The Vision
The vision of the UCL VEIV Centre is to become a world-leading centre for the training of engineers who can exploit graphics & imaging technologies. We aim to create a cohort of engineers who have a broad experience of the fields which develop or exploit graphics and imaging technologies; as well as having made a novel contribution to a specific field through their doctorate. Graphics & imaging technologies have very significant impact across a range of disciplines and there are a number of core skills, such as design process, programming or modelling, and critical evaluation, that all engineers will either have to employ, or work closely with people who employ. A centre is thus needed to provide a way of introducing REs to different ways of thinking and to foster a community where ideas from different fields can cross-fertilise. It also provides critical mass for the required specialist core skills training.
The value of good quality visualisations and images has long been recognised; they are a primary medium for communication between different stakeholders in design, science or engineering practice. They might also be end products in themselves in media such as computer games, film or computer-generated art, but even then the research and development process uses a variety of visual media. However the exploitation of graphics and imaging has remained a very specialist skill, with either designers training themselves on the technical side, or engineers learning through experience how to respond to and shape design processes. Recently with a massive push from the technology side, the tools for graphics and imaging have become a lot more accessible. From the other, design side, there is an increasing need to find efficiencies in engineering processes, or to facilitate more creative or analytic development. Thus, there is a need for skilled research engineers who can bridge the gaps between engineering, technology, creativity and design.
History of VEIV
The Engineering Doctorate Centre in Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualisation (EngD VEIV), was founded in 2001 following a successful bid to an EPSRC call for new EngD centres. Our EngD programme addresses the cross-disciplinary field of visual engineering.
The current EngD VEIV programme has been very successful in generating brand recognition with industrial partners and in supporting a cohort amongst Research Engineers (REs) as our students are known.
We have been recognised by the EPSRC as a centre of excellence in technology transfer, evidenced through its selection by the EPSRC for presentation to the International Review of Information & Communication Technologies in 2006. It was described as an excellent centre in the EPSRC’s 2007 review of the existing EngD Centres.
In 2008, the centre received approximately £6,000,000 in funding from the EPSRC to fund 50 more places over the next 10 years. In addition, UCL has shown its support for the centre by offering places on the EngD through its overseas scholarship funds.
Founded in 2001 through an EPSRC grant, the Engineering Doctorate in Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualisation has produced an enviable track record in its diverse field. To date over 50 students have commenced innovative research across all manner of domains. Building on this success, in 2009 the Centre was awarded a £6-million grant by EPSRC to support a further 50 places over five years. This has also provided an opportunity to extend the Centre’s remit.
Collaborating Groups
The VEIV Centre works with host of different research groups and centre at UCL
VECG: Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics
The Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics Group (VECG) is based in the Department of Computer Science. The CS department has over 50 active academic staff in eight research groups. The department is housed in the new Malet Place Engineering Building (a £30M investment opened in 2005). The VECG group in CS numbers six academic staff (Dr Steed, Prof. Slater, Dr Kautz, Dr Julier, Dr Weyrich, Dr Brostow, Prof Treleaven). There are approximately 24 research fellows and doctoral students. The group is well known for its work on what makes virtual reality systems effective, real-time global illumination, virtual humans, collaborative virtual environments, computer games systems, haptics, 3D interaction and digital heritage. It pioneered the study of presence as a measure of the effectiveness of immersive virtual environments, and this research helped shape two EU FET calls on presence-enabling technologies.
Aside from the EngD, significant recent projects include Equator (EPSRC), Presencia (EU), Presenccia (EU), Virtual Light Field (EPSRC), Presence in the Virtual Light Field (EPSRC), Eyecatching (EPSRC) and the EPSRC Senior Fellowship of Prof. Slater - 1999-2004). Over the past five years, the staff have been investigators on projects totalling over £5M. One of the key indicators of the international competitiveness of the group is the quality of recent academic appointments. We have recruited from MIT, Princeton, and ETH Zurich/University of Cambridge (ranked 1st, 14th, 13th, and 5th in THES-QS ranking of world-wide technology universities). All are particularly strong in the graphics/vision areas. The VECG group has a long-standing collaboration with University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, involving a series of exchanges of visiting research students and joint papers in the top journals in the field (e.g. SIGGRAPH). Other key collaborators include the Max-Planck Institute, University of Stuttgart, MIT, ETH-Zurich, Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise, CWI (Netherlands), Brown University and UCSB.
