Professor Weisi Guo

Areas of expertise

• Autonomous Systems
• Communications Systems
• Defence Info Systems
• Safety, Resilience, Risk & Reliability
• Systems Engineering
• Water Science and Engineering

Background

Professor Guo is the Director of the Smart Living Grand Challenge and Head of Applied AI Group at Cranfield. He is currently also the course director of the Applied AI MSc.

He obtained his MEng, MA, and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge. Since 2012, he has built an award-winning team at the University of Warwick (2012-19) and then Cranfield (2019-now) [QS world top50, ARWU world top50, REF 2]. Professor Guo works within the Centre for Autonomous and Cyber-Physical Systems and the new £67m Digital Aviation Research and Technology Centre (DARTeC). 

He has been PI on £4.7m and investigator on over £16m of research funding, and was a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. He has published 100+ journal papers (total IF 500+) and 60+ IEEE/ACM conference papers, with over 4000 citations (h-index 31). This includes a Nature commentary, Nature communications, Nature Comp.Sci., a top 10% cited paper, and several cover issues in Royal Society and IEEE journals. He is also an IET Innovation Award winner (2015) and been a runner-up in the Bell Labs Prize three times (2014, 2017, 2019). He currently serves as editor on 3 IEEE & 1 Royal Society journals, and is a Full Member of the EPSRC peer-review college, as well as reviewing for ESRC, MRC, Royal Society, and Leverhulme.

Research opportunities

As human society is becoming increasingly inter-connected, human and machine intelligence is more closely interfaced than ever. Our networked society faces serious challenges from the human and natural world. My expertise is in connected intelligence, linking: data science, communication systems, and machine learning. 

My research designs data-driven solutions for socio-cyber-physical ecosystems. In particular, I am interested in how AI and information systems can be designed for specific challenging environments or tasks, whilst integrating human domain knowledge. 

I am currently recruiting:

• Post-Docs: The group has a number of project-based openings throughout year. We also welcome top-quality motivated fellowship applicants (RAEng, UKRI, H2020 MSCA), please send a detailed CV and your top 1-2 papers for a discussion.
• PhDs: The group usually takes in maximum 2 new PhD students a year. We restrict this number to ensure high quality supervision. This may expand to 3-4 as new faculty staff joins for 2022 intake.
• Visiting Fellows/Senior PhD Students: The group only considers maximum 1 case a year (6-12 months) with exceptional synergy and a clear research plan that benefits the group.

Current activities

The research areas are:

• Cyber - Communication in Extreme Environments:
  Domains: Social Data-Driven 5G & 6G, UAV Communication, Secure Communication, Biological Communication
  Methods: Physical Layer Security, Intelligence Reflecting Surface, Molecular Encoding 
  Key Papers: "Robust Fuzzy Learning for Partially Overlapping Channels Allocation in UAV Communication Networks," IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2020
  "Explainable Artificial Intelligence for 6G: Improving Trust between Human and Machine," IEEE Communications Magazine, 2020
  "Mutual Information and Noise Distributions of Molecular Signals using Laser Induced Fluorescence," IEEE Globecom, 2019
  Key Grants: [EPSRC] TAS-S Trustworthy Autonomous Systems-Security (EP/V026682/1, 2020-24)
  [H2020] DAWN4IoE - Data Aware Wireless Network for Internet-of-Everything (778305, 2017-21)
  [H2020] Mo-IoNT - Molecular Internet-of-Nano-Things (792799, 2018-20)
   

• Physical - Networked & Autonomous Critical Systems:
  Domains: Large-scale Networked Systems, Networked Robots, Networked Natural Ecosystems
  Methods: Sensing/Compression: Graph Signal Processing, Network Science, Federated Learning, Explainable AI
  Key Papers: "Sampling and Inference of Networked Dynamics using Log-Koopman Nonlinear Graph Fourier Transform," IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 2020
  "Network community structure of substorms using SuperMAG magnetometers," Nature Communications, vol.12, 1842, Mar 2021 
  "On the Accuracy and Efficiency of Sensing and Localization for Robotics," IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing,2020
  "Random Sketch Learning for Deep Neural Networks in Edge Computing," Nature Computational Science, vol.1(3), Mar 2021 
  Key Grants: [EPSRC] CoTRE - Complexity Twin for Resilient Ecosystems (EP/R041725/1, 2018-20)
  [InnovateUK] Fly2Plan (70883, 2020-22)
  [Turing LRF] CHANCE - Coupled Human and Natural Critical Ecosystems (2017-21)
  [H2020] GreenML5G - Green Machine Learning for 5G & Beyond Resource Optimisation (891221, 2020-22)
   

• Social - Human Response to Physical & Digital Environments: 
  Domains: Social Networks, Conflict, Climate Induced Migration & Conflict
  Methods: Natural Language Processing, Network Science, Inference, Social-Physics Models
  Key Papers: "Retool AI to Forecast and Limit Wars," Nature, 2018
  "Gang Confrontation: The case of Medellin (Colombia)," PLOS ONE, vol.14(12), Dec 2019 
  "Common Statistical Patterns in Urban Terrorism," Royal Society Open Science, vol.6(9), Sep 2019
  "Google Trends can Improve Surveillance of Type 2 Diabetes," Nature Scientific Reports, vol. 7(1), Jun 2017
  Key Grants: [EPSRC] Mobility as a service: MAnaging Cybersecurity Risks across Consumers, Organisations and Sectors (EP/V039164/1, 2021-23)
  [EPSRC] Centre for Doctoral Training in Urban Science and Progress (EP/L016400/1, 2014-22)
  [EPSRC] Patterns of City Formation & Development (EP/N509796/1, 2018-22)
  [Turing D&S] GUARD - Global Urban Analytics for Resilient Defence (2017-19, extension: 2019-21)

Clients

• EPSRC
• H2020
• InnovateUK
• Alan Turing Institute
• DSTL
• US Air Force: Office for Scientific Research
• Royal Society
• British Council
• UK Geospatial Commission
• Lloyds Register Foundation
• Department for Transport
• Ranplan (UK SME)

Publications

• Articles in journals
• Conference papers
• Books