Presentations
Tuesday 22nd January 12th George Stephenson Lecture- Changing Trains
The 12th George Stephenson Lecture focuses on the progressive changes in train engineering
in the UK and worldwide. The President reflects on the beneficial impact of engineering
invention, innovation and development, both past and present, on train design and construction.
Examples and illustrations relate to his career and also to the wider railway community.
He reviews how privatisation of UK railways has influenced the demands on current operators
and their suppliers. In looking forward he comments on the latest developments in High-Speed
Trains in the UK and he concludes with examples from further afield of how, through innovation,
future inter-city rail travel may change radically.
Tony Roche is a career rail engineer having spent some 40years with British Rail.
Throughout this period he has majored on Train Engineering including being the Project Manager
for the prototype High- Speed Train, Britains most successful train in the last 25 years.
His career has spanned design, new construction and all levels of maintenance of locomotives
and rolling stock, all against a background of management of change. He has held many senior
posts within the industry, ultimately becoming the Executive Board Member of British Rail
responsible for Engineering, for Safety and for Support Services. In this appointment he
played a major role in the privatisation of UK Rail. He is now a Director of First Class
Partnerships Limited, a small consultancy company advising senior policy and decision-makers
in the rail industry. Currently the President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers,
he is also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Governor of Imperial College,
London. During his time on the Institutions Council he has been actively involved in all the
principal committees, chairing a number of them. He was the Chairman of the railway Division
in 1993. Thursday 31st January 2002 - Filings, Filaments and FETs: Technologies for Harnessing the Waves
Prof. Steve Nightingale, Senior Technical Executive of ERA Technology Ltd
Steve is going to deliver the 'Filings Filaments and FETs' lecture he gave to the IEE three
years ago. He has updated and modified the lecture a bit, basically it will be about the
development in technology for radio communications over the years starting with the theoretical
predictions of Maxwell and the early work of Hertz, Marconi and others on spark transmitters and
coherers on to the discovery and use of the valve, the development of the transistor and then
the integrated circuit. There will be demonstrations of several pieces of radio equipment
ranging from a World War 1 'trench set' spark transmitter to hopefully, the latest Nokia mobile
phone during this lecture together with a display of some of the technologies used within them.
About the author:
Steve qualified as an electronic engineer in 1974 and received his PhD from Kent University
in 1980. He was with Philips Research Laboratories in Redhill, UK and Hamburg, Germany until
1982 where his work included: investigating the fundamental properties of GaAs (gallium arsenide)
, automated test and measurement and microwave hybrid circuit and system design to frequencies
over 100 GHz. From 1982 - 1986, he worked for General Electric in Syracuse, USA specialising in
the design of GaAs Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMIC's) for military and commercial
applications. In 1986, he joined THORN EMI Electronics, UK, initially as a Technology Manager
and then as Manager of the Radiation Department both at Hayes and Crawley. He introduced GaAs
MMIC technology into the company and led the team, which developed Europe's first foundry GaAs
IC. He also organized and ran a project to develop a range of circuit functions for a Transmit
Receive module for the phased array gun locating radar, COBRA. This was a joint programme
between Britain, France, Germany and the USA. After a short period leading a specialized
technology team, he joined ERA Technology in 1996 to develop a business designing, developing
and manufacturing ultra wideband amplifiers and associated components for use in the optical
communications industry for OC-48 & OC-192 applications. He is currently Chief Consultant in
communications and sensors in ERA.
Steve has published widely with over 45 articles in the microwave field and contributed to
four books in the areas of GaAs MMIC and hybrid circuit design applied to millimeter wave
radiometers, radars and communication systems.
He is a Registered European Engineer (Eur Ing), a Chartered Engineer (CEng) a Chartered
Physicist (CPhys) and a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (FIEE) and the
Institute of Physics, (FInstP), UK. He was recently elected to be a Fellow of the Institute
of Electrical and Electronics (FIEEE), USA, with the citation 'for contributions to planar
microwave and millimeter wave circuits'.
Thursday 7th February 2002 - Requirements Engineering
Refreshments will be served before the talk which will begin at about 7.45pm
Prof. Kecheng Liu, Professor of Computing Science at Staffordshire University.
Kecheng, Professor of Computing Science at Staffordshire University, is a Fellow of the
British Computer Society, with international recognition in information systems. He has
published over 100 papers in the fields of computing. His lecture will consist of two major
parts. The first part will discuss the notions of information systems from the semiotic
perspective and the principles of requirements engineering. The second part illustrates the
relevance of the semiotic approach to requirements engineering by looking at some examples:
legacy systems re-engineering and e-business systems, followed by a summary and discussions
on future issues.
