Abstract:

Smart technology (ST) is all pervasive with many of us owning several networked processing units at home, on the move, at work and during our recreation periods. Scientific and non-scientific communities are beginning to realise the relatively untapped worldwide potential this global interconnectedness offers. One example involvespeoples’ smart phonesthat are used as relays in modern MIMO communication systems.  A second example is the use of a large number of smart phones equipped with an appropriate APP that are used to rapidly detect seismic activity. A third example is the classification of genome sequencesin the form of an online game.  These new paradigms aim to exploitthe  ‘free’  technology resource i.e. the smartphone, coupled with the network of  ‘free’ applied researchers.This talk will focus on three specific aspects of technological enablers; Drivers, the Technology itself, and Applications, that continue to facilitate significant advances in a growing number of diverse disciplines. 

Firstly some key technological drivers will be described that will be seen to be either societyor industry driven. Secondly an overview of technology will be provided that aims to uncover the historical and recent trends in both hardware and algorithmic advances that havefacilitated such rapid progress that we have witnessed over the last few decades.  The third part of the talk will describe some real examplesof signal processing enabled applications from the bio-medical and radar domains.These considerations will help us address such questions  as 'Where are the current major challenges?',  ‘What might be the next significanttechnological  developments?’  and  ‘Everyone’s potential role as a global applied researcher!’.