Alan Winfield

Professor
Department of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences
University of the West of England
Frenchay Campus
Coldharbour Lane
Bristol BS16 1QY

0117 328 3159

http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/~a-winfie/

Specialist Research Area
Swarm Intelligence; Swarm Robotics; Public Engagement.

In 1984, shortly after completing a PhD in Digital Communications Winfield resigned his lectureship at the University of Hull, to found a company on the then newly established Hull University Science Park. Created to commercialise patented research in high performance computer architectures, the company also found itself delivering contract research and development in software for safety-critical communication systems, primarily for the public safety sector. Winfield went on to establish the company, APD Communications Ltd, as one of the key UK providers of software for mobile radio data systems, notably leading contracts to design a fault-tolerant radio communications infrastructure for the Channel Tunnel. He left the company in 1992 to take up appointment as Associate Dean (Research) and Hewlett-Packard Professor of Electronic Engineering at the University of the West of England, Bristol, but remains a non-executive director of APD. Winfield is a Chartered Engineer and Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the IEEE and the Institute of Directors. Moving into the field of mobile robotics he co-founded, with Chris Melhuish and Owen Holland, the Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) Laboratory at the University of the West of England in 1993. Within the IAS laboratory Winfield's projects have included intelligent control, in particular stable adaptive neural control, and more recently provably-stable behaviour based control. With Owen Holland and Ian Horsfield Winfield designed the IAS lab LinuxBots, contributing the embedded Linux based control and wireless communications architecture. Winfield's current work is focussed on the engineering and scientific applications of Swarm Intelligence. His work on Swarm Robotics is concerned with algorithms, analysis, modelling and specification for potential high integrity applications. At the same time Winfield is interested in Swarm Robotics as a constructionist metaphor for the study of emergence, self-organisation and intelligence. Winfield is strongly committed to the widest possible dissemination of research and ideas in science, engineering and technology. Working with UWE's Graphic Science Unit he is engaged in a number of public engagement projects centred upon robotics, notably leading the three year EPSRC Stage Award programme "Walking with Robots" which will take UK-wide robotics research into the public arena.