The VECG group has excellent visualisation facilities including a 4-sided ReaCTor™ (CAVE™-hybrid) driven by an SGI Prism system (6 x FireGLX3 graphics pipes) or a PC cluster (4 client nodes with GeForce Quadro 5600 graphics), a six-camera Vicon motion-tracking system, an Intersense wireless tracking system, a Lake Huron spatial audio system, head-mounted virtual reality and augmented reality displays, a GRAB haptic interface and various other tracking systems and input devices including bio-signal amplifiers. These facilities represent an initial infrastructure investment of £950,000, and were recently upgraded with a £350,000 SRIF2 award. A full-time member of staff has managed the facilities for six years, and this, project inputs to the running and replacement of equipment and UCL contributions for space refurbishment, would be estimated at £400,000 associated contributions. These facilities are available for EngD REs to use, and one of the core courses includes training to use the systems.
UCLIC: UCL Interaction Centre
UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC) led by Prof. Ann Blanford, is an interdisciplinary centre conducting research on Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) that spans psychological and computing sciences. It is jointly funded by two UCL 5A/5* departments, Computer Science and Psychology. UCLIC teaches a major Masters course in HCI with Ergonomics, accredited by the Ergonomics Society, from which 25–30 students graduate each year.
The focus of UCLIC’s research is on understanding people and their interactions, and using that understanding to inform design. Facilities include a standard usability laboratory with eye tracker and a reconfigurable space in which experiments using a motion capture system, a driving simulator or other large-scale equipment can be run. UCLIC researchers collaborate with both usability companies and users of technology, including hospitals, law firms, news organisations, e-commerce suppliers and control rooms. The Centre has links with universities in North America, Europe, Japan and New Zealand and, especially as it is now housed in the new Malet Place Engineering Building, it is an important resource in growing the VEIV Centre.
CMIC: Centre for Medical Image Computing
The Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC) was formed 3.5 years ago when Prof. David Hawkes and his team moved from KCL to join Prof. Simon Arridge and Dr. Daniel Alexander (then members of CS’s VIVE group, now members of CS’s VIS group). Prof. Hawkes directed the EPSRC and MRC-funded Medical Images and Signals IRC from 2003 to 2007. Dr. Alexander has recently been awarded an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship. CMIC holds a Platform Grant in Medical Image Computing and an MRC Interdisciplinary Bridging Award as well as a significant portfolio of EPSRC responsive mode grants, 5 TSB Technology Programme Grants and was recently awarded ~ £8-10M for a Cancer Imaging Centre joint with King’s College. CMIC’s annual income is ~£5M, supporting its research activity in both methodological research and its translation to life sciences and healthcare.
CMIC’s methodological research includes image reconstruction and inverse problems, imaging moving structures, tensor imaging and tractography, relating image derived information across scale, multi-modal imaging, image registration, data fusion, visualisation, measurement, shape representation and soft tissue motion correction. CMIC currently has 27 registered PhD students and runs a new MSc (starting its 2nd year of intake in October 2008) with modules shared with the Biomedical Engineering and Materials, Medical Imaging and VIVE MScs. Modules from these programmes will be available as a component of the training element of the EngD programme.
Chorley Institute
The UCL Chorley Institute, led by Dr Muki Haklay, offers support for research across UCL in the area of computer visualisation and modelling, and the resources that are available through it are accessible, at no additional costs to VEIV REs. These include hardware, software and datasets.
In hardware, the institute provides access to a 3D colour laser scanner provided by Arius3D (~£0.5M) which is the only on of its kind in England, and a portable laser scanner that can be used accurately to depict objects up to room size. It also holds mobile eye trackers that can be used for a wide range of visualisation experiments. It provides access to MatLab with image processing and mapping extensions and other software tools that can be used by VEIV REs including Manifold GIS and ENVI/IDL. Finally, the datasets include a complete high-resolution aerial coverage of London and 3D information for London. An extension, planned by the Vice-Provost (Research) will link the Institute to UCL’s High Performance Computing facilities, including the £4M, 42 TeraFlop ‘Legion’ facility.
