Thales hosts first Earley Schools cluster group - posted June 2010 
Thales UK’s Reading-based research facility hosted the first Earley Schools cluster group meeting on 1 July 2010. In conjunction with seven local schools - Hawkedon Primary School (a Thales Partnership School), Aldryngton Primary School, Loddon Primary School, Whiteknights Primary School, Hillside Primary School, Radstock Primary School and Earley St Peters Primary School - Thales hosted a ‘Partnership Day’ to enhance pupils learning across the curriculum.
The day consisted of six Year 4 children from each school being put into teams and being set a challenge. The children were asked to investigate features of a variety of bridges, work as a team to design a bridge and then make a model bridge that was then tested for its strength.
Neil Symons-Chan, Primary School teacher at Hawkedon Primary School, says: "The collaboration and team work involving schools and industry expertise was amazing to see today at the Thales UK-hosted day. It gave the children a different perspective and approach to using and applying their skills." “This was clearly a valuable opportunity that should be explored and utilised more often. It was a positive experience for everyone involved, which highlighted the effectiveness of learning out of the classroom."
Victor Chavez, Deputy Chief Executive Thales UK, says: “Thales UK employs 8,500 throughout all regions of the UK, with a high proportion of staff being involved in science, technology and engineering. The themes of technology and education are at the heart of what we do, which is why we are so enthusiastic about supporting such activities. “We believe very strongly that this type of activity is crucial in raising the profile of engineering in the minds of young people as an exciting career for their future.” | TRT University of Reading prize 2010 - posted June 2010 
On 30 June 2010 Edward Stansfield joined in the graduation procession for the School of Systems Engineering at Reading University, where he is a visiting professor. Edward later presented Christopher Ollerenshaw with the TRT Prize for the best BEng/MEng final year Electronic Engineering Project 2010, which was entitled “Real Time Kinematic Algorithms". | Best paper award at IEEE SoSE conference - posted June 2010
A paper co-written by TRT and LJMU (Liverpool John Moores University) has won the award for best paper presented at the IEEE 5th International Systems of Systems Engineering Conference, which was held at Loughborough University, 22-24 June 2010. The paper was titled "System-of-Systems Boundary Check in a Public Event Scenario". There was a strong focus on systems of systems engineering at the conference, with much less emphasis on network/systems of systems security, but Bret Michael (General Co-Chair), said the paper was chosen because it's a difficult area that we're nonetheless making progress in.
For the past two years, TRT has been liaising with the team based at LJMU as part of an EPSRC Knowledge Transfer Project (KTP). This partnership has been researching security issues for systems-of-systems and has lead to the development of new IP and several academic papers.
Further details of the paper can be found at Technical Publications 2010. | 'Tabletops - Horizontal Interactive Displays' book chapters - posted June 2010
The book 'Tabletops - Horizontal Interactive Displays' which brings together the most important international current research in the domain of tabletops was published in May by Springer in their Human-Computer Interaction series (ISBN-13: 978-1849961127).
It describes various aspects of interactive tabletops, from low-level implementation issues, to high-level social theories of collaborative use.
Mark Ashdown (TRT wrote the chapter entitled 'High-Resolution Interactive Displays', which is about combining multiple projectors and pen input devices. Phil Tuddenham, whose PhD at Cambridge was supported by TRT and completed in 2008, wrote the chapter entitled 'Coordination and Awareness in Remote Tabletop Collaboration', which is about how multiple people collaborate when co-located or remote. | RTIC 2010 conference CEDAR paper - posted May 2010
CEDAR (Charging Electronically by Distance And Road) was a technology and behavioural trial of distance-based road user charging in urban areas of Southern England. Thales provided GPS-based On-Board Equipment (OBE) to improve transport logistics and reduce congestion.
A paper "The CEDAR project: time, distance, place (TDP) road pricing" co-authored by TRT, Transportation Research Group, University of Southampton and Thales Transport and Security was presented at the RTIC 2010 - better transport through technology conference organised by IET and ITS, 25-27 May 2010.
