About Me

I am currently a Senior Research Associate/ BBC Research Fellow at the University College London (UCL). I have completed my PhD in 2008, and since then I had worked in Prof. Stephen Hailes's network group in the project Indian-UK Advanced Technology Centre (IUATC). My research focuses was in Internet of Things (IoT), and have worked in various projects related to both wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring and wearable technologies. My recent research and development interest is around the Computing At School initiatives on informal and formal learning technologies.

Research

Formal and informal learning technologies

Engduino - My most recent research and development interest is around the Computing At School (CAS) initiatives on formal and informal learning technologies, sparked from the Prof. Stephen Hailes' group, when the Engduino was created. The development on Engduino is still going on, together with many activities associated with the Engduino, including collaboration with the Microsoft and Mathwork.

CodeMe - Since the Engduino, I have been working on the CodeMe project with Prof. Yvonne Rogers and Dr. Nicolai Marquardt, focusing on developing fun learning technologies for younger age children, for learning about the next generation of technologies. The research focus here is to observe how children learns with making and creating, and interacting with each other. Yvonne and Nicolai's UCLIC group researches on HCI - Human Computer Interaction

Internet of Things

Pollution Monitoring - During 2008-2011, I worked on pollution monitoring in the IUATC project. We actually deployed 15-20 real sensors in the UK, Cyprus and India, collected pollution data for the Scientists at the Civil, Enviromental and Geomatic Engineering department at UCL to study pollution in urban environment. There are a few publications resulted in the projects on sensor calibration, bias correction technique and adaptive sampling algorithms. You can find them in my Google Scolar page

Wearable Technologies - I have worked on several projects using wearable and body sensing technologies, including,

1) Performance monitoring of open water swimming athlete - In this project, we used a device developed by Graeme McPhillips, which can collect GPS and 3D motion data (accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope). I developed a user interface, which analysed the collected data for stroke rate, stroke distances and some other metrics, and plotted the route of the swimmer on Google map. The system was used by some Olympic swimmers in preparation for the London Olympic 2012.

2) Heart rate and heart rate variation monitoring - I was involved in monitoring the comfort level of office worker in relation of colour of light, partnered with the Energy Institute of UCL. Also, the same equipment was used for monitoring the concentration level of autistic children, partnered with the Institute of Child Health.

Embankment Monitoring - During 2006-2008, I worked at a start up company Senceive in the last 2 years of my PhD, working on an end-to-end total solution for embankment monitoring for Network Rail. We (only 4 people) developed the first prototypes to gather tilt information and relay this back to a central database, to be displayed via a webpage.

Oceanography monitoring - My PhD dissertation was on Topology control and data handling of wireless sensor networks - which I developed a network topology management technique for wireless sensor data, analysed the oceanographic data and developed a suitable data compression and sampling strategy. This project was SECOAS , which monitor the effect of a wind farm on sandbank movement at Norfolk.

Publications

I maintain an update list of publications at Google Scholar

Teaching

COMPGC01-Introductory Programming, course lecturer and tutor - This is a very hands-on Master course aiming to introduce imperative and object-oriented programming with the JAVA language. The students are required to learn the programming techniques and practice them in their lab session and project, which is to design a JAVA application for a real client.

Programming Club - This is an interest club held in the Maths and Stats department, aiming at helping students with programming with Pythons and other programming language. I helped with running the sessions and held some themed workshops for the students.

Outreaching Activities - Held outreaching workshops for different events for the Engduino and CodeMe, aiming to introduce programming and technologies to young people in a fun way.

Experience

06/2014 – Now Senior Research Associate/ BBC Research Fellow, University College London

03/2008 – 06/2014 Research Associate, India-UK Advance Technology Centre, University College London

01/2006 – 01/2008 Application Developer, Senceive Limited

04/2002 – 04/2003 System Engineer, consultancy department, Aircom International, Singapore Regional Office

10/2001 – 04/2002 System Engineer, consultancy department, Aircom International, UK Main Office

09/1998 – 09/2000 Engineering Graduate, E&M Dept, The Hong Kong SAR Government