Welcome Address

Professor Liam Maguire

Ulster University

Liam Maguire is Dean of Faculty of Computing and Engineering at Ulster and Director of the Intelligent Systems Research Centre. He obtained MEng and PhD degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the Queen's University of Belfast. He is a fellow of the IET and a Member of the IEEE. Liam joined Ulster University, as a Lecturer in 1994; he was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2001, Reader in 2004 and he became a Professor of Computational Intelligence in 2007.

The Intelligent Systems Research Centre (ISRC) is a major research unit in the Faculty of Computing and Engineering. As Director, Liam provides leadership for over 80 researchers including academic staff, research associates and PhD students who work on a range of research projects with state of the art research facilities. The ISRC has four teams: Computational Neuroscience and Neural Engineering, Cognitive Robotics, Neural Systems and Neuro-technology and finally Ambient Intelligence and Virtual Worlds. Liam's research interests focus on brain modelling and the development and application of bio-inspired techniques such as computationally effective spiking neural networks and related hardware implementations on FPGAs. He is the author of over 200 research papers including over 80 Journal papers. He has a track record of securing research funding from Research Council; European Union programmes; N. Ireland and Republic of Ireland industry; Science Research Infrastructure Funds; and Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. He has also supervised 16 PhD and 3 MPhil students to completion.