URBAN FLOWS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Chartered Engineer
- Member of the Management Team
- Professor of Structural Engineering
Buick is a Chartered Engineer and a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He joined the academic staff in 1993 after a number of years in practice as a Structural Engineer where he gained first-hand experience in the design and construction of numerous projects including sports stadia, factories and multi-storey buildings. Buick's research interests lie in the behaviour of steel-framed structures, in particular the influence of joints connecting steel frames together influence the overall behaviour of the structure. He also focusses on sustainability issues in structural engineering by investigating the environmental burden of construction practices.
Charles' PhD attempts to develop a framework of assessment for use in the determination of the reserve structural capacity of existing buildings. This will be extended to include additional factors influential upon the extension-potential of common buildings; forming a typology-based framework used to assess the impacts of hypothetical vertical extension schemes at various urban scales. Charles' wider research interests are centred on the circularity of the built environment and ensuring sustainable development through whole-building adaptation and re-use.
Job Titles:
- Director Professor of Nonlinear and Complex Systems
Viewing modern cities as systems-of-systems, Daniel is interested in developing a framework for integrating, analysing and modelling in real-time the data generated by large heterogeneous arrays of sensors across multiple spatial and temporal scales, to help understand the emergent properties of cities, to characterise their performance - especially city resilience and robustness - and to provide a quantitative basis for designing urban policies and forecasting their impact through exploratory simulation analyses and optimization.
Danielle's PhD investigates the retrofitting of non-domestic buildings which helps to reduce energy use in the UK. More specifically, her interest revolves around the possibility of automating the process, allowing for quicker design and implementation of building retrofit. She is also examining the effect of accounting for embodied carbon within retrofit design and whether this would discourage or encourage the demolition of existing buildings.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Management Team
- Director Lecturer in Architectural Engineering
Danielle leads Urbans Flows' work on resources, with a particular interest in construction materials. She is using Urban Flows' remote sensing equipment, including LiDAR, visual and thermal imaging to understand our built environment better and in particular to answer the question: what is Sheffield made of? More broadly, Danielle is interested in reducing the whole life carbon of the built environment by optimising the use of materials, across scales from building design through to systems of materials in cities and countries.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Management Team
- Director Lecturer, Transport Lead
Giuliano's background is in the broad area of control theory and complex systems. After a degree in aerospace engineering, he briefly joined industry, before completing a PhD in swarm engineering in 2013. His interests include networks and graph theory, robotics, control theory, consensus and complexity. Giuliano's post-doctoral appointments include teaching and research at the Universities of Glasgow, Strathclyde and Sheffield. Within the Urban Flows Observatory, Giuliano is leading on the transportation theme, investigating the role of urban infrastructure to enhance mobility, their resilience in the face of increasing demand pressures and ageing, and how communities, cities and regions are shaped by access to and type of transport available. This research looks at both the developed and the developing world.
Maud's research has previously focused on weighing the importance of urban built environment stocks for sustainability, using the Danish city of Odense as a case study. As an industrial ecologist, Maud uses the systems perspective to investigate how to reduce the environmental impacts of cities and their built environment. Her interests include socio-economic metabolism (including urban metabolism), material flow analysis and material stock analysis.
Dr Ramsay Taylor is a University Teacher in Multidisciplinary Engineering Education. Having studied Computer Science at the University of Kent, he was then employed by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) in the Safety Critical Systems team. His interests are in computer systems that are embedded in other engineering. At DSTL this was mainly aircraft, but the Diamond Smart Building project has brought his focus on to buildings and urban environments. He is particularly interested in the infrastructure that supports capturing and processing the data from these systems - both the networking and sensors themselves, and the database systems that retain and present the data to allow useful research.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Management Team
- Senior Lecturer - Department of Civil and Structural Engineering
Abigail's research aims to ensure that in the drive for energy efficient buildings we maintain healthy indoor environments for the occupants. Her interest in the role of human activity on indoor air has developed to consider a variety of built environments. Her main interest is in the interactions of people with their building and the resulting impacts on air flow across the building envelope and between interior spaces. This includes researching the role of automated building systems to improve the comfort and quality of internal environments at low energy cost.
