Celebrating success: Postgraduate Awards 2015

Director of Postgraduate Studies Professor Andrew Holmes with prizewinners Nicolas Moser, Thiannithi Thanthawaritthisai, Mark Roche and Muhammad Zaid Hameed. (Photograph: Danny Harvey)

The Postgraduate Awards ceremony on 6th May gave our department the opportunity to welcome back our MSc and PhD graduates.

Following the formal award ceremony in the Royal Albert Hall where the graduates were presented with their degree certificates by President Professor Alice Gast, the Department held a reception for our graduates and their guests. Professor Andrew Holmes, Director of Postgraduate Studies, presented the Department’s prizes.

Cyrus Jahanchahi was awarded the Eryl Cadwaladr Davies Prize for the best doctoral thesis: “Quaternion Valued Adaptive Signal Processing’” which was supervised by Professor Danilo Mandic.

Quaternions have long become a standard in computer graphics and animation, owing to the elegance with which they can deal with orientation and rotation; yet their widespread use in learning systems has been prevented by the mathematical obstacles in calculating quaternion gradient.

Cyrus has solved the 180-year old problem of the gradient of real functions of quaternion variables, typical objective functions in adaptive learning systems, which has helped enable the introduction of a suite of adaptive estimation algorithms.

To put his achievement into perspective, we live in a three-dimensional world, but processing 3D phenomena directly in the space where they reside has so far been subject to a number of mathematical shortcuts. This thesis opens up a new avenue of research in adaptive and learning systems, with applications ranging from 3D wind modelling for renewables to satellite navigation, seismic exploration, and wearable inertial technologies.

Nicolas Moser was awarded the Hertha Aryton Centenary Prize for the MSc project with the most significant original contribution for his dissertation "An ISFET based DNA sequencing system with in-pixel compensation and quantisation.” Nicolas also won the Prize for Outstanding Achievement in MSc Analogue and Digital Integrated Circuit Design. He is now continuing his project as PhD research in the department as a HiPEDS CDT student with Dr Pantelis Georgiou.

Similar prizes for Outstanding Achievement were awarded to Thiannithi Thanthawaritthisai (MSc Communications and Signal Processing) and Mark Roche (MSc Control Systems). The Ivor Tupper Prize for Excellence in Signal Processing, Broadcast and Video Technology was won by Muhammad Zaid Hameed.

We send our congratulations to all our graduates and prize-winners, and wish them all the very best in their future careers.