2017 Cohort

Michael Akintunde

I’m a PhD student in the Verification of Autonomous Systems Group, supervised by Prof. Alessio Lomuscio.  My research interests lie in the area of formal verification, particularly in the development of techniques for verifying the correctness of software generated using machine learning, such as neural networks.

Naomi Bassett

I am currently a PhD student in the intelligent behaviour understanding group (ibug), under the supervision of Stefanos Zafeiriou. Prior to joining HiPEDS I also completed my MEng in Computing here at Imperial. My current research focuses on emotion recognition, prediction and synthesis from body motion, facial expressions and speech.

Miguel Cacho Soblecher

I am a PhD candidate at the Centre for Bioinspired Technology, part of both the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical & Electronic Engineering Department. My interest is on the intersection of both chemistry, biology and engineering, and my research focus is on ISFETs chemical imaging arrays, which are sensors capable of perceiving chemical and biological reactions using standard CMOS technology.  Before my PhD, I studied in both University Carlos III of Madrid (BSc) and Imperial College London (MSc), and worked in both Consultancy and Telecoms industry.

Nadeen Gebara

I am currently a PhD student under the joint supervision of Dr. Wayne Luk (Custom Computing Group) and Dr. Paolo Costa. My current research focuses on investigating the use of FPGAs to support the high-performance networking demands of datacenters.  I obtained my MSc Degree in Computer Science from the University of EPFL in Switzerland after completing a B.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering. My master’s research focused on the architectural modelling of FPGAs to predict the memory access patterns of high-performance workloads on FPGAs from their x86 binaries and determine potential performance bottlenecks without the challenges associated with hardware design.

Aidan Hogg

I obtained my MEng degree in Electronic and Information Engineering from Imperial College London in 2017.  I am now a PhD student graduating from Imperial College London in 2021 with developed professional interests in Speech & Audio Signal Processing. I have over 2 years experience working in various engineering roles including both software and hardware development.  My research is in speaker diarisation which aims at answering the question ‘which speaker spoke when?’. More formally this requires the unsupervised identification of each speaker within an audio stream and the intervals during which each speaker is active.

Dan Iorga

I am working in the Multicore Programming Group under the supervisor of Alastair F. Donaldson. I am interested in all aspects of reliability of software on multicore systems particularly of that of computer vision algorithms on such platforms. Currently, I am investigating portable solutions for multicore timing analysis.  Before joining Imperial, I finished a masters in Embedded Systems at TUDelft in the Netherlands, specialising in embedded computer architectures.

Kenny Malpartida Cárdenas

I am a biomedical engineer with MRes in Nanomaterials at Imperial College London (2017). Currently, I am first year PhD student at the Centre for Bio-Inspired Technology under the supervision of Dr. Pantelis Georgiou developing rapid point-of-care diagnostics for infectious diseases, mainly for malaria. My research involves multidisciplinary skills working at the interface between electronics (CMOS-based ISFETs biosensing technology) and molecular biology (molecular amplification methods such as LAMP and PCR).

Ian McInerney

I am currently a PhD student in the Control and Power research group in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering studying under the supervision of Dr. Eric Kerrigan and Professor George Constantinides. My research focuses on the implementation of Model Predictive Control on embedded systems. This includes adapting optimization algorithms to reduce the computational load by taking advantage of the specifics of the problem, and also developing custom compute architectures to efficiently implement the algorithms on FPGAs.  Prior to attending Imperial, I received my MS and BS degrees in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University in the United States. There I focused on embedded systems design and control systems implementation, with my master’s work involving the modelling and control of quadrotors. I have also had internships at Caterpillar, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, and the John’s Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Philippos Papaphilippou

I have a BSc in Computer Science with course specialisation in Computer Systems and Networks from the University of Cyprus (2016). I have also completed my MPhil in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge with distinction (2017). I am here with an industrial sponsorship from Dunnhumby. The goal is to accelerate the execution of a specific set of queries using specialised hardware. My main research interests include computer architecture, multi-core processors, FPGAs and data science.

