Thinklab

Envisioning Digital Futures

Professor Terrence Fernando

Director
+44 (0)161 295 2914
t.fernando@salford.ac.uk

Biography

Professor Terrence Fernando has a broad background in conducting multi-disciplinary research programmes involving a large number of research teams in areas such as distributed virtual engineering, virtual building construction, driving simulations, virtual prototyping, urban simulation and maintenance simulation.  

Between 2001 and 2004, he led a regional research centre on advanced virtual prototyping, involving the Universities of Salford, Manchester and Lancaster. This EPSRC/OST funded project brought together key research teams in the region to develop visualisation and simulation technologies for product design. Furthermore, as a part of the EU funded Future Workspaces roadmap project and the MOSAIC project, Professor Fernando brought together over 100 companies and research centres from areas such as aerospace, automotive, building construction, multi-modal interfaces, system architecture, networking and human factors to define a 10 year European vision for future collaborative engineering workspaces and mobile workspaces.

Professor Fernando was the Technical Director for the EU funded CoSpaces project (12m Euro) leading the scientific workpackages and collaboration between the scientific teams and the industrialists. He was  also a core member of the INTUITION Network of Excellence project involving over 50 research centres across Europe to develop coordinated research activities on VR. This work resulted in an European Association for Virtual Reality for promoting advanced VR research in Europe. He received further funding  from EU through the VisionAir project to strengthen the VR infrastructure and VR research within Europe involving over 25 key VR centres across Europe. As a part of the EPSRC funded Vivacity project, he led the development of a collaborative urban planning environment in collaboration with the Black Country Consortium and Ordnance Survey. This work is now being further developed to support regeneration projects within the cities of Manchester and Salford, involving a range of stakeholders including City Councils, Police, Fire and Rescue Services, PCTs and the Environment Agency. Professor Fernando also led the Virtual Futures theme within the EPSRC funded FIRM project which resulted in creating a range of new media platforms for media professionals and citizens.   

Recently he has completed three EU projects (Design4Energy, PROSECO and CROSS DRIVE) which delivered advanced team collaboration platforms for  the energy sector, manufacturing and space agencies. He is now leading a large EPSRC projects to develop a “Collaborative Multi-agency Platform for Building Resilient Communities”. This project aims to develop a digital infrastructure that can offer intelligence to a range of agencies in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Malaysia to work together to reduce the impact of disasters such as floods and landslides on communities. This project is supported by the UK Cabinet Office, Greater Manchester Resilience Forum, Rockfeller Foundation – 100 resilient cities, Telespazio, Secure IA, Satellite Application Centre and Environment Agency.

In addition to research, Terrence  leads a successful commercial unit within the THINKlab that is specialised in creating innovative technology platforms for industry partners. Some of the clients of this Unit include Network Rail, Northern Alliance, Arup, Siemens, GSK, Manchester  City Council, Salford City Council, Environment Agency.  One of the iconic project that Terrence has developed that is relevant to this proposal is the creation of a 4D Simulation Environment for Track Renewal Programmes for Network Rail and its partners, which won both the  regional and national “BIM Project of the Year Award” from the Construction Excellence in 2016.

He is passionate about bringing interdisciplinary teams to bring innovation into cities and commercial organisations. To this end, he organises and chairs three major national conferences on Smart Cities, Smart Homes, IoT & Big Data in collaboration with the Salford Professional Development (SPD) team at the University of Salford.

Research Interests

  • Collaborative virtual environments
  • Multi-agency collaboration platform
  • Smart Cities
  • Collaborative engineering environments

Qualifications and Memberships

  • PhD in Computer Science, Department of Computation, UMIST, Manchester
  • MSc in Microprocessor Engineering and Digital Electronics, Department of Electrical Engineering, UMIST, Manchester
  • BSc (Hons) in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering (First Class), University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka