Computer scientist secures YERUN Award to collaborate with Bremen

As Essex is a member of YERUN (Young European Research Universities), our early career researchers have the chance to collaborate with other YERUN academics.

This year, the YERUN Research Mobility Awards programme is supporting researchers to establish a new research collaboration in a virtual format.

We spoke to one successful Mobility Award winner, Dr Sangeet Saha, from our School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, to find out why he wanted to get involved in the YERUN programme.

Why did you want to apply for a YERUN Mobility Award?

As an Essex researcher, I ask critical questions and try to find vital insights. In my opinion, by combining expertise and resources I can answer bigger and more complex scientific questions and expand the breadth of my research. Therefore, the YERUN Mobility Award is a great opportunity for early-career researchers like me to establish a new research collaboration with another researcher from another YERUN university.

Which YERUN University are you collaborating with and why?

I am collaborating with the University of Bremen because Essex and Bremen have a long-standing international reputation for work on the design, implementation, and optimisation of software and hardware systems, as well as the methodological aspects of FPGA-Based embedded systems.

What is your area of research expertise?

I am a Senior Research Officer in the Robotics and Embedded Systems research group and, primarily, my research expertise is in embedded systems, with specific interests that include real-time scheduling, scheduling for heterogeneous systems, reconfigurable (FPGA-Based) computing, multicore systems, fault-tolerance, and approximation-based real-time computing.

Why are you interested in your area of research?

My research is timely for several reasons. Firstly, the new trends towards autonomous systems in areas such as driverless car, autonomous robots, communication and aerospace applications, the FPGA-Based system is emerging as a primary choice. Secondly, my research matches the EU Digital Economy theme, the FPGA-Based processing allows improved production efficiency, for example in the cloud, high performance computing (HPC) and cloud computing. My research could be a gain for EU companies specialising in HPC/cloud/embedded computing by improving their hardware utilisation and thus reducing their financial cost. Through the reduction of financial costs, the electricity bill, as well as CO2 emissions of the supercomputers and the datacentres, will also reduce, and therefore, this research will contribute to developing a sustainable society.

What are your hopes for the YERUN collaboration?

I hope this collaboration will provide significant opportunities for me to acquire new technical skills by interacting with the computer architecture research group in Bremen. I will also achieve academic skills by participating in the seminar series and group discussions both at the Bremen and Essex. During our YERUN collaboration, we would like to plan for a joint academic course on heterogeneous real-time systems. Another prime expectation from this joint research work will be to foster the collaborative research attempts between Bremen and Essex in addition to one of our existing collaborators at Norwegian University of Science and Technology.