Contact the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems

Professor Jim Harkin

Head of the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems

Prof Jim Harkin is Head of the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems. He is a member of the Computational Neuroscience and Neuromorphic Engineering team in the Intelligent Systems Research Centre (ISRC) and previously worked as a post-doc researcher in Embedded Systems at Ulster (2001-2004) on the EPSRC project (GR/N26753).

His current teaching interests relate to embedded systems encompassing digital systems design, VHDL for FPGAs and system testing. Dr. Harkin leads research on the design of intelligent embedded systems and focuses on developing electronic computing systems that can self-repair under the presence of errors. In particular, his work explores how computer models of neural networks (brain like-repair) can be mapped to hardware to build highly efficient and reliable embedded computers.

His work has seen innovations in Networks-on-Chip strategies and the hardware implementation of self-repairing Spiking Neural Networks, and is Co-founder of the medical analytics start-up company Respiratory Analytics. He has secured grant funding of +£3.5 million from several sources including EPSRC, MRC, Innovate UK, HSC R&D, InvestNI and DEL and has published over +140 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He was included in the University’s Computer Science (UoA 23) submission to the RAE 2008, REF2014 and also UoA 11 in REF2021.

Dr Bryan Gardiner

Deputy Head of the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems

Dr Bryan Gardiner received a first class honours degree in Electronics and Computer Systems in 2006, and a Ph.D. degree from Ulster University in 2010. Bryan is a Reader in Computer Science and Associate Head of the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems at Ulster. A fellow of the HEA, he is also the Research Lead for the Intelligent Data Analytics team within the Intelligent Systems Research Centre.

His research interests are primarily in Data Analytics, with a keen focus on Computer Vision. His research is currently supported by funding from MRC, HSCNI and Interreg NWE. He has undertaken a number of technology commercialisation and knowledge exchange projects funded via Innovate UK, Invest NI and InterTradeIreland.

Bryan is a member of the IEEE UKRI society, IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), Irish Pattern Recognition & Classification Society (IPRCS), International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR), British Machine Vision Association (BMVA), and affiliate member of IEEE Computational Imaging Special Interest Group.

A Guest Editor of MDPI Remote Sensing Journal, he is also a member of a number of Programme Committees, such as: the International Conference on Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications; the Artificial Intelligence & Cognitive Systems conference; the Irish Machine Vision Image Processing Conference, and has served as a reviewer for several international conferences and journals.

Professor Liam McDaid

Interim Research Director

Paddy McDonough

Technical Planning & Development Manager

Elaine Duffy

School Administrative Officer