Jim Harkin

Dr Jim Harkin is Associate Head of the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems and a Reader in Embedded Systems. He is a member of the Computational Neuroscience and Neural Engineering team in the Intelligent Systems Research Centre (ISRC) and  previously worked as a post-doc researcher in embedded systems design at Ulster (2001-2004) on the EPSRC funded project (GR/N26753). His current teaching interests relate to embedded systems encompassing digital systems design, VHDL for FPGAs and system testing. Dr. Harkin leads research on the design of intelligent embedded systems and focuses on developing electronic computing systems that can self-repair under the presence of errors. In particular, his work explores how computer models of neural networks (brain like-repair) can be mapped to hardware to build highly efficient and reliable embedded computers. His work has seen innovations in Networks-on-Chip strategies and the hardware implementation of self-repairing Spiking Neural Networks, and is Co-founder of the medical analaytics start-up company Airbrio. He has secured grant funding of +£2 million from several sources including EPSRC, DETI, InvestNI and DEL and has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He was included in the University’s Computer Science (UoA 23) submission to the RAE 2008, and also UoA 11 in REF2014.