CCS: Centre for Computational Science
The Centre for Computational Science is a research centre at University College London headed by Professor Peter V. Coveney and based in the Department of Chemistry. The group performs research in atomistic, mesoscale and multiscale modeling, including quantum and classical molecular dynamics, dissipative particle dynamics, lattice gas and lattice-Boltzmann techniques, and exploits state of the art high performance computing and visualisation methods.
Coveney has been leading the large EPSRC RealityGrid e-Science Pilot Project (2001-05) which is funded from 2005 through to 2009 as a Platform Grant; he is also the PI and co-Investigator on several other current grants funded by EPSRC, BBSRC and the U.K. Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII) which involve grid computing and/or high performance computing (HPC) research. He has held several major NSF funded supercomputing grants (under the PACI and NRAC programs), and currently holds an MRAC allocation under the same program which provides roaming access to the entire set of computational resources on the US TeraGrid. Coveney is leading the Virtual Physiological Human EU Network of Excellence.
Student Testimonials
“I had previously completed an MSc at UCL and after a short stint in industry, an EngG vacancy at UCL became available that I could not resist. The combination of the topic, academic supervisor and industrial partner was perfect. Although it seemed like a leap of faith to quit my job to be a student again, being back at UCL I knew that I was in safe hands. A world leader in research, the strong connections to industrial partners within London and beyond opened many opportunities to me. The environment is one that encourages researchers to thrive and explore creatively. Simply put, the more you put into UCL, the more you get out!”
Kelvin Wong, MRes + EngD Student, 2013 cohort
“Deciding to go for the MRes + EngD program has opened so many doors for me. Mostly I love that I've been part of such great projects and trialled some of the most cutting edge technologies around. The greatest benefit career wise has been gaining access to director level decision making at my sponsor company and working intensively to develop my research skills. It's a great program and I would highly recommend it.”
[Full text] “I was studying at UCL pat time and working as a receptionist when I found out about the opportunity at VEIV. Deciding to go for the MRes + EngD program has opened so many doors for me since then. Mostly I love that I've been part of such great projects and trialled some of the most cutting edge technologies around. The people you can meet on the VEIV program are incredible too, and they've given up so much of their time helping me reach my goals. I feel really lucky. The greatest benefit career wise has been gaining access to director level decision making at my sponsor company and working intensively to develop my research skills. It's a great program and I would highly recommend it to anyone who's open to new experiences and looking for a challenge.”
Lucy Campbell, MRes + EngD Student, 2013 cohort
“I chose to study at UCL because of the calibre of the research group and facilities. During my four years as an EngD I have grown greatly as a researcher with the guidance and example of the academic staff.”
Sebastien Friston, MRes + EngD Student, 2012 cohort
“After working in industry for a few years, I was very keen to develop my skills in research but didn’t want to lose my connection with industry. The Engineering Faculty at UCL has a great reputation around the world and I had experienced this first hand during my undergraduate degree. My lecturers and supervisors had always been incredibly supportive throughout and this didn’t change during my time as a postgraduate. The MRes and EngD programme appealed to me because of the strong collaboration between industry and academia. I was highly motivated by the idea of solving a problem that was significant to my industrial sponsor. The programme allowed me to split my time and grow in these two environments. After returning to industry I can instantly see the benefits the programme has had to me in terms of the wide variety of skills that I have developed, but also the impact it has had on my career progression.”
Anita Soni, BIM Strategy Manager, Skanska, 2010 cohort
“I couldn’t have chosen a better career path than when I decided to do an EngD at UCL. One of the main objective of the EngD programme is to create the next generation of academic and industrial leaders, and the programme does exactly that. I was lucky enough to do what was essentially a Masters and PhD, plus developed invaluable knowledge and skills to understand technology transfer and innovation that you wouldn’t typically get from doing a traditional PhD.
My Research focus was in the area of optimisation. I designed and implemented optimisation algorithms that could solve real-world problems faster and better than state of the art, which had wide-ranging applications in both academia and industry. Subsequently I span out a company loosely inspired by this research that was funded ad supported by UCL. As CEO of this company (Satalia) I can testify to how well the EngD prepared me for this role.
The EngD is an essential degree for those interested in science and the pathways to impact of research, which are both critical in securing academic funding or being a successful entrepreneur, engineer or manager. The EngD gave me the option to have a career in academic and equipped me to be a success influencer in business and industry. “
Daniel Hulme, CEO, Satalia, 2003 cohort