The Partners in the project were Thales, the Transportation Research Group at Southampton University and Swindon Borough Council. It extended the successful trials Thales previously carried out for Transport for London. The CEDAR project ran from May 2008 to December 2009, with the trial running during the latter 6 months of 2009, and was a successful demonstration of the technology.
The conclusion is that the technology is close to being acceptable for commercial use in real urban road pricing schemes.
Further details of the paper can be found at Technical Publications 2010. | I3CON second handbook published - posted May 2010
The second I3CON (Industrialised, Integrated, Intelligent sustainable Construction) handbook has been published by BISRA, with a chapter from TRT's I3CON team.
I3CON, an industry-led collaborative research project, part funded by the EU under Framework 6, has published its second handbook to disseminate work carried out within the area of sustainable construction to a wider audience.
Abolghasem (Hamid) Asgari and Mark Irons from TRT have contributed a chapter "A health monitoring application for wireless sensor networks" which discusses security issues for wireless sensor networks and the implementation of an access control service mechanism. This I3CON 2 Handbook was published in collaboration with BISRIA in May 2010, ISBN 9780860226987, available from I3CON web site. | IET Technology visit for the Radar, Sonar and Navigation Network Network on Indoor Positioning - posted May 2010
On Thursday, 6th May, Thales UK R&T lab hosted an IET technology visit for the Radar, Sonar and Navigation Network. The event consisted of lectures and live demonstrations of Frequency Hopping UWB for precise indoor positioning and through wall radar.
During the well attended visit, Dave Harmer gave a presentation of our patented Frequency-Hopping Ultra Wideband (FH-UWB) technology and its applications. The attendees had the opportunity to discuss the detail of the technologies with the designers, discuss applications, participate in live demonstrations and engage in a lively Q&A session.
The Indoor Positioning System (IPS) demonstrated its unique features, such as operating at much longer range than conventional solutions (up to 1KM), operation through walls, the use of a very sparse infrastructure, simple deployment, and delivering high accuracy. A second demonstration showed an enhanced FH-UWB positioning system integrated with inertial sensors to give accurate positioning and repeatable pointing capability. These features open up a whole new world of applications and opportunities.
This same technology also has application as a compact, low-cost radar with greater sensitivity. Mike Newman demonstrated the FH-UWB radar operating through walls, detecting the movement of personnel and even the breathing of a stationary individual.
For further details on the technology, see Indoor Positioning. | I3CON Publication “Building services and IT integration through enterprise architectures” - posted May 2010
I3CON aims at enhancing the sustainability of the European construction industry by delivering industrially produced, integrated processes and intelligent building systems. The project devised distributed control systems with embedded sensors, ambient user interfaces, and autonomous controllers.
TRT (UK) devised and implemented a Service Oriented Architecture for developing an enterprise networking environment. This is used for integrating building management systems and applications with other operational enterprise functions for the purpose of information sharing and monitoring, controlling, and managing the enterprise environment. We focused on Wireless Sensor Networks which are viewed as an information providers, not only to building management systems but also to wider applications in the enterprise infrastructure. The four-year FP6 project, was partially funded by the Commission of the European Union.
For more information see I3CON. | INTERSECTION (INfrastructure for heTErogeneous, Resilient, SEcure, Complex, Tightly Inter-Operating Networks) project Final Review - posted April 2010
INTERSECTION was a European Framework 7 collaborative project with ten industrial and academic partners from six countries across Europe. Led by Elsag Datamat (Italy) the consortium has shown how an effective network security system can be constructed from a set of loosely coupled components (probes, intrusion detection systems, decision engines, reaction and remediation functions) with standards based interfaces. TRT(UK) developed a flexible visualisation component to assist in understanding the vast amounts of information provided by the various components of the system and led the Integration workpackage, bringing the various components together and verifying the operation of the system. More information on the project and its consortium can be found at www.intersection-project.eu. | I3CON Project Review - posted April 2010
I3CON aims at enhancing the sustainability of the European construction industry by delivering industrially produced, integrated processes and intelligent building systems. The project devised distributed control systems with embedded sensors, ambient user interfaces, and autonomous controllers.
