Orestis Georgiou Homepage

Hello and welcome to my old personal website!

I am a Marie Curie Fellow at the IRIDA research centre and the Director of Research at Ultrahaptics where I also lead the Academic Program aimed at facilitating R&D in mid-air haptics and focused Ultrasound. I am also a visiting fellow of the School of Mathematics of the University of Bristol and of the Department of Informatics of the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. During 2012-16, I was a Senior Research Engineer at Toshiba TRL, and before that I was a research visitor at the MPIPKS in Dresden Germany and an active member of the Dynamical Systems and Social Dynamics group. My BSc is in Mathematical Physics (University of Nottingham 2007), and my PhD in Applied Mathematics (University of Bristol 2011) supervised by Carl Dettmann.

Birthplace: Nicosia, Cyprus, Nationality: Greek Cypriot

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Please visit my new website

www.orestisgeorgiou.com

Short Biosketch

Dr Orestis Georgiou has a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Bristol and has published over 60 articles in leading journals and conferences of Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, Engineering and Medicine and holds 4 US patents. He is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at the IRIDA research centre for communications and the Director of Research at Ultrahaptics where he is co-PI of the FET Open projects LEVITATE and H-Reality. Before that, Orestis was a Senior Researcher at Toshiba TRL, and a Postdoc at the Max Planck Institute PKS in Dresden. Dr Georgiou has presented, discussed and taught science and innovation at numerous events to the general public, university students, leading academics, VIP business executives, and members of the UK Parliament. His expertise lie within the fields of wireless communications and human-computer interactions in which he has supervised a number of PhD and MSc students and has also organised multiple workshops at leading conferences. Orestis is the recipient of two Best Paper Awards and the 2019 IEEE Heinrich Hertz Award.

Research Interests

My research work has at least two main themes. The first and most recent one lies at the intersection of human-computer-interaction, haptics and Virtual Reality, while the second lies at the intersection of applied probability, stochastic geometry, and statistical physics, and finds application in wireless telecommunications (e.g. localization and interference mitigation of wireless sensor networks for the IoT), quantum transport (e.g. nano-wires), chaotic dynamical systems (e.g. mathematical billiards), and statistics in general.

Haptics and their role in Human Computer Interaction

Haptics is the science of applying touch sensations to control and interact with computer applications. Haptic technologies is a market currently estimated at $16 billion and expected to reach $ 44.5 billion by 2022. Indeed, the potential for using haptics in interfaces for virtual-environment and tele-operator applications is enormous, and appears to be growing exponentially. To be highly effective however, haptic researchers need to consider not only the hardware and software, but also the human user. This is why there are continuing challenges related to making the technology more seamless, reliable, and natural.
We see nowadays an increasing number of conferences and journals where haptic researchers can publish their findings. According to the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics, the successful deployment of haptic interfaces requires continuing advancements in hardware and software algorithms, as well as our understanding of the human somatosensory system. Furthermore, current priority areas include, but are not limited to: devices and technology, tactile display and tactile sensing, haptic rendering, perception and psychophysics, neuroscience, haptic cognition, multi-modal perception, sensory guided motor control, and haptic communication. At Ultrahaptics, we are slowly but steadily going through this list of priority research areas in haptics with the aim of refining and expanding our current technology and its use cases.

Spatially Embedded Networks

A network is formed by nodes connected by edges, often used to represent relations between objects on which a number of processes may take place. The internet for example currently has about 4.84 billion web pages indexed by google, which you can reach through your browser. Unlike social, neural and cyber networks however, many other complex networks such as our transport infrastructure, power grid lines, and wireless mobile phone networks, are very much affected by the metric space (often Euclidian) in which they reside. The reason for this really boils down to costs of deployment, reliability against system failures or attacks, and efficiency in performing the desired process. Space therefore dictates network topology and forms the skeleton on which critical network processes function. Characterizing and understanding the structure of this skeleton is crucial from both a scientific and engineering point of view. Marc Barthélemy has an excellent review paper on this fascinating topic.
My personal interest in spatially embedded networks, relates to wireless communications and the many sources of randomness found therein (both spatial and temporal), which from a mathematical point of view, can facilitate for a meaningful statistical analysis, and therefore engineering design and optimization. A list of my published work can be found here.
My collaborators Justin Coon and Carl Dettmann have recently won a £2m grant from EPSRC called Spatially Embedded Networks (SEN) aimed at creating new analytical techniques and models for graphs embedded within a bounding geometry. The focus of SEN is on mobility, spectral properties, trust, security, and temporal variations.

Mathematical Billiards

During my Phd I specialized on the escape properties of "open" chaotic dynamical systems and in particular mathematical billiards. Open here refers to systems whose content may escape through some pre-specified hole. Such investigations are both of mathematical and physical interest as they offer a kind of spectroscopy into the corresponding closed system's dynamics. This research topic has strong overlaps with chaotic dynamics, statistical mechanics, and ergodic theory, where it is often more useful to think in terms of the macroscopic observable behaviours rather than particular microscopic states. Moreover, much of the classical billiard dynamics can be interpreted as the high energy limit of their quantum counterparts, with open billiards offering insights into non-Hermitian quantum dynamics and fractal Weyl laws.

Quantum Transport

I am also interested in the dynamical properties of quantum transort. Examples include reflecting quantum wavepackets across different interfaces, waveguides, and propagation through disordered media (see Anderson localization).

Other Interests

In my free time, I paint, I cook, I read philosophy (my curent favorite is Marinoff's Plato, not Prozac!), and play the Djembe (badly, but I'm slowly improving, but still quite badly). Recently, I've also taken up SCUBA diving at the Severnside Sub Aqua Club where I'm a qualified BSAC Sports Diver.