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer in Organic Electronics
Alastair leads the Sheffield Solar research group. As part of the Urban Flows Observatory, his team provide services relating to solar photovoltaic power flows within the GB electricity networks. These include national and regional real-time and historic out-turns and 7 day-ahead forecasting. Alastair has a background in technology development in industry and academia, and is Senior Lecturer in the Physics Department at The University of Sheffield.
Dr. Iñaki Esnaola Senior Lecturer; Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering
Iñaki received an M.S degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Navarra, Spain, in 2006, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 2011. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering of the University of Sheffield, and a Visiting Research Collaborator in the Department of Electrical Engineering of Princeton University. He has previously been a Research Intern with Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent, New Jersey, and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. His research interests include information theory and communication theory with an emphasis on the application to smart grid problems.
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer in Sensor Systems
Jon spent over a decade designing thermal imaging cameras and other remote sensing instruments at AMETEK, Inc. before moving into Academia with an EPSRC Established Career Fellowship. His research focuses on pushing forward the boundaries of optical sensing technology. In the Observatory, this currently involves augmenting accurate temperature fields with LiDAR. His other work includes single pixel imaging with novel sensors and high speed microscopic thermal imaging for additive manufacturing. He has published papers on diverse applications from practical instrumentation for realising the benefits of the new definition of the kelvin, to measurements of the dynamics of volcano lava lakes.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer in Machine Learning
Mauricio is a Lecturer in Machine Learning in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. Mauricio is interested in machine learning in general, its interplay with mathematics and statistics and its applications. In particular, his research interests include probabilistic models, kernel methods, and stochastic processes. He works on the development of new probabilistic models and their application in different engineering and scientific areas that include Neuroscience, Neural Engineering, Systems Biology, and Humanoid Robotics. His work on the Urban Flows Observatory is broadly related to the use of data analytics for learning models of environmental variables that can be used for exploratory and predictive tasks. More recently, he and his team have been using spatial statistics to analyse datasets of air pollution.
Job Titles:
- Teacher Director of Learning & Teaching
Mohammed joined the University of Sheffield to carry out research for a PhD in coal combustion and its environmental impacts after completing a degree in Chemical Engineering, followed by an MSc with Distinction from the University of Bradford in Advanced Chemical Engineering. He was awarded the 2005 Foxwell Memorial Prize for his research on Leaching Behaviour of Trace Elements in UK Pulverised Coal Ash Fly. In 2008, Mohammed joined the Environment Department at Tata Steel RD&T. His research focus was alternative fuels for iron making and CO2 sequestration technologies. In January 2010 he re-joined the University of Sheffield and led the Energy Institute Yorkshire branch until 2018. In 2015, in response to the local government's report on the fuel poverty in Sheffield, Dr Zandi funded Project ACE to increase awareness of energy efficiency and tackle fuel poverty in Sheffield.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer at the Automatic Control
Patricio is currently a Research Software Engineer at the Automatic Control and Systems Engineering Department at the University of Sheffield. His interests within the Urban Flows Observatory project are the interdisciplinary usage of air quality data, particularly applied to human health issues, data quality control, data visualisation, databases and semantics used to characterise the data. Patricio, a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Toronto, worked on various astronomy projects including the International Virtual Observatory and ESA's Gaia as well as on Earth Observation projects using satellite data (Globtemp). He is also the author of "First Steps in Scientific Programming".
Job Titles:
- Lecturer in Landscape Planning, Department of Landscape
- Planner
Paul is a landscape planner with an interest in applying geocomputational analysis to explore spatial and statistical relationships relating to the provision and equality of urban greenspace. He has over fifteen years expertise of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and uses his extensive experience of computer programming to automate operations in order to implement them at scale. He is currently involved in the NERC funded project - Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature (IWUN - http://iwun.uk) where he is applying statistical and spatial analysis to explore the health and wellbeing benefits associated with urban greenspace.
