2014 Cohort

Konstantinos Boikos

Konstantinos Boikos is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, where he also received his M.Res. in 2015. Previously he studied in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki where he received his Diploma (M.Eng.) in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2014.  He is interested in digital hardware design and computer architecture, and his research focus is high performance and low-power hardware architectures, for real-time computer vision applications.

Salvatore DiPietro

I am currently part of the Analysis, Engineering, Simulation & Optimization of Performance group, under the supervision of Dr. Giuliano Casale. My current research is focused on the Performability in the Cloud. The aim of my research is to characterise some applications deployed in a private or public cloud to predict its performance, to dynamically scale the system and to analyse the system reliability under different failing circumstances. I am currently working on the formal description and optimisation of some NoSQL databases like Cassandra and ScyllaDB.

Panagiotis Garefalakis

I am currently a PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Peter Pietzuch. I am affiliated with the Large-Scale Distributed Systems (LSDS) group and my PhD is supported by a CDT HiPEDS scholarship. My research interests lie within the broad area of systems including large-scale distributed systems, cluster resource management and stream processing.

Ira Ktena

I am an Electrical and Computer Engineer pursuing a research degree in Medical Image Computing under the supervision of Professor Daniel Rueckert. Previously I worked as a Software Engineer at the Biomedical Image Analysis (BioMedIA) group at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, focusing on the development of a translational medical imaging platform. I have also worked as a Software Developer and Research Assistant at the Forecasting & Strategy Unit, National Technical University of Athens.  My current research focuses on the investigation of the human connectome, which is one of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21st century. My major interest lies in developing methods for modelling and analysing brain networks, whose dynamics can potentially shed light on neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders.

Adrian Millea

I have a Bachelor’s in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Bucharest, Romania, and a Master’s in Artificial Intelligence from University of Groningen, The Netherlands, graduating ‘cum laude’. I am interested in the theoretical aspects of Machine Learning as well as the practical ones and am now working on Deep Learning and Deep Reinforcement Learning. In particular, I am investigating an efficient method for decorrelating the activations of the Restricted Boltzmann Machine, by adding a penalty term to the loss function which reflects the direction of the gradient of the covariance between visible and hidden units.

Nicholaos Miscourides

I am currently based in the Centre for Bioinspired Technology which belongs jointly to the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical & Electronic Engineering Department. Cross-discipline by nature, this group aims to produce electronics-based solutions addressing various challenges in the area of biomedical engineering and diagnostics. Specifically, I’m designing large arrays of a specific type of chemical sensor called ISFET that measures the pH of a solution using standard CMOS technology. This approach allows for standard, low-cost and mass-manufactured microchips to serve as chemical sensors, offering chemical inputs to otherwise conventional electronic circuits. As a result, ISFET-based sensing platforms lend themselves to a plethora of applications ranging from point-of-care rapid tests to elaborated lab-based genetic detection such as DNA sequencing. During the course of my two years at the CDT, I’ve produced one journal and two conference papers and co-designed two chemical sensing microchips.

Nicolas Moser

I obtained my Bachelor’s Degree in Electronics and Chemical Engineering at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium in 2013, and then graduated in 2014 with an MSc Degree at Imperial College London in Analogue & Digital Integrated Circuit Design. I am now in the third year of the HiPEDS CDT. As part of my research, I have managed to mix my passion for electronics with my interest for chemistry. As such, my research focuses on CMOS-based chemical sensors, and in particular I am using chips to sequence DNA or measure ion concentration in the blood for a wide range of biomedical applications.

Christian Priebe

I am a PhD student in the Large-Scale Distributed Systems Research Group under the supervision of Dr. Peter Pietzuch. I am specifically interested in Systems and Systems Security research including the topics of Cloud Computing Security, Trusted Computing and Secure (Remote) Data Processing.

Nadesh Ramanathan

I work with Prof. George Constantinides at the Circuits and System Group of EEE. My research specialises in digital circuit design for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Prior to join the HiPEDS CDT, I completed an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science at Cambridge University.

Adrien Rapeaux

I have a background in Electronic Engineering obtained from Phelma School of Engineering in Grenoble, France. I am currently researching “Algorithms and Systems for Highly Selective Neural Stimulation and Recording” as a PhD topic in the Center for Bioinspired Technology. I was on the organising committee for the Center for Doctoral Training Festival of Science for two consecutive years and was responsible for production of graphics and advertisement for the event. I have also presented and led a demonstration of Electro-encephalogram (EEG) technology at the National Science Museum. At Imperial College, I carried out teaching assistant work for the EEE department Introduction to Computing course and held student one-one sessions for the Biomedical Electronics course.

Julian Sutherland

My research centres around extending a current abstract concurrent separation logic for proving the partial functional correctness (TaDA) to proving the total correctness (termination) of such algorithms (impossible in general, logics are not complete). My first paper solves this problem for non-blocking algorithms and I’m currently working on extending this to blocking algorithms while maintaining aspects of the logic like compositionality (making proofs reusable), modularity (separation of the verification of modules from the proof of a client using the module using abstract module specifications) and thread locality (being able to reason locally about a thread’s code without explicit knowledge of the other concurrently running threads).

James Targett

In 2015 I obtained my MRes with Distinction as part of the HIPEDS programme. I also studied Computing at Imperial for an undergraduate MEng degree where I received 1st class Honours and the Detica Prize for Technical Innovation. As part of the MEng I was an intern at Maxeler Systems for 6 months working as a member of the compilers team. My research interests are based around FPGA architecture, with an interest in reduced precision and Maxeler based systems.

Antoine Toisoul

I am a PhD candidate at Imperial College London in the Realistic Graphics and Imaging group under the supervision of Dr Abhijeet Ghosh. My research focuses on measurement-based realistic computer graphics. More specifically I am interested in the photo realistic real-time rendering of wave optics effects using measurements of real-world materials.  Before the start of my PhD, I studied jointly at Imperial College London and Télécom ParisTech (previously known as ENST) for my master’s degree.

Emanuele Vespa

I am affiliated with the Software Performance Optimisation group of the Department of Computing, working under the supervision of Prof. Paul H J Kelly. My research focus is on domain specific optimisations and high-level abstractions for computer vision applications, specialising in the sub-field of Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM). As part of my Ph.D studies, I spent three months at ARM Research, working on low-level optimisations for SLAM algorithms on future ARM architectures. Prior to starting the HiPEDS CDT programme, I worked as a software engineer in the finance industry at a risk assessment firm.