This is Engineering Day 2020
Posted on 4 November 2020
We’re celebrating This is Engineering Day. Together, we can shape our world for the better, whether that’s by making our day to day lives easier or tackling some of our biggest global challenges.
The campaign, led by the Royal Academy of Engineering, is working to bring engineering to life and give more young people the opportunity to pursue a career that is future-shaping, varied, well-paid and in-demand. The aim is to showcase what engineering really looks like, and how it could be an exciting and rewarding path for young people in the future.
At York, engineering means everything from the application of digital games to teaching foreign languages to using advanced encryption to keep our medical data secure.
Professor Ana Cavalcanti
Ana Cavalcanti is a Professor of Software Verification at the University and was named one of ten Royal Academy of Engineering Chairs in Emerging Technologies in 2018.
Ana’s project 'Software Engineering for Robotics: Modelling, Validation, Simulation, and Testing', will develop an approach for practitioners that allows them to solve problems using accessible domain-specific languages. She hopes to move the discipline of software engineering forward, using methods justified by mathematical principles that are routinely used in many engineering disciplines.
Watch Ana’s presentation at York Talks 2020.
Ana is an Academic Lead for the Institute for Safe Autonomy, based at York, which seeks to realise the full potential of robotics and connected autonomous systems safely and ethically.
In addition, Ana is part of the RoboStar group, one of the largest research groups in the world on software engineering for robotics. RoboStar is involved in two interdisciplinary projects on verifiability and resilience of autonomous systems that have just been awarded £3M from the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) programme.
YorRobots
Led by Ana, YorRobots is an institution-wide initiative bringing together researchers and practitioners with an interest in robotics and autonomous systems, and their applications.
Ana said: “Increasingly, robotics provides strong prospects for significant societal and industrial impact. At York, our ongoing research makes a significant contribution to this exciting and challenging field through the development of software and hardware to ethical and regulatory issues.”
Feeling inspired?
Our undergraduate courses are designed to reflect the diverse research strengths of our academics, meaning that aspiring engineers can study anything from artificial intelligence to cyber security.
Our postgraduate courses offer students the chance to continue their studies, with courses such as MSc Safety Critical Systems Engineering teaching students how to manage the risk autonomous systems pose to human lives. Students who want to continue their studies can also join our community of researchers on our PhD and MSc by Research courses.
Find out more about the research that we’re doing across the department.