15 May 07. The Electromagnetic Remote Sensing (EMRS) and the Systems Engineering of Autonomous Systems (SEAS) Defence Technology Centres (DTCs) are holding the UK’s largest annual defence science conference on Tuesday 10th and Wednesday 11th of July 2007. The event will be held at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC) and is sponsored by Scottish Enterprise. Established by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), DTCs are virtual centres of excellence dealing in technology development for use in future defence and civilian applications. The strategic aim of DTCs is to provide more rapid application of low technology maturity level research in the MoD’s defence equipment programme. The DTC initiative is a role model for research collaboration between Government, the UK Defence industry, small-medium sized enterprises and universities. Both the SEAS and EMRS DTCs will invest up to £30m each of MoD research funds over a six year period. This sum is matched by industry investing knowledge of their internally funded research, use of industrial facilities and access to key members of staff. This joint technical conference and exhibition forms the DTCs’ main channel for dissemination of unclassified research output – with approximately 100 technical papers being presented. Moreover the event establishes the DTC initiative as the national focus for collaborative, defence science research. It is expected that approximately 550 defence scientists from the UK and beyond will attend the event. The technical conference offers two parallel events, with simultaneous conference and exhibition for each DTC.
The EMRS DTC conference is split into parallel sessions offering:
• RF Systems
• Embedded Processing
• Devices and Materials
• Electro-Optic Systems
The SEAS conference follows the same format and is split into the following thematic sessions:
• Systems Engineering Research
• Mission Planning & Decision Making
• Algorithms & Architecture
• Sensor Exploitation
• Communications & Control
• Propulsion Power Generation and Energy Management
The conference will be attended by and be of interest to exploiters of EMRS and SEAS funded research, providers of EMRS and SEAS programmes, as well as the EMRS and SEAS engineering communities.