Igniting minds: Café Scientific event Presents a Visionary Dive into Digital and Engineering Systems

Professor Jianming Tang presented the Digitial Signal Processing Centre. This centre of excellence was founded in 2019 with an initial £3.9m funding from the European Regional Development Fund through Welsh Government and received an additional £3m from the North Wales Growth Deal through Ambition North Wales, Welsh Government and UK Government in 2022.  

With awe-inspiring case studies and visionary anecdotes, Jianming presented the remarkable advancements and game-changing breakthroughs that the DSP centre have made. With State-of-the-art equipment worth over £4.5m (Increasing to over £5.5m by 2024) Jianming presented how DSP technologies enable the development of advanced and intelligent systems with a focus on communication technologies such as 5G mobile networks and their associated ecosystems. Jianming also presented that the centre has been leading a consortium of the North Wales Broadband with an aim of providing 5G connections to hard-to-reach properties in North Wales and leading the way with market products and services. 

Dr Walter Villanueva spoke about his work in nuclear engineering. He presented the recently commissioned BULLET (Bangor University Lead Loop Erosion/corrosion Testing) facility which is designed to investigate the thermal hydraulics of lead circulation, and the erosion and corrosion effects on materials in flowing or stagnant lead. This is especially of interest when developing the next generation of nuclear reactors (Gen-IV), such as Lead-cooled Fast Reactors (LFRs) which employs molten lead (or lead-based alloys) as coolants. The first results from a successful commissioning test were presented. 

Dr Mosab Bazargani  spoke on solving complex optimisation problems using metaheuristics. Metaheuristics are a class of algorithms that are inspired by natural systems. The idea is to find a "good” solution, rather than trying to find an exact answer. In fact, with some combinatorial problems there are exponentially large space of candidate solutions with so many constraints that it is often impossible to find the best solution, especially to achieve it in a timely way. Mosab explained that heuristic algorithms can be used to tackle problems that have confounded traditional optimization techniques. He gave an example of finding the shortest journey to travel between every city in the UK. He talked about an application of metaheuristics to tackle transportation problem by scheduling delivery drivers from the depot to several stores, with a driver break, and making a collection from a supplier.