TRT (UK) devised and implemented a Service Oriented Architecture for developing an enterprise networking environment. This is used for integrating building management systems and applications with other operational enterprise functions for the purpose of information sharing and monitoring, controlling, and managing the enterprise environment. We focused on Wireless Sensor Networks which are viewed as an information providers, not only to building management systems but also to wider applications in the enterprise infrastructure. The four-year FP6 project, was partially funded by the Commission of the European Union.
For more information see I3CON | IiP silver gained by TRT (UK) - posted February 2010
Thales Research & Technology (UK) Ltd has now gained re-accreditation by Investors in People, (IiP) this time at the higher Silver level. This is a fantastic achievement as to date, there are only 147 organisations in the UK who have achieved Silver status. | Mathematics in the Wider World talk - posted February 2010
On 11 February 2010, Edward Stansfield gave a talk entitled 'Mathematics in the Wider World' to an audience of over 150 students aged between 16 and 18. His was one of 3 talks at a Science and Maths Seminar organised by the independent North London Collegiate School, under the Thales Employee Volunteering Scheme, and was attended by pupils from this and surrounding schools. | Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (OCIAM) presentation - posted February 2010
On 30 October 2009, Doug Watson presented a seminar on "Graph Optimisation Problem for Signal Sorting" at the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematicss (OCIAM). The aim was to engage with the OCIAM mathematicians on the problem of maximum weighted matching of a bipartite graph for radar signal deinterleaving. | European Commission FP6 Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellowship reports - posted December 2009
Three European Commission FP6 Marie Curie Actions Outgoing International Fellowship 21743 reports from the "Distributed Crisis Management using Remote Collaboration Technologies" project have recently been published:
- "Design of Experiments for Asymmetric Distributed Collaboration"
- "User Experiences with Asymmetric Distributed Collaboration"
- "Escritoire 2 Project: Conclusions and Future Work"
The full text of these three reports can be found at Technical Publications 2009 and the two previous reports at Technical Publications 2008. | Mathematics in Defence conference sponsored by Thalesadministrator - posted November 2009 
Thales UK sponsored the first one-day conference on 'Mathematics in Defence' held by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) on 19 November 2009 at QinetiQ in Farnborough. The conference was attended by over 160 delegates who had the opportunity to listen to over 40 papers covering a wide variety of defence related mathematics. David Youdan, IMA Executive Director, said that this was "a fantastically successful conference" and that he "did not expect a first conference to be one of the larger IMA conferences that has ever been held".
The day began with a keynote address "Mathematics on the Front Line" by Dr Chris Mace (Director General, Science and Technology Operations, MOD), and in the afternoon a second keynote talk by Professor John McWhirter (Cardiff University) was entitled "Polynomial Matrix Decomposition with Engineering Applications".
Professor Edward Stansfield from Thales Research & Technology (UK) Ltd was a member of the technical organising committee, and two of the presented papers were from Thales Underwater Systems. Phil Cotterill (Stockport) gave a talk on "Modelling the impact of defects noise reduction treatments applied to underwater structures" and Peter Brazier-Smith (Templecombe) presented a paper entitled "A model for the acoustic properties of macro voided tiles". Details of all the presented papers can be found on the IMA conference website. | NAV09 Conference presentation - posted November 2009
Dave Harmer gave a presentation "Indoor Positioning" at the NAV09 - "Positioning & Location: Now and into the Future. Looking beyond the Horizon" Conference jointly organised by the Royal Institute of Navigation and the GNSS Research and Applications Centre of Excellence (GRACE), held at the University of Nottingham on 12 November 2009.
For more information about FH-UWB indoor positioning see our Publications | SANDRA project - posted November 2009 
The SANDRA (Seamless Aeronautical Networking through Integration of Data links, Radios, and Antennas) project started in October 2009 and over the next four years will design, implement and validate through laboratory tests and in-flight trials an integrated aeronautical communications system based on an open architecture and provide a common set of interfaces.
The SANDRA programme involves 31 European partners including Selex, DLR and Thales Avionics (UK). TRT is leading six work packages and will work together with Thales Avionics (UK), GateHouse, Thales Alenia Space (Fr), Selex and The University of Bradford amongst others to develop a prototype proof of concept Integrated Modular Radio. | Thales shortlisted for iawards' Best Collaboration category - posted November 2009 
Thales UK, with its collaborative working tool, nuVa, joins the high-quality shortlist for the iawards, recognising some of the most innovative British businesses.
