Dr Yonghua Yin, Research Associate, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

I work as a Research Associate in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial. I received the President’s PhD Scholarship in 2014 and completed my PhD in electrical engineering at Imperial last year. Before this, I completed my undergraduate and Master’s in engineering at Sun Yat-sen University in China.

My PhD research topics focus on neural networks and deep learning, which are subsets of machine intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI). I have been developing effective neural network tools that can be used for data analysis and decision-making, and am trying to understand the internal mechanisms of deep neural networks. With AI technology becoming more and more important in our daily life, I am glad to make my contributions to these areas.

As a Research Associate at Imperial, I am working on the EU H2020 Project “GHOST: Safe-Guarding Home Internet of Things (IoT) Environments”, which involves 11 academic and industrial institutes and companies across various countries. In this project, my main responsibility is to design a machine learning system that runs within an IoT gateway to analyse packet traffics and detect potential cyber-security attacks over time. The experience I’m gaining at Imperial has different sides: the procedure for exploring a research idea, building up a commercial product, and the approaches and tools for managing international collaborations.

I like working on this project because it allows me to collaborate with and learn from 10 other partners of both academic and industrial backgrounds. While working and discussing with other colleagues at Imperial, I also have the opportunity to get involved in other EU projects.