Three new professorships awarded in ECS

Three members of the School have been awarded Personal Chairs by the University. The title of ‘Professor’ goes to Dr Steve Gunn, Dr Alun Vaughan, and Dr Joao Marques-Silva, bringing the total number of Professors among the School’s 102 academic staff to 36.

Professor Steve Gunn was both an undergraduate and postgraduate student in Electronic Engineering at Southampton, before being appointed as a research fellow in ECS in 1998. He is a member of the Information: Signals, Images, Systems group, and his research covers two state-of-the-art areas: machine learning and computer vision. His work focuses on the development of techniques to convert these ill-posed inverse problems to well-posed problems through the careful design of a function space with an appropriate prior.

Professor Alun Vaughan researches in the area of the electrical properties of polymers and dielectric breakdown, understanding the processes of stress and ageing. He is a member of the ECS Electrical Power Engineering group and says that the group’s work in dielectrics is virtually unique in the UK. Next month the group will host a major international conference on the subject at Winchester.

Professor Joao Marques-Silva joined the School’s Dependable Systems and Software Engineering group in early 2006, from the Technical University of Lisbon. His research focuses on system verification, and he is interested in its enabling technologies: constraint solving and optimisation. ‘System verification is a key topic in industry,’ he says. ‘Large companies spend very large resources on this. New, more efficient verification algorithms are expected to increase system dependability and indirectly to bring large productivity gains.’