Queen's University Belfast

Research

Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Queen's is ranked 9th in the UK (Times Good University Guide 2012) and among the top 100 in the world (QS World Rankings 2012). In the most recent Research Assessment Exercise 80% of research within the School was judged to be internationally excellent or world leading.

A strong, research-led ethos pervades the School, and this is reflected in its involvement in a number of major research centres, including:

The Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), a £30m UK Knowledge Centre
The Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT), a new world-class centre specializing in key areas of advanced digital and communications technology, with a unique focus on blue skies, strategic and industrial research projects.

Research within the School is organised within seven research divisions (clusters).

A brief summary of each of these research clusters is available from the links below.

Research Clusters	Research Directors
Digital Communications	Professor William Scanlon ECIT building
Energy, Power and Intelligent Control	Professor Seán McLoone Ashby building
High Frequency Electronic Circuits	Professor Vince Fusco ECIT building
High Performance and Distributed Computing	Professor Dimitrios Nikolopoulos Bernard Crossland Building
Speech, Image and Vision Systems	Professor Danny Crookes ECIT building
System-on-Chip Architectures and Programmable Systems	Professor Sakir Sezer ECIT building
Knowledge and Data Engineering	Professor Weiru Liu Bernard Crossland building

Other Research conducted within the School

Computer Graphics

Spin-out Companies

Queen's University Belfast is the holder of the prestigious 2009 'Entrepreneurial University of the Year' title awarded by Times Higher Education. One of the reasons for this is the number of successful spin-out companies set up by staff within the University. The drive to promote the application of entrepreneurial thinking and leadership is predominant within the School, as evidenced by the number of spin-out companies set up by its staff, examples of which include the following –

ACT Wireless Ltd

Developing products featuring assured communication technology such as completely unobtrusive continuous people and asset localisation, and road user charging systems based on vehicle to vehicle networks.

Capna

Cutting edge development tools and services for rapid design, debug and delivery of high performance, low latency digital systems.

Event Map Solutions

Effective Resource usage through use of leading edge optimisation techniques.

TOM LTD

Traffic Observation via Management (TOM) LTD is an award winning spin-out originating from the ECIT centre in Queen’s University Belfast. TOM’s SpriteGuardTM range of detection and prevention solutions makes wireless networks more robust and resilient against malicious attacks through the implementation of innovative technology focused on open access networks and on the payment card Industry. SpriteGuardTM is the first embedded WiFi security system compliant with PCI DSS wireless security regulations. It monitors user air space, detects and blocks malicious attacks against user networks.