The iawards, in association with QinetiQ, were launched by Lord Drayson and James Caan in July. They aim to celebrate the best of British science, technology and innovation. As such, all entrants had to specify the British involvement in their innovation - demonstrating that innovative thinking and development came from a British organisation or team.
The ‘Best Collaboration’ category focuses on any industry that will demonstrate commercial success through collaboration with companies or public sector organisations. As with all categories each entry had to demonstrate how its innovative qualities relate to at least one of the following challenges:
- Increasing international security from tackling global poverty to minimising the threat of terrorism;
- Preserving finite natural resources in the face of population growth and climate change; and
- Delivering public services, which make best use of new technologies.
All of the winners will be announced at the iawards gala dinner on 16 November at the Science Museum.
For more information please visit http://www.iawards.org.uk or http://www.mynuva.com for more details on nuVa. | Université Bordeaux 1 Guest Professor appointmentadministrator - posted September 2009
Hamid Asgari was nominated and has subsequently been appointed as “Guest Professor” of Bordeaux 1 University at its CNRS Lab (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - National Centre for Scientific Research in France). Hamid will visit the university for a period of one month (between Oct and Nov 2009). This appointment is aimed at promoting research collaboration and establishing links between university and industry, especially Thales research centres. Hamid will work closely with researchers at the university's CNRS Lab, identifying opportunities for research, and providing lectures in relevant subjects. | Thames Valley Economic Partnership Innovation eventadministrator - posted July 2009
On 21 July 2009, TRT together with The Thames Valley Economic Partnership (TVEP) held a business event on Commercialising Innovation, which included guest speakers from University of Reading and the Thames Valley Innovation Growth Team. TRT presented our approach to innovation using nuVa and FH-UWB as two case studies from the original idea to product and we summarized our experiences and lessons learned along the way. Following the formalities, many of our guests had hands-on time with nuVa, and networking went on until 8pm when our last guest left.
More information about nuVa and FH-UWB can be found here. | TRT (UK) University of Reading Prizeadministrator - posted July 2009 
Reading University student Joseph Smith won this year’s Thales Research & Technology (UK) Ltd prize for the best MEng/BEng final year project. Jo’s project concerned the design, development, implementation and testing of a prototype low-cost digital audio mixer for the amateur market. He carried out the work during a 6 month placement at Soundcraft in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, who tasked him with investigating the potential benefit of using Oxford Digital’s “Tiny DSP Core” as an alternative to the SHARC processor used in professional mixers. After analysing the performance and feasibility of the Tiny DSP Core, Jo concluded that it was not cost-effective using the currently available hardware.
The photo shows Jo being presented with his prize on Graduation Day, Saturday 4 July 2009, by Edward Stansfield from TRT, a Visiting Industrial Professor in the School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading. Jo received a trophy (pictured), a certificate signed by John Howard, managing director of TRT (UK), and a cheque for £150. | Paper presented at SENSORCOMM 2009administrator - posted June 2009
Sarah Pennington participated in The Third International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications (SENSORCOMM 2009) in Athens on 18th–22nd June. Sarah chaired two sessions and presented a paper jointly authored by Sarah, Tim Baugé and Ben Murray. The paper, entitled, “Integrity-Checking Framework: an In-situ Testing and Validation Framework for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks”, describing some of the wireless sensor and actuator network work done by TRT (UK) within the SENSEI project. The paper was commended and won an award as one of the best papers presented at the conference.
Further details of the paper can be found at Technical Publications 2009 | Institute of Mathematicsadministrator - posted May 2009
At the Institute of Mathematics AGM and Summer Lecture on 24 June 2009, Edward Stansfield was presented with a 'Certificate of Service' in recognition of 'dedicated service and contribution to the Institute as Vice President of Engineering and Professional Affairs'. Edward's term as Vice President finishes in December this year after the maximum allowed 4 years service. |
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