Requirements engineering covers all of the activities involved in discovering, documenting
and maintaining a set of requirements for a business or an IT based system. This relatively
young discipline aims at delivering a set of "systematic" and "repeatable" techniques ensuring
that requirements are complete, consistent and relevant. In this lecture, we shall look at the
role of requirements engineering in information systems development, from a perspective of
semiotics. Semiotics, the study of signs (such as icons, symbols and information) with a 300
year long history, can be applied to the development of information systems - a system that
comprises people, business processes, activities and IT.
Thursday 21st February 2002 - Synthetic Aperture Radar and Sonar
Prof. Hugh Griffiths
The techniques of aperture synthesis have their origins in radioastronomy,
and are now used to obtain high resolution images of the Earth's surface,
from aircraft and satellites, both for remote sensing and for military
surveillance purposes. More recently, similar techniques have been applied
to sonar, to give high resolution images of objects on the seabed. The
lecture will review the principles of synthetic aperture processing, and
present a variety of examples of their application in radar and sonar
About the Author
His research interests include radar systems and signal processing, radar
remote sensing, and antenna measurement techniques, and he has published
over two hundred and fifty papers and technical articles in the fields of
radar and antennas. He was a recipient of the URSI 'Young Scientist' Award
in 1990, and won the IERE Lord Brabazon Premium in 1984, and the IEE
Mountbatten and Maxwell Premium Awards in 1996. In 1996 he received the
IEEE AESS Fred Nathanson Award. He is a Fellow of the IEE (1995), Fellow of
the IEEE (1999), and in 1997 he was elected to Fellowship of the Royal
Academy of Engineering. He will be Chairman of the IEE International Radar
Conference to be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in October 2002.
Thursday 7th March 2002 - "Airborne Surveillance Radar"
Dr. Simon Watts, Thale Sensors
Airborne radar has been an indispensable asset for surveillance operations since its first
demonstration in 1937. Modern applications include maritime surveillance, detecting submarine
periscopes in high sea states and classifying ships at long range; airborne early warning,
detecting small aircraft at long range; and battlefield surveillance, mapping the ground at
very high resolutions and detecting moving targets. The radars used to undertake these tasks
are very complex, using the latest technology, and are deployed in a wide variety of airborne
platforms.
This lecture will illustrate the development of airborne surveillance radars since WWII up to
the present day. It will cover maritime surveillance (ASV) from H2S Mk1 (ASV Mk3), which
played a vital role in hunting submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic, through to Searchwater
2000MR, which is being developed for the new RAF Nimrod MRA4 maritime reconnaissance aircraft.
Surveillance of the battlefield will also be described, from the side-looking imaging radar
fitted to the RAF Phantom aircraft in the 1970s through to the latest synthetic aperture radar
(SAR) and ground moving target indication (GMTI) systems. Finally, air-to-air surveillance will
be covered, including the Searchwater Airborne Early Warning (AEW) radars operated by the Royal
Navy on their carriers.
The development of modern high-performance radars is supported by a large body of research
undertaken in industry and government. Some of the airborne assets used to support such
research will be described, together with an overview of some of the topics currently being
studied.
About the Author:
Presented by Tony Roche BSc FREng FIMechE
6.30pm Winstanley Lecture Hall, Trinity College
During his career, Stephen Nitingale has been a Director of the European Microwave
Association (EuMA), Chairman of the IEE Electronics and Communications Division and a visiting
Professor at Leeds University as well as holding other professional posts and advisory positions
to the UK government and the MoD. He is listed in Who's Who is Science and Engineering, Who's
Who in Finance and Industry and Who's Who in the World published by Marquis Who's Who..
7.15pm Winstanley Lecture Hall, Trinity College
6.30pm Winstanley Lecture Hall, Trinity College
Hugh Griffiths was educated at Dorchester and Keble College, Oxford University. After
graduation he worked from 1978 to 1981 with Plessey Electronic Systems
Research, Roke Manor, before taking a post as Research Associate in the
Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University College
London, where he received his PhD in Electronic Engineering in 1986. He
became a Professor in 1993, and was appointed Head of Department in July
2001.
6.30pm Winstanley Lecture Hall, Trinity College
Simon Watts graduated from the University of Oxford in 1971 and obtained an MSc from the
University of Birmingham in 1972. He is currently Chief Scientist of Thales Sensors, part of
Thales Defence Ltd. He joined Thales Sensors (then EMI Electronics) in 1967 and since then has
worked on a wide range of radar and EW projects. His research interests include the modelling
of radar sea clutter and the development of signal processing techniques for radar target
detection, and he obtained a PhD for work in these areas from the CNAA in 1987. He is author
and co-author of over 20 journal and conference papers, several patents and over 100 company
reports, and was chairman of the international radar conference RADAR-97. He was appointed MBE
in 1996 for services to the UK defence industry and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of
Engineering, Fellow of the IEE and Senior Member of the IEEE.