People within Information and Communications Engineering

Professor Darryl Charles

Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Games

Darryl Charles joined Ulster University in 2001 and is a member of the Computer Science Research Institute. Darryl is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and teaches at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. His research background is in computational intelligence and he has applied his expertise in this area to serious games and apps as well as a number of research contexts such as intelligent interactive storytelling, machine learning in games, user modelling, cloud computing, and connected health. Recent research has been mainly focused on health contexts and creating software with natural user interfaces to help motivate people to engage with learning, exercise and rehabilitation. Since 1998 he has had over 80 papers published in peer reviewed journals and conferences as well as an authored book entitled Biologically Inspired Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games.

Darryl graduated from Queens University Belfast with a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (Hons.) in 1988. After qualifying as a teacher at Stranmillis College, Belfast, he taught Technology and Design to A-Level at Portadown College until 1995 and during this spell completed an MSc in Microelectronics and Microcomputer Applications at the University of Ulster. After a spell as Head of IT at Cox Green School in Maidenhead he returned to full-time education to study for a PhD on Unsupervised Artificial Neural Networks at the University of Paisley. While completing his PhD he was appointed as a lecturer and subsequently as a senior lecturer in Computing at Paisley before returning to Northern Ireland in 2001.

Professor Sally McClean

Professor of Mathematics

Professor Bryan Scotney

Professor of Informatics

Bryan Scotney has over 30 years’ experience spanning a range of research interests in mathematical computation, especially in digital image processing and computer vision, pattern recognition and classification, statistical databases, reasoning under uncertainty, and applications to healthcare informatics, official statistics, biomedical and vision sciences, and telecommunications network management.

He has published widely in the areas of image processing and distributed data processing and analysis, focusing on solving the problems of integration of heterogeneous data sources.

Prof Scotney has collaborated widely with academic, government and commercial partners, and has extensive experience of working in interdisciplinary projects, most recently with an emphasis on healthcare technologies and applications for healthcare support.

Much of his work has been supported by funding from the European Union Framework Programmes and the UK Research Councils.

This includes four EU FP5 projects to address issues of harmonisation of Official Statistics.

More recently, he is an investigator on

• EPSRC NETWORK in Next Generation Networks Systems and Services (EP/F030118/1)
• EPSRC–DST funded India-UK Advanced Technology Centre (IU-ATC) of Excellence in Next Generation Networks Systems and Services (EP/G051674/1 and EP/J016748/1)
• ESRC-funded project on Design for Ageing Well (RES-353-25-0004)
• SAVASA project on a Standards-based Approach to Video Archive Search and Analysis, funded by the EU FP7 Security programme

Professor Scotney was the Principal Investigator on the recently completed EU FP7 project: Security System for Language and Image Analysis (SLANDAIL).

Currently he is an investigator on two EU H2020 projects:

• DESIREE: Decision Support and Information Management System for Breast Cancer (Feb 2016 – Jan 2019)
• ASGARD - Analysis System for Gathered Raw Data (Sep 2016 – Mar 2020), working on breast tissue characterisation from medical images, and biometrics from video data (face recognition), respectively.

Professor Scotney has substantial experience of research management both within Ulster University and externally.

He was Director of the University’s Computer Science Research Institute since its formation in 2005 until May 2015, with management responsibility for 50 academic staff, approximately 30 contract research staff, and over 90 PhD students. In this capacity he led the University’s periodic UK Research Assessment submissions for Computer Science and Informatics, RAE2008 and REF2014.

Externally, he was President of the Irish Pattern Recognition and Classification Society 2007-2014 (re-elected in 2010), and a member of the Governing Board of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), 2007-2014. Currently he is Guest Professor at Keio University, Tokyo.