Contact
Telephone: +44 (0) 23 8059 7478
Email: grace.chai@soton.ac.uk
In a quest to understand the mind, David started the study of psychology, in which he obtained an MSc in Psychology (Theory and Research Option) from the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in the year 2014 (cum laude). Beyond the neuroscience and principles of cognition that inspired the quest, these years were also formative in terms of research methodology, with a strong emphasis on the scientific method, modelling techniques and statistics. While studying psychology, David found that he was more interested in designing systems that following intelligent principles (Artificial Intelligence), rather than trying to copy the -- potentially sub-optimal -- way in which humans reason (Psychology). Thus he went on to do an MSc in Artificial Intelligence (Engineering and Computer Science Option) also at the KUL, a study from which he graduated in the year 2015 (magna cum laude).
From late 2015 until 2019, David joined the University of Southampton for a PhD programme in artificial intelligence. During this project, he studied reinforcement learning in long-term unknown environments, where only few assumptions could be made on the learning environment: sparse reward environments may hamper the ability to learn any rewarding patterns; partial observability and limited knowledge hamper the ability to investigate the environment; many unknown tasks may be presented in sequence (lifelong learning).
Since 2019, David has started his postdoc to improve the robustness of robots to sudden faults or other types of changes in the environment. One current line of investigation is how to evolve a suitable behavioural repertoire, such that searching across this repertoire allows a rapid adaptation to unforeseen changes. Another line of investigation is how to perform realistic, efficient, online adaption based on such behavioural repertoires, despite the many challenges that may occur, such as the gaps between simulation and reality, the different faults affecting different robots, etc.
To get on idea of David's publications, you can visit his Google scholar page. David has also been covered in an Elsevier press article on the topic of active adaptive perception, a unique blend of the universalist and sub-symbolic approach towards artificial general intelligence.
Publications
Bossens, David, Townsend, Nicholas and Sobey, Adam (2019) Learning to learn with active adaptive perception. Neural Networks, 115, 30-49. (doi:10.1016/j.neunet.2019.03.006).
Bossens, David, Mouret, Jean-Baptiste and Tarapore, Danesh (2020) Learning behaviour-performance maps with meta-evolution. In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2020. pp. 49-57 .
Bossens, David (2020) Reinforcement learning with limited prior knowledge in long-term environments. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis, 205pp.
Bossens, David and Tarapore, Danesh (2020) QED: using Quality-Environment-Diversity to evolve resilient robot swarms. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. (doi:10.1109/TEVC.2020.3036578).
Bossens, David and Tarapore, Danesh (2021) On the use of feature-maps for improved quality-diversity meta-evolution. In GECCO '21: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion. pp. 83-84 . (doi:10.1145/3449726.3459442).
Naiseh, Mohammad, Clark, Jediah, Divband Soorati, Mohammad and Bossens, David , (2021) Trusting machines? Cross-sector lessons from healthcare & security: conference report Southampton. University of Southampton 20pp. (doi:10.5258/SOTON/P0134).
Bossens, David and Tarapore, Danesh (2021) Rapidly adapting robot swarms with Swarm Map-based Bayesian Optimisation. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). pp. 9848-9854 . (doi:10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9560958).
Thomas, Toby, Bossens, David and Tarapore, Danesh (2021) ASVLite: a high-performance simulator for autonomous surface vehicles. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). pp. 2249-2255 . (doi:10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9561815).
Bossens, David and Tarapore, Danesh (2022) Quality-Diversity Meta-Evolution: customising behaviour spaces to a meta-objective. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. (doi:10.1109/TEVC.2022.3152384). (In Press)
Bossens, David, Ramchurn, Sarvapali and Tarapore, Danesh (2022) Resilient robot teams: a review integrating decentralised control, change-detection, and learning. Current Robotics Reports. (doi:10.1007/s43154-022-00079-4).
Bossens, David and Bishop, Nicholas (2022) Explicit Explore, Exploit, or Escape (E4): near-optimal safety-constrained reinforcement learning in polynomial time. Machine Learning. (doi:10.1007/s10994-022-06201-z).
Contact
Email: D.M.Bossens@soton.ac.uk
Contact
Telephone: +44 (0) 23 8059 7438003808
Email: xl8g15@soton.ac.uk
The University of Southampton is ranked 76th in the world for Engineering and Technology teaching and research, according to the Times Higher Education (THE) World Rankings by Subject 2020.
The subject grouping, which includes Electrical and Electronic Engineering, has now received top 100 status for seven consecutive years at Southampton.
The World Rankings by Subject placed Southampton sixth amongst listed UK universities and 18th in Europe.
Electrical and Electronic Engineering is part of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and was placed third in the UK for career prospects in the Guardian University Guide 2020. In research, it was ranked first in the UK for volume and quality in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014.
Professor Paul Lewin, Head of ECS, said: “I am very pleased that ECS continues to be judged as world-leading in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. It is a measure of success that reflects not only the hard work and dedication of our staff, but also our excellent facilities and the high quality of our students.”
The latest THE table for Engineering & Technology also includes the disciplines of General, Mechanical & Aerospace, Civil and Chemical Engineering.
Like the main THE World Rankings, the publication’s rankings by subject are based on criteria encompassing Teaching, International Outlook, Research, Citations and Industry Income.
The ranking follows similar results in the QS World Rankings by Subject published earlier this year where Southampton was rated in the top 100 (non-specific ranking between 51-100) for Civil & Structural, Electrical & Electronic and Mechanical, and Aeronautical & Manufacturing Engineering.
Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Dean of Faculty Engineering and Physical Sciences, said: “I welcome the news of Southampton’s international recognition in the Times Higher Education Top 100 University World Rankings by Subject for Engineering and Technology.
“This reflects excellence in engineering at Southampton across a broad range of related disciplines and attests to the long and established history of engineering education and innovation at the University.”
Articles that may also interest you
Transceivers for beyond-5G wireless and reliable tracking for electronics will be developed through two new Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Industrial Fellowships at the University of Southampton.
Dr Mohammed El-Hajjar and Dr Basel Halak from the School of Electronics and Computer Science will spearhead collaborative research projects with industry partners InterDigital and Arm through the prestigious scheme. The academics are amongst 19 UK-based researchers selected by the RAEng this autumn to realise innovative new technologies.
Awardees will gain first-hand experience of working in an industrial environment and familiarise themselves with current industry practices, helping them to improve the industrial relevance of their academic research and teaching.
Mohammed’s research will build upon several years of collaboration with InterDigital to advance the research and design of transceivers for 6G systems.
“Wireless communications have played a key role in creating the world as we know it,” he explains. “With mobile subscribers continuing to demonstrate an insatiable demand for data and billions of smart wireless devices predicted in future services for smart homes, cities, transport, healthcare and environments, the explosive demand for wireless access will soon surpass the data transfer capacity of existing mobile systems. “Achieving the vision of the Internet of Things relies on a huge number of smart devices or machines acting in different roles. A major challenge for allowing these devices to be connected is the design trade-off of the underlying cost, complexity and performance requirements of communications.
“Working closely with InterDigital, I will design and develop novel signal processing techniques relying on the concept of Holographic Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) for allowing low-cost high-performance communications supporting a large number of devices.”
Basel will partner with the security experts in Arm to build a detailed threat model of the integrated circuit (IC) supply chain.
“The multinational-distributed nature of IC supply chain has made it vulnerable to hardware security attacks such as Trojan Insertion and IC counterfeit,” he says. “These have severe financial consequences, for example, counterfeiting is costing the UK economy around £30bn and is putting around 14,800 jobs at risk.
“This project aims to create an infrastructure to enforce reliable tracking of electronic systems throughout its life cycle to mitigate against said attacks. This will be achieved by designing an unforgeable hardware root of trust that can be embedded in each computing device and developing appropriate defence mechanisms based on a trustworthy cryptographically secure tracking system.”
Basel has vast experience of the implementation flow of IC, from concept to silicon, and has recently published a book in this area on the use of Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) to produce trustworthy electronic systems. He has also designed a new module on secure hardware design to further promote this research area.
The RAEng Industrial Fellowships scheme has supported 58 researchers to complete placements with 53 industrial partners over the past five years.
Other engineering disciplines covered in this latest cohort include innovations in plastic waste recycling, carbon dioxide capture, bamboo-timber composite beams for buildings and 3D reconstructed human skin.
Articles that may also interest you
Publications
Tuddenham, Mark, Prugel-Bennett, Adam and Hare, Jonathon (2020) Quasi-Newton's method in the class gradient defined high-curvature subspace. 12th Annual Workshop on Optimization for Machine Learning, Virtual. 11 Dec 2020.
Contact
Email: mark.tuddenham@soton.ac.uk
Student hackers from the University of Southampton have been named the winners of the Major League Hacking (MLH) Europe Hackathon Season.
The University topped a leader board of over 150 European institutions in its debut entry to the series thanks to its high-achieving, 36-hour Hack the South competition.
Hackathons challenge small teams to work intensely over a weekend on a new website, app or device that is then presented for feedback and prizes.
The MLH Europe Hackathon Season, which ran from August 2018 to July 2019, included over 5,000 hackers creating more than 1,000 projects in 32 events across the continent.
Universities earn points toward their final ranking through a combination of merit points awarded for winning builds and participation points received from entering hackathon events.
Alexandru Rosianu, 2018-19 HackaSoton President, says, “Southampton is a great place for hacking. Since I joined in 2016, every year I saw tons of enthusiastic students learning new technologies and building crazy ideas. It’s a great place to be, especially with the Future Worlds accelerator ready to take hackathon-winners to the next level.
“I had always considered Hack the South a massive success, but it is an amazing surprise to be named the best MLH hackathon in Europe. I'd like to highlight the team's dedication — we all had coursework and third year projects, but we really, really wanted to make it happen.”
Over 150 people participated in Hack the South 2019, with the bumper turnout requiring an entire truck of food, snacks and drinks to be delivered to fuel the hungry participants. The event, which was co-organised by HackaSoton and the Fish on Toast entrepreneurship and business society, included over £2,000 in prizes for the judges’ pick of the top three teams.
“HackaSoton is focused on teaching tech and entrepreneurship skills through tech events,” Alexandru says. “Hack the South 2019 was my 13th hackathon and I still enjoy the thrills of working (almost) non-stop for a weekend to show a presentable product at the end. The group is looking for new committee members to build on this year’s success and everyone is welcome.”
English universities dominated the top 10 places of the Official 2019 Europe MLH Hackathon Season, with King’s College London and Coventry University maintaining their second and third finishes respectively. The University of Cambridge rose four places to 10th, while the University of Surrey climbed 39 places to 8th. The complete season’s standings are available on the MLH website.
Articles that may also interest you
Publications
Worrawichaipat, Phuriwat, Gerding, Enrico, Kaparias, Ioannis and Ramchurn, Sarvapali (2021) Resilient intersection management with multi-vehicle collision avoidance. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 3, [670454]. (doi:10.3389/frsc.2021.670454).
Contact
Telephone: +44 (0) 23 8059 7476159893
Email: pw1r19@soton.ac.uk