Telecommunications, Networking and Broadcasting

14 July 2010

LJMU's School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences has once again held the national PostGraduate Networking Conference (PGNet). This annual symposium which is addressed solely at UK PhD students working in the areas of Networking, Broadcasting and Telecommunications, has been held at LJMU for the past 11 years.  This series of events has the support of major industries and senior academics including, EPSRC, BCS, Cisco Systems, BT Research, Philips Research, Sony Research, SELEX Communications and Agilent Technologies.

This year's conference was opened by LJMU Vice Chancellor, Professor Michael Brown CBE DL, who said “This conference is extremely important in that it is about young people with expertise, launching their careers, in areas of excitement to them. The best way to learn a subject is to teach it and you are starting to teach it as well by presenting it and learning from each other.”

The conference had around 65 presentations from over 22 different UK universities, with more than 120 people attending each day. The programme was represented by 13 subject areas including, wireless and cellular communications, ubiquitous and mobile computing, games technology and virtual environments, sensor networks, and computer security and forensics.

This year’s keynote speaker was Dr. Mahesh Marina from the University of Edinburgh,  and he talked about Broadband Wireless Access for Rural Areas: The Tegola Project Experience.

The conference was closed by a panel discussion entitled: From Bricks to Smart Phones in 25 Years, what next for mobile computing? chaired by Professor Nigel Linge from Salford University. The panel members including, Dr. Stewart Bryant from Cisco Systems, Dr. David England from Liverpool John Moores University, Professor David Parish from Loughborough University, Tim Trew from Virage Logic and Dr. Cath Watts from SELEX Communications,  thendiscussed the lessons learned from the past 25 years of research and development in mobile communications and mobile computing. This was a very lively discussion which the audience thoroughly enjoyed.

Pictured from left: Prof. Madjid Merabti, Prof. David Hutchison (Lancaster University), Prof. Michael Brown, Prof. David Parish (Loughborough University), Dr. Mahesh Marina (Edinburgh University)