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2006 Conference Materials > Foreword

Systems Engineering for Autonomous Systems Defence Technology Centre

Proceedings of First Annual Conference, 13 / 14 July 2006
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 first, annual Technical Conference.

The SEAS DTC was launched in January 2005 and, during our first year of operation, we have placed over 60 research contracts with over 30 organisations.

The objectives of this conference are to present the results of the first year of research, to enable you to interact with the researchers and to help form relationships between the researchers, industry and MoD to support future exploitation of the research outputs.

The conference is organised in 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 Algorithms & Architectures 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 Communications & Control themes

In addition, we have three plenary sessions in the Pentland Auditorium where we will be presenting aspects of our cross-DTC systems engineering work and providing some initial demonstrations of integration of DTC outputs.

We are pleased to be sharing the conference venue and events with our colleagues from the EMRS DTC. Delegates are free to move between conference sessions in both conferences. The session chairs will endeavour to ensure that the start times of papers are adhered to so that delegates can move discreetly between sessions, choosing projects that most interest them

Although the DTC’s research work is at a low technology maturity level, we want to consider possible exploitation routes from the earliest stage. 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