Meet the people who make up STEM Faculty.
Professor (Information & Communication Technologies)
He received his B.Sc. (Hons), M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Wales/Cymru (Swansea) and having held professorial positions in both Australia and Germany, he was appointed in 2008 as Professor of Information and Communication Technologies in the School of Computing and Communications at The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.
He is a Chartered Engineer (C.Eng), Senior Life Member of the IEEE (SMIEEE) and Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS), as well as equally proudly being a Catenian, a Mauritshuis Friend, and a Vice President of the Welsh Crawshays Rugby Club .
He has published 1 book and around 290 scientific journals, conference papers, book chapters and monographs, with demonstrable esteem by being awarded 5 international Best Paper Prizes.
He has successfully supervised 32 PhD students to completion and is currently supervising 1 PhD student within the neXt Generation Multimedia Technologies (XGMT) research group which he founded in 2008. All his PhD students, in their own inimitable ways, have been the catalyst for stimulating intellectual debate and discovery during our weekly Monday community meetings. A holder of 2 patents and a recipient of significant public/private sector funding to support his multidisciplinary research, including as a co-investigator on the National Space Innovation Programme TreeView: Precision Forestry to Tackle Climate Change project, to develop satellite imaging and AI solutions for tree management as part of the UK climate action agenda.
24 PhD External Examinerships (Jurer/Opponent) in the UK, Australia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Mauritius, and New Zealand.
15 Research Masters (M.Phil) External Examinerships.
He is currently External Examiner (EE) for the Joint Programme (JP) in Engineering between Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT). Previous EE terms have included:
He has been a member of numerous international conference technical programme committees and has 3 times been an invited Keynote Address speaker, while for the past decade he was an Associate Editor and Editorial Board member of the IET Image Processing journal.
A passionate teacher with an unalloyed commitment to excellence which is both led and informed by his research, Laurence has been awarded Teaching Innovation grants and published pedagogical papers detailing his professional teaching practice. He continues to innovate championing new technologies to enrich the on-line student learning and research training experience.
With a wealth of UG and PG teaching experience in multimodal, blended and on-line delivery, he has presented an extensive range of professional career development, technical and managerial short courses for industry (SME and corporate sectors), academia and government agencies on topics ranging from The ABC of DSP and Computer Vision (Arcada University, Helsinki), to ICT Project Management (Australian Quarantine Inspection Service).
Current teaching commitments:
He also was the academic mentor for the OU partnered UG Computer Science & Computer Games degrees at the dual-sector University Centre, Leeds.
Received the 2010 IEEE Certificate of Excellence Award in recognition of sustained academic contributions to Promoting International Exchange, while between 2003 and 2007, he served as a Director of GREEN Inc (Gippsland Regional Ecology and Environmental Network), a regional technology/business incubator in Churchill, Victoria (Australia), fostering SME technology transfer and entrepreneurship.
Visiting scholarship positions held, PhD student exchanges and collaborative research projects undertaken in partnership with:
