Hugo Hiden

I originally did a Chemical Engineering undergraduate degree at Newcastle University before completing a PhD on the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for modelling and monitoring chemical process plants. This led me away from Chemical Engineering towards software development with a particular focus on data intensive applications. After a spell of six years in industry creating data analysis systems for high throughput chemical laboratories, I moved back to Newcastle University to work in the newly formed e-Science Centre. This group was involved in a number of projects across the University making use of Grid systems. This research group eventually became the Digital Institute. Throughout this time, I have also maintained an active development role and, along with some University colleagues, developed the e-Science Central product (www.esciencecentral.co.uk) which is a Cloud based data processing and analytics platform. This has been used in a number of research projects (typically in the Medical School) and also formed the basis for the company that a few of us formed (Inkspot.co) which sold the e-Science Central platform into industry (most notably to Unilever for their connected consumer devices programs). This background has led my interest in IoT type applications, streaming data ingest, visualisation and machine learning.