Said has several years' experience in air quality monitoring, data analysis and modelling both in the UK and abroad. For the Urban Flows Observatory in Sheffield, Said is working on the design and deployment of air quality sensors network (AQSN). The aim is to set up a dense air quality monitoring network made of several layers: A layer of highly accurate reference AQ sensors, a second layer of high quality AQ sensors, and a third layer of low-cost IOT (internet of things) sensors. Furthermore, an instrumented van will be used to monitor air quality on various roads, between and next to sensors, to provide better spatial coverage and a source of data for sensor calibration. Said will analyse the data, develop high resolution maps and a land-use regression model to determine the main drivers of air quality in Sheffield.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Speech and Audio Technology Head of Speech and Hearing Research
Thomas has a research track record of more than 20 years in machine learning and artificial intelligence related to modelling of signals. He has a background in electrical engineering and among his interests are representations for processing multi-modality, as obtained from rich sensory networks. With respect to the Urban Flows Observatory, a particular interest is research into construction of dynamic modelling frameworks that can adjust computation (e.g. prediction) and data agglomeration dynamically according to network structure and capacity.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- Member of the Management Team
Hadi's work and research interests sit at the interface of data-driven urban engineering and planning. Hadi's overall body of research focuses on the challenges relating to resource consumption and productivity in urban systems often in the context of planetary resource capacity and climate change. Their previous research focused on providing new insights on the effects of spatial scale on urban economic performance balance and the extent to which it is influenced by mobility infrastructure across spatial scales. Hadi's broader research activity and interests include but are not limited to network analysis of intra- and inter-city urban flows, infrastructure and planning, and city morphology, stocks, and metabolism. Hadi has a keen interest in policy impact of these urban challenges and takes a spatially multi-scale approach to studying them.
Harry's PhD looks to investigate the balance between adaptability and optimisation in steel structures; attempting to answer the question of whether a pursuit of optimisation may actually be detrimental to the long-term carbon savings. With this view on the longer-term carbon saving potential of optimised-yet-adaptable structures, the research will attempt to assess the scale to which the findings can be deployed within the UK construction industry, and aims to develop recommendations and guidance for adaptive building design for practitioners to use within the field.
Hiu Yi is a graduate student studying in MSc Real Estate Planning and Development. She is an Intern in the RISE team responsible for personal information identification and anonymization. She has an interest in city sustainable development such as urban renewal, and ESG as a consideration in urban planning.
Ling Min's work focuses on understanding and formulation of the effects of city economic and energetic characteristics on their resource consumption. Her research interests include industrial ecology related areas such as urban metabolism, circular economy, ecological network analysis, and designs for sustainable urban systems through optimising the patterns of resource consumption and improved resource efficiency.
Lu's research focusses on multi-hazard disaster risk management and system modelling. This incorporates multi-disciplinary knowledge into a dynamic and unified modelling framework to increase the resilience of cities against extreme hydrometeorological events (such as floods and landslides) caused by changing climates. Lu aims to numerically model the impact of these hazards on infrastructure networks, on people and on possible rescue and mitigation efforts. She helped with the development of HazardCM, which is a unique software that assesses and numerically models cities and their resilience to natural hazards such as flooding.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Management Team
- Director Professor of Engineering Design
Martin leads the Urban Flows' work on energy, air quality and the modelling of urban processes as complex systems. He is currently leading the Observatory work on developing our digital models, data capture and the exploration of methods to identify features of the built environment. His current work includes the exploration of the relationships between decarbonisation, power grid characteristics and thermal energy demand across scales in order to establish how cities can efficiently decarbonise their energy systems. His objective for the Observatory is to understand the flow of energy, resources and materials across scales and systems in order to help cities reduce their total impact upon the planet.
Menglin's research involves proposing an integrated data capture approach for the detection of insulation absence, defective installation, thermal leakage, and presence of moisture that can be deployed across cities, which utilises machine learning to automate identification in big datasets.
Oktay's research interests include energy harvesting-aided wireless-powered communications for the Internet of Things.
Philip Warren is an ecologist with interests in biodiversity and ecological processes, particularly at the community and landscape scale. Much of his work has been involved with understanding the ecology of urban systems, including work on the role of domestic gardens for biodiversity, the management of urban rivers and the relationship between the form of the urban environment and the ecosystem services (benefits to people) it delivers. His interest in the Urban Flows Observatory is particularly focused on how better monitoring of urban systems can inform our understanding of how the built urban environment interacts with the ‘green space', which constitutes a significant fraction of urban areas, and how this knowledge might allow us to design more biodiverse, sustainable and healthier cities.