Jukka Soikkeli

I am a PhD student in the Resilient Information Systems Security (RISS) group of the Department of Computing, working under the supervision of Professor Emil Lupu. My research interests are in ways to improve the resilience of partially compromised networks, and network forensics.  I hold an MSc in Computing Science from Imperial College London, and degrees in economics from the University of Oxford and the University of St Andrews.

Alexandros Tasos

I am a 1st year PhD student supervised by Sophia Drossopoulou and Susan Eisenbach. My research specialises in Programming Languages, and more specifically in the design of a programming language that attempts to ease the exploitation of SIMD constructs (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) in modern CPUs and to better utilise CPU caches in order to achieve better performance. Before that, I received my BSc in Computer Science from the University of Athens in 2016.

George Theodorakis

I am a Ph.D. student in the Large-Scale Distributed Systems (LSDS) group @ Imperial College London, under the supervision of Dr. Peter Pietzuch. My Ph.D. is supported by a CDT HiPEDS scholarship. Prior to this, I was an undergraduate student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of National Technical University of Athens and conducted my thesis under the supervision of Dr. Konstantinou in affiliation with CSLab.  My research interests lie in the areas of distributed and parallel computing systems, database management systems and stream processing engines, with a current focus on optimization of streaming queries. At the moment, I am working on designing highly efficient streaming operator implementations that exploit superscalar execution and SIMD parallelism.

James Wilson

As a PhD student at Imperial (jointly supervised by Wayne Luk and Marc Deisenroth), my research centers on Bayesian inference and decision-making. I am interested in understanding and improving upon simple building blocks that are widely used to construct complex algorithms, esp. those involving Gaussian processes.

Jingqing Zhang

Jingqing Zhang is a PhD (HiPEDS) student at Department of Computing, Imperial College London under supervision of Prof. Yi-Ke Guo. His research interest includes Text Mining, Deep Learning, Machine Learning and their applications. He received his BEng degree in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University, 2016.

Ruizhe Zhao

I am currently a Ph.D. student in the Custom Computing group at Imperial College London, supervised by Prof. Wayne Luk. My research interests are about domain-specific compiler targeting at FPGA from high-level application representations, especially from Deep Neural Networks.  I am currently working on efficiently compiling DNN described in TensorFlow to FPGA-based hardware designs on various platforms.  I received my M.Res in Advanced Computing from Imperial College London with distinction and was awarded The Corporate Partnership Programme Awards for Academic Excellence.  I received my B.Sc. in Computer Science and Technology from Peking University, China.

Aligned Students

Eduardo Da Costa Carvalho

I am part of the Software Performance Optimisation group of the Department of Computing, working under supervision of Prof. Paul Kelly and sponsored by Arup, an engineering and design consultancy. My research focuses on several aspects of Statistical Machine Learning with applications to black-box optimisation and design space exploration in the built environment and engineering domains.  Prior to starting my PhD studies I was working as a Data Scientist for the financial industry and carried out my master thesis work in applying Statistical Machine Learning to Formula 1. I also hold a Bachelors degree in Physics from the University of Lisbon and a MSc in Statistics from Imperial College London.

Georgios Rizos

I graduated in 2012 from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. I continued with postgraduate studies at the Imperial College of London, where I acquired my M.Sc. with distinction in Biomedical Engineering in 2013.  Between 2013 and 2017 I worked at the Information Technologies Institute of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH – ITI) as a research assistant, applying machine learning techniques on large scale data from social networks in the context of the FP7-REVEAL and H2020-STEP projects. This work has led to the publication (among others) of a PLOS One article on multilabel online user classification using localized community detection.  I am currently carrying out my PhD in Reinforcement Learning using Bayesian Neural Networks under the supervision of Dr. Björn Schuller as a member of the HiPEDS 2017 cohort. My PhD work is funded by the prestigious President’s Scholarship of Imperial College London.

Johannes Wiebe

I am a PhD student at the Department of Computing (QUADS group) under the supervision of Dr Ruth Misener. My research interest is optimization under uncertainty of chemical and manufacturing processes with degrading equipment. I am funded through an iCase studentship in cooperation with the Schlumberger Gould Research center in Cambridge, UK. I previously obtained an M.Sc. degree in Chemical Engineering and a B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from RWTH Aachen, Germany.