Keynote Speakers

Biography:

Chris is a full Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Head of School of Computing at Ulster University. 

His research interests include the development and evaluation of technologies to support pervasive healthcare within smart environments. Specifically, this has involved research in the topics of mobile based reminding solutions, activity recognition and behaviour modelling and more recently technology adoption modelling.  He is the director of the Pervasive Computing Research Centre,  the co-Principal Investigator of the Connected Health Innovation Centre,  the Principal Investigator at Ulster for the PWC Advanced Research and Engineering Centre and co-Investigator for the BT Ireland Innovation Centre.

To date he has successfully supervised 47 PhD students to completion and has an h-index of 60.  In 2024 he was recognised on Stanford's top 2% most highly cited scientists and is currently ranked No. 1 internationally on Google Scholar for citations in the area of Ambient Assisted Living.  He has been instrumental in initiating,  preparing,  supporting and managing a number of externally funded Research Projects.  The total funding allocated to Ulster as a result of these projects is in excess of £52M.  In 2016 he was awarded a Senior Distinguished Research Fellowship by Ulster University.

Through his network of collaborators he has endeavoured to share the findings of his research and strategies in Digital Health.  He has held visiting Professorships at Halmstad University (Sweden) and the University of Florence (Italy) and is currently a visiting Professor in Pervasive and Mobile Computing at Lulea Technical University (Sweden),  a visiting Professor in Computing at Shandong Jianzhu University (China) and a Visiting Professor in Computing at Dalian University of Technology (China). 

Since 2008 has served as an Associate Editor for the Editorial Board of the IEEE Engineering Medicine and Biology Conference,  Healthcare Information Systems Theme and he is currently serving as a member of Ireland’s Commission on Care for Older People. 

Title of the talk: Delivering Health and Wellbeing solutions within smart environments through AI enabled IoT

Abstract

Advances in computational power,  high speed communications,  artificial intelligence (AI) and low-cost sensing devices are providing us with the tools and platforms that we require to assist in making a step change across a wide range of Internet of Things (IoT) based application domains.  Smart environments have already established themselves as appropriate tools for the tracking of inhabitants and the profiling of behavioural trends.  At the core of this process is the fundamental task of identifying the individual activities that each inhabitant is undertaking and subsequently building a deeper understanding of likely future activities in addition to analysis of any potential deviations from the normal. 

Whilst many approaches have yielded high levels of activity recognition performance the data available to support the creation of data driven models is now being considered by many as hindering significant improvements in performance.  This is coupled with challenges of deploying AI models on resource constrained devices.

This presentation will provide an update on our current work where we have continued to improve the performance of activity recognition within smart environments.  Details of strategies deployed using synthetic data will be discussed as approaches to augment training datasets.  In addition, our recent work of reducing model size for deployment on resource constrained devices will also be discussed.

Cross cutting strategies of personalisation,  sustainability and trustworthiness,  all of which are integral to this work of AI enabled IoT within smart environments will also be presented.