Research Areas

Energy-Driven Computing

My research is rethinking the design of power-constrained embedded systems, where the available energy, its dynamics, and its consumption, are a primary design parameter. Much of my research in this area is concerned with managing IoT-like devices powered from energy harvested from the environment (e.g. solar), and more recently has focussed on 'intermittently' powered systems which are unintentionally off for much of the time.

Embedded Machine Learning

Machine learning enables computers to learn from data they have previously observed, building models and using them to make decisions or predictions in the future. Embedding this into everyday objects - such as the Internet of Things (IoT) - requires processing data on electronic devices, but the computing power needed to cater for these machine learning models is too great for current low-energy handheld devices to manage. My research is addressing this, and enabling energy-efficient computation for intelligence.

Multi-Core Resource Management

Power- and energy-efficiency continues to be a primary concern in the design and management of computing systems, through from mobile devices (battery life and temperature) to HPC (electricity bills and temperature). Managing this is an increasingly complex task, as systems shift from having a single processing element to multi- and many-core computing platforms with numerous cores of differing types. My research is investigating runtime management (RTM) approaches to tackle this challenge.

Research Centres

Centre for IoT & Pervasive Systems

I am a member of the School's Strategic Research Centre for Internet of Things and Pervasive Systems, having previous been Head of Centre from 2018-24. The Centre has research activities in a full spectrum of topics cutting across the full IoT system stack, from underpinning semiconductor and sensor devices, through to machine intelligence and data science.

Funded Projects

Dates Title Funder Value
2019-24 International Centre for Spatial Computational Learning
Co-Investigator (Southampton PI)
EPSRC (EP/S030069/1) £1.21M
2017-22 Wearable and Autonomous Computing for Future Smart Cities: A Platform Grant
Co-Investigator (Deputy Director, Theme Leader)
EPSRC (EP/P010164/1) £1.43M
2014-18 Continuous On-line Adaptation in Many-core Systems: From Graceful Degradation to Graceful Amelioration
Co-Investigator (Southampton PI)
EPSRC (EP/L000563/1) £1.32M
2013-18 PRiME Programme Grant: Power-efficient, Reliable, Many-core Embedded systems
Co-Investigator (Theme Leader)
EPSRC (EP/K034448/1) £5.64M
2011 A Low-Cost Home-Based Stroke Rehabilitation System using Haptic Devices and Virtual Environments
Principal Investigator
TSB/SBRI £39k
2010-13 Energy Harvesting Network
Co-Investigator
EPSRC (EP/H013458/1) £112k
2010 Design and Human Evaluation of Haptic Devices for Hand Rehabilitation from Sensory Deficits due to Neurological Impairment
Principal Investigator
UoS AARG (A2009/9) £37k
2009-13 Next Generation Energy-Harvesting Electronics - A Holistic Approach
Co-Investigator (Project Coordinator)
EPSRC (EP/G067740/1) £722k
2006-09 Platform: New Directions in Intelligent Sensors
Named Researcher
EPSRC (EP/D042917/1) £417k