London Digital Twin Research Centre

British council project “Urban resilience for agriculture“: Teams from Van Lang University (VLU, Vietnam) and Middlesex University (UK) organised a dissemination workshop in Ho Chi Minh city on 14th April 2023. Ms Lan Phuong Nguyen, Vice President of VLU and Ms Phi Phan, Programme Manager from British Council Vietnam, opened the event with welcoming speeches outlining the importance of the work with UN’s sustainable development goals. Prof Huan Nguyen, Dr Vu Thi Quyen and Dr Meri Juntti then presented the latest project outcomes to an audience of 60+ people. There were also invited speakers from relevant stakeholders: Mr Pham Lam Chinh Van (HCMC Department of Agriculture and Rural Development), Mr Le Nhut Duy (Biotechnology Centre – Ho Chi Minh City), and Mr. Nguyen Van Thanh (Gia Phat Agriculture Ltd), presenting the case studies as well as outlining the policies for agriculture in urban context. Following the workshop, there was a visit to the green house built at Van Lang University. The teams then visited several urban farming centres in and around Ho Chi Minh city and held fruitful discussions for collaboration with the centres.

Continue reading “British Council project workshop in Ho Chi Minh City: Digital technologies for vertical farming”

From 8th April to 13th April, Prof. Huan Nguyen and Dr Quoc-Tuan Vien paid a visit to our project partners HCL (Noida), TCS (Pune) and Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore), India. This EPSRC funded project (within the UKI-FNI network) is progressing well at this stage. The partners discussed the potential Digital Twin (DT) architecture to improve automation and efficiency of the operation of the Open RAN. Difference use cases of traffic steering, anomaly detection and energy efficiency were discussed in details. Development of xApps/rApps for this purpose was already attempted. The LDTRC team explored different 5G facilities from our partners in India. In-person meetings among the partners will resume in the UK soon.

Continue reading “Digital Twin for Open RAN towards 6G: Visiting partners HCL and IISc in India”

There have recently been strong interests in our DT work at LDTRC from external parties. On 10th March, a strong group of more than 20 people from Japan paid a visit to learn about our work at the centre. The delegation, led by Professor Osamu Sudo (Chuo University), includes high ranking representatives from NEC Corporation, Hitachi Solutions, NTT Data Corporation, and others (RYOBI Systems, RKK CS, Gyosei System Inc, Kitanihon, UCHIDAYOKO Co). Prof. Huan Nguyen and other professors (Mehmet Karamanoglu, Franco Raimondi, David Windridge, and Richard Bayford) from Faculty of Science and Technology presented latest works on digital twin technology, bio-engineering, AI and taken the delegation for a facility tour. Both sides discussed a plan for concrete collaborations in smart city, digital twin for healthcare and AI.

Continue reading “Visits from Japanese and Vietnamese delegations”

Our PhD student Mahnoor Yaqoob has got a paper accepted at the ICC’23 workshop, as part of the work from the EPSRC project “Digital Twin for OpenRAN” through the UK-India Future Networks Initiative (UKI-FNI). The paper focuses on the DT approach for end-to-end network slicing solution which address both RAN and Core parts to improve automation and efficiency of the Beyond 5G network.

On 2nd February 2023, Professor Huan Nguyen was invited to join a panel discussion at the Workshop “Engineering Digital Twins in Practice” hosted at Factory 2050 in AMRC Sheffield. The panel, chaired by Professor David Wagg (University of Sheffield), included other panelists John Patsavellas (Cranfield University), Jan Wolber (GE Healthcare), and Ali Nicholl (IOTICS). The benefits, challenges and specific use cases on Digital Twin technology were discussed and shared with 100+ in-person and online audiences. Prof. Nguyen presented some examples of the DT work at LDTRC for applications on smart factory and 6G mobile networks. The event also featured several other talks on DT and was ended with a tour of fantastic facilities at AMRC’s Factory 2050.

Continue reading “Panel Discussion at AMRC Workshop “Engineering Digital Twins in Practice””

On 18th December 2022, project partner Van Lang University – VLU (Vietnam) paid a visit to our campus in Hendon London, as part of a British Council project on smart agriculture. Two teams reviewed the work completed so far, including the setting up of two greenhouses in London and in Ho Chi Minh City. Next activities was then discussed and planned, including the work on improving awareness of smart technology sulutions to relevant stakeholders. VLU team visited the greenhouse setup at Sunny House on Hendon campus. Both teams will now move to the next steps to synchronise the IoT works for automation of the greenhouse operation in both London and Ho Chi Minh city.

Continue reading “Vertical Farming Project Updates”

Within the scope of our British Council project “Women in STEM,” the following openings are now available to apply for candidates from East Asia (Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam):

1. Early Academic Fellowships for Women in STEM for 2023/24 (4 to 5 positions): more details and how to apply can be found from this link
2. MSc Scholarships for Women in STEM for 2023/24 (5 to 6 scholarships): details can be found from this link

On 29th November 2022, the LDTRC has kicked off its EPSRC project with other two industrial partners Rakuten Symphony and HCL. The project members (below) discussed the ideas to run the project and planned the next activities. OpenRAN is an important research area to diversify the telecommunication markets and this is a common interest of all three partners. The consortium is also looking forward to working with other UKI-FNI partners in this area, exploring the collaboration possibility of testbed solutions for for 5G and Beyond.

Continue reading “Kick-off meeting – ‘Digital Twin for Open RAN towards 6G’ project”

The Centre has recently published a comprehensive paper on the Digital Twin technology on the popular IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials. This 37-page paper reviews the latest developments of DT technology, discusses the enabling technologies, the challenges, the technology trends and outlines the future developments. The paper also presents the specific use cases investigated in several projects conducted at the Centre: i) Anomaly detection for tea bag production line in India, ii) the Festo Cyber-Physical Factory at Hendon, London and iii) the structural health monitoring of Vietnam bridges. The projects were funded by the U.K.–India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI), the British Council’s Institutional Links through the Newton Programme Vietnam, the British Council Indonesia’s Going Global Partnerships Programme (2022–2024), and the VinGroup Innovation Fund (VinIF).

There is another good news on funding front in this week from the London Digital Twin Research Centre. Prof Huan Nguyen (PI) and Dr Quoc-Tuan Vien (Co-I) have secured an EPSRC grant as part of the EPSRC UK-India Future Networks Initiative (UKI-FNI) led by Professor Gerard Parr from the University of East Anglia. Partners include Rakuten (UK) and HCL (India and Vietnam). This project aims to investigate the possibility of digital twin technology in supporting the deployment and operation of OpenRAN in Beyond 5G and 6G towards a greener network. The investigation will be on the key components, design challenges and prospects of DT in the OpenRAN architecture as well as the impact of DT on a specific use case of energy efficiency.

Continue reading “And further funding news (EPSRC grant)”