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2009 Conference Materials > Foreword

Proceedings of Fourth Annual Conference, 7 & 8 July 2009
Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Foreword

On behalf of the Board of the Systems Engineering for Autonomous Systems Defence Technology Centre (SEAS DTC), I should like to extend a warm welcome to all participants in this, our fourth annual technical conference.

We are now well into the second phase of three years of DTC operation, and are seeking to build on the encouraging technical progress of the first phase through a programme of integration and demonstration of capabilities during this second phase, leading towards exploitation.

The objectives of this conference are to present the status of the research, to illustrate our integration work and plans, to enable you to interact with the researchers and to help form relationships between the researchers, industry and MoD in order to support future exploitation of the research outputs.

The conference is organised into three parallel sessions over the two days, largely based around the structure of the DTC's research programme, which has six research themes :

Stream A (in the Kilsyth room) covers the Communications & Control and Sensor Exploitation themes

Stream B (in the Moorfoot room) covers the Systems Engineering Research and Mission Planning & Decision-making themes

Stream C (in the Tinto room) covers the Propulsion, Power Generation & Energy Management and Algorithms & Architectures themes

We also have a number of plenary sessions in the Pentland Auditorium where we will be presenting aspects of our cross-DTC activities and expectations for future progress; the final plenary session will provide opportunity to view practical demonstrations of outcomes of DTC work.

We are again delighted to be sharing the conference venue and events with our colleagues from the EMRS DTC. Delegates are free to move between sessions in the two conferences.

Although the DTC's research work is mainly at low technology maturity level, we are always keen to pursue possible exploitation routes. We thus encourage you to use the conference to talk to the researchers to stimulate ideas for future research direction, and to consider how the fruits of their research might be exploited to the advantage of the UK.

The presenters range from PhD students, still getting to grips with new subject areas, through to world leaders in their field. Please give them your support. Bear in mind that what is being presented is a snapshot of the DTC's work at a point in time, with some projects much further into their programmes of work than others.

We hope that you will enjoy the presentations and will also take the opportunity to attend the conference reception on the evening of the first day. Of course, we also hope that you enjoy your stay in historic Edinburgh.

Dr Bill Bardo, SEAS DTC Technical Director