Roger Woods

Roger Woods is Dean of Research at Queens University Belfast. He has a well-established research portfolio in programmable hardware for signal and data processing, and wireless communications. This includes a large word vocabulary, speech recognition system, the world’s first FPGA-based musical instrument and traffic management and monitoring solutions. Earlier in his career, he designed a number of advanced signal processing chips, successfully transferred to industry including recursive digital filter chips with GEC Plessey Semiconductor (now Zarlink) and an award-winning, digital TV Phase Correlation chip.

He leads the University’s activity on use of FPGAs in data centres in the EU Nanostreams and OPRECOMP projects. He established a £5M, Tier -2 high performance computing facility (NI-HPC) in Northern Ireland and also leads the e-Futures grant, seeking to grow and enhance the UK community in electronic systems. He is a member of the UKRI’s Strategic Advisory Team on ICT. In 2007, he co-founded a spin-off company, Analytics Engines Ltd. which develops data analytics software. It employs 20 people and is engaged on projects with the National Gallery, RTE, Innovate UK, Coriolis.

He holds four patents and has authored over 230 papers. He sits on the programme committees of numerous computing technology conferences, e.g., IEEE Conferences on Field Programmable Logic, Field Programmable Technology and Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling and Simulation. He is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing and Industrial Electronics Societies and sits on the Advisory Board for the IEEE SPS Technical Committee on the Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems. He is on the Editorial Board for the Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems and the IET Proceedings on Computer and Digital Techniques.