Richard has a PhD in energy storage in urban systems. He is interested in the effects of energy storage location and operation mode(s) on its sizing and on the benefits it is able to provide to the distribution system. He is currently working as a Research Associate on the Active Building Centre.
Rohit's PhD project is titled as "Low Cost Internet of Things based Sensor Networks for Air Quality" under the supervision of Professor Martin Mayfield. This project is funded by Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures. As a Grantham Scholar researching on climate change, Rohit's main aim is to develop models and techniques that will afford significantly improved monitoring and communication of the pollution level in cities without the need to significantly invest in monitoring equipment.
Job Titles:
- Chief Technical Officer
- Member of the Management Team
Steve is responsible for the delivery and operation of the sensing and data collection systems that are the basis of the observatory. With a background in the Telecommunications industry and having studied environmental and energy engineering, Steve has a broad interest in the way infrastructures form and support cities and urban living. In particular, he intends to gain a detailed understanding of how wireless networks, that are becoming increasingly important to support urban systems, are affected by the structural environment.
As a research programmer, Thomas's main responsibility is ensuring that myself and the rest of the team are following good programming practices. Good practice in this context means a variety of things, but some prominent examples are: making sure that code files and repositories are structured in a clear and logical fashion; ensuring that the codebase is well-tested and that these tests are run every time we introduce a significant change; and advising the team on appropriate software development methodologies.
Tom's background is primarily in Earth Sciences. In 2014 he received an MSci degree in Environmental Geoscience from the University of Bristol in 2014. In 2015 he embarked on a PhD in Volcanology at the University of Sheffield. This research involves the development of low-cost remote sensing equipment for monitoring volcanoes. As part of this project, Tom has built a UV camera, spectrometer and thermal imaging camera. All of these instruments provide a low-cost alternative to equipment which is already commonly deployed on volcanoes and could significantly reduce the cost of volcano research and monitoring. This interest in remote sensing has led Tom to undertake his current research as part of the Sheffield Urban Flows Observatory project.
Tom's research aims to develop and communicate a systemic policy approach for extreme climate change adaptation. He is developing evidence regarding how extreme climate change scenarios drive changes in peri-urban and urban infrastructure and food systems, given the growing need for resources and the decreasing availability of planetary resource stocks and flows, by mapping the key issues across interdisciplinary fields and synthesising evidence to support policy development.
Before joining the University of Sheffield, Tom completed a PhD in climate dynamics, investigating the large-scale atmospheric circulation response to climate change drivers.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Management Team
- Professor of Green Infrastructure for Stormwater Management
Virginia's research focuses on Urban Stormwater Management and Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS); how we can develop engineered drainage systems using natural components such as soil and plants to manage storm flows generated by urban constructs such as buildings, pavements and car parks. Virginia looks at the technical performance of vegetated SuDS (particularly green roofs and ponds) and Green Infrastructure, aiming to understand the processes that control the quantity and quality of urban runoff in order to develop fit-for-purpose models of those processes and generate novel strategies to enable storm water to be managed more effectively and sustainably.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Management Team
- Research Associate
Wil is working on developing machine learning workflows for the efficient retrofit of residential buildings to increase energy efficiency. Previously, he worked in Physics, Statistics and Computer Science departments, researching physically-informed probabilistic machine learning techniques, in particular Gaussian processes, for solutions to non-linear dynamical problems. He is also the founder and former network coordinator of the Sheffield Machine Learning Research Network, involved in promoting community for researchers using machine learning in the University of Sheffield. The role involved organising events, tutorials and promoting machine learning in the university.
Yulan's PhD investigates the correlations between residential building energy consumption with its characteristics. The project involves multimodality data, represents buildings' spatial, morphological and thermal-related conditions, utilising machine learning and GIS.
Yushu's research work in the RISE team is responsible for MARVel data management. By using both physical storage and database management system to facilitate the multisensory data modelling research work.
Zeyi's research interest relates to GIS and Remote Sensing applications. Her PhD project is aimed to use satellite data to estimate material stocks in the built environment in the UK, and GIS will be applied to analyse and visualize the results.