Prof. Sunil Vadera
University of Salford,UK
Sunil Vadera is a Professor of Computer Science and the Head of the School of Computing, Science and Engineering at the University of Salford. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Chartered Engineer (C.Eng) and Chartered IT Professional (CITP).
He gained a first class BSc(Hons) in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Salford in 1982, receiving three best student prizes. Following graduation, he began his career as a Research Assistant and progressed to a Lectureship in Computer Science in 1984. He holds a PhD from the University of Manchester in the area of Formal Methods of Software Development which was awarded in 1992. He was promoted to a Senior Lecturer in 1997 and to a Chair in Computer Science in 2000.
Sunil was chair of the British Computer Society Academic Accreditations Committee with responsibility for professional accreditation of all UK University programmes in Computer Science from January 2007 to December 2009.
His research is driven by the desire to close the gap between theory and practice in Artificial Intelligence, with expertise in the areas of Bayesian networks, decision tree learning, credit assessment and planning. His research has included work on:
(a) Bayesian Networks on sensor validation with colleagues from the Mexican Instituto de Electricas
(b) Research on the development DUST-EXPERT a system that advises on the relief venting of explosions in chemical processes for the Health and Safety Executive in the UK.
(c) Use of cost-sensitive machine learning for credit rating of sub-prime loans, helping to improve financial inclusion, which was selected by ESRC as an example of the impact of research:
http://www.esrc.ac.uk/publications/videos/creating-impact.aspx
(d) a British Gas funded project applying data mining to SMART meter data with a view to understanding energy consumption behaviour
He is currently working on the FP7 SEEDS: Self learning Energy Efficient builDings and open Spaces project with partners from Europe. The project aims to apply machine learning methods with a view to reducing energy consumption in buildings. Details of the project can be found at:
http://seeds-fp7.eu/partner_salford.php
Sunil was chair of the UK BCS Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Symposium held in Salford in 2009, General Chair of the IFIP conference on Intelligent Information Processing in 2010 and his research has been published in some of the leading outlets, including the Computer Journal, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, ACM Computing Surveys, Expert Systems Journal, Foundations of Science, and IEEE Transactions of Power Systems. A selection of the papers are available for downloading from:
http://usir.salford.ac.uk/view/authors/13105.default.html
