2020 Archive
- UCD team wins prestigious ESB Inter-Colleges Challenge 2020
- Engineers Ireland’s Engineering Excellence Digital Series
- George Vathakkattil Joseph, a Ph.D. student in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering has come runner-up in the ThesisIn3 competition at UCD for his talk
- Digital Animation for Educators
- Intel’s Colm Farrell named as Adjunct Professor at UCD
- PlasmaBound Seals €1.1 million Investment Round
- UCD Engineers Receive 2019 NovaUCD Innovation Awards
- Airflow video shows how easily coronavirus can be spread by coughing
- UCD Formula Student Wins the 2020 NovaUCD Student Enterprise Competition
- The Irish Laboratory Awards 2020
- Students celebrate victory at the ‘Shaping Your Future’ 3D printing innovation challenge
- Arup UCD Engineering scholarships 2019
- UCD-based Inventors Help Create Ingenious Solutions to Everyday Problems for Extraordinary People on Big Life Fix
- UCD engineer leads Irish efforts in global race to build ventilators
- UCD volunteers use 3D printing to produce PPE for front-line COVID-19 medical staff
George Vathakkattil Joseph, a Ph.D. student in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering has come runner-up in the ThesisIn3 competition at UCD for his talk titled: "In-Sync: Learning to compute from fireflies".
Wednesday, 8 July, 2020

George is a doctoral researcher in Dynamical Systems and Risk Lab (DSRL), headed by Prof. Vikram Pakrashi in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. His thesis explores novel forms of computation drawing inspiration from how the brain computes and elsewhere in nature such as fireflies. The phenomenon of synchronization allows oscillators connected to each other to solve computational problems in a radically different manner from traditional computing. Oscillators could be anything from a ball with a spring attached, or an electronic (LC) circuit, or even lasers. George's work focuses on understanding the classes of problems that can take advantage of this computing paradigm (this model has been called the 'Ising machine') by studying the mathematical models of coupled oscillators.
His work on brain-inspired neuromorphic computing has already been shown to be of immediate application in the field of structural health monitoring (SHM). An algorithm based on the ability of the brain to recognize patterns in speech was applied to recognize patterns in vibrations of structures. He implements his algorithms on a neuromorphic chip from Intel called Loihi, as a part of the Intel neuromorphic research community (INRC).