chain’ in the context of the Atlantic Futures Project. The research encompasses assessing international freight connectivity at the regional level and factors that influence international freight transport decisions, to analyse the potential effect of transport infrastructure or service disruptions. Key challenges to this work include fragmented freight flows which make data sharing difficult, inconsistent data reporting across Ireland/NI, technological gaps, and cautiousness over privacy and proprietary data – especially in industries such as manufacturing and chemicals. The work aims to improve transport connectivity to better the general well-being and economic well-being of the region 

Professor Huiru Jane Zheng, also of Ulster University, spoke next on ‘Data Analytics in Agriculture’. Her key research areas are in advanced AI/ML techniques for identifying biomarkers associated with host traits, and identification of low methane emitting dairy/beef cattle for selective breeding. Research questions include: to what extent does rumen microbial composition and their functional activities estimated at RNA level contribution to the variation in feed efficiency and methane emission? Related projects include a smart soil monitoring system, animal behaviour modelling, and development of new computational models for predicting nitrogen excretion in dairy cattle. 

Professor Michaela Black of Ulster University, presented on ‘Data Analytics for diverse Health Care Data’. She highlighted two particular research projects: MIDAS (Meaningful Integration of Data Analytics and Services) targeted at policy makers in healthcare and run by researchers in Finland, Northern Ireland, and Spain. The project aimed to take heterogenous data and link it together, allowing policy makers to look above and beyond simply their own data, and look at success of policies. She also introduced the LUCIA Horizon Europe project for lung cancer, involving data from 9 countries, some of which have active screening programmes and others which simply have historical data available. Lung cancer is the biggest cancer killer worldwide and the project aimed to develop a toolbox to discover and understand new risk factors that contribute to its development. The research involves geospatial analytical techniques with retrospective datasets, and taking into account factors such as radon, green spaces, deprivation studies, urbanisation and more.