Erica Yang

Dr Erica Yang is the Managing Director of Chilton Computing Limited, a AI-powered IoT system design and engineering company based in Oxford, UK. She is a big data and IoT system expert with more than 20 years’ experience in cutting edge computing R&D and engineering complex computing systems. She started her outstanding career with 11 years at the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Oxford as a senior computer scientist. She then became leader of the visual analytics and imaging systems group in the Scientific Computing Department in 2016, then, the founding project director of the £8 million UK Data and Analytics Facility of National Infrastructure (DAFNI) in 2017. DAFNI is a national repository of data, analysis models, advanced analytics and visualisation tools, with integrated computational infrastructure and data services.

Dr Yang also represented STFC in the UK Automotive Council's working group on virtual Design Verification of Autonomous Vehicles (2016-2018). Her industry oriented research was funded funded by STFC Innovations Ltd via a proof-of-concept grant on predictive analytics system architecture for Smart Motorway data from Highways England.

In 2018, she was certified by the NVDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) as a trainer for academia. Since 2016 she has been working for the European Commission as an expert reviewer for the H2020 ICT, Space and/or Societal Challenges R&D programmes.

Career at Rutherford Appleton Lab

Whilst with STFC, she involved extensively in data science R&D projects with world-class European large science facilities, such as

She also contributed to European large-scale collaborative ICT R&D projects in Grid computing, Cybersecurity, and, data science, including

Through the European programmes, she got involved in early ontology standarisation, interoperability, and data analysis provenance research for world-class UK science research facilities at Rutherford Lab in Oxfordshire to accelerate large scale data sharing and through-life analysis for science communities. This resulted in the advanced version of CSMD-CCLRC Core Scientific Metadata Model and its open source software implementation – ICAT. Today, these facilities represent bleeding-edge research capabilities of the UK, enabling 10s of MBs of small experiments to 100s of TBs experiments on a daily basis and supporting thousands of scientific experiments and analysis from all over the world doing multidisciplinary cutting-edge research of critical importance to our society.

Career at Oxford University

Dr Yang worked for Oxford University twice; for the Oxford-Google Books project in 2010 at the Bodleian Library (distributed indexing and text analytics) and for the Clinical Trial Service Unit (CTSU) of the Medical Sciences Division in 2006 for the Biobank project (software system for data catalogue).

Career Summary

2005 – PhD in computer science, specialising in distributed system security and fault tolerance (Durham University)

2006 – Analyst programmer, software for data catalogue (Oxford University, Biobank Project)

2007 – Senior researcher, security for distributed grid systems (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Science and Technology Facilities Council)

2010 – Technical lead, distributed indexing, cataloguing, text analytics (Oxford University, Oxford-Google Books Project)

2011 – Senior researcher, science data cataloguing, indexing, sharing (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Science and Technology Facilities Council)

2015 – Senior researcher, science data visualisation and image analytics (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Science and Technology Facilities Council)

2016 – Group leader, visual analytics and imaging systems group (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Science and Technology Facilities Council)

2016 – STFC representative, UK Automotive Council working group on virtual Design Verification of Autonomous Vehicles (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Science and Technology Facilities Council)

2016 – Expert reviewer, H2020 ICT, Space, and/or Societal Challenges programmes (European Commission, ongoing)

2017 – Founder project director, UK Data and Analytics Facility of National Infrastructure (DAFNI) at Harwell Oxford (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Science and Technology Facilities Council)

2018 – Certified instructor for academia (NVDIA Deep Learning Institute – DLI)

2018 – Managing Director, Chilton Computing Limited

2019 – Awarded a place at Women Satellite Data & Space-Tech Entrepreneur Programme (SETsquared Partnership – the Enterprise collaboration of the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey, Funded by UK Space Agency)

2019 – Project lead, MD-Trac: Multi-Dimensional Traffic management technologies of the future (InnovateUK SBRI – GovTech Catalyst grant, collaboration with Huduma Ltd)

2020 – Project lead, DT-4-CT: Building a Digital Twin for Cybersecurity Testing of CAV Networks (InnovateUK, CCAV – Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles, Zenzic grant, collaboration Oxfordshire County Council, Science and Technology Facilities Council, Huduma Ltd)

2020 – Awarded a place at the Cyber101 programme of Digital Catapult (cybersecurity startup programme funded by DCMS – Department of Culture Media and Sports)

Selected Publications and News

2013 - "Enhancing the core scientific metadata model to incorporate derived data", Journal of Future Generation Computer Systems, Elsevier

2014 - "Enhanced Urban Living through Data Analytics: Towards a techno-social theory and practice of urban management", report supported by STFC Future Programme

2015 - "Data optimised computing for heterogeneous big data computing applications", IEEE Big Data Conference

2016 - "Hundreds of thousands of images turned into 3D reconstructions in ULTRA fast time", press release at Scientific Computing 2016 in Utah/USA, supported by UK Research and Innovation

2017 - "Visualisation and making sense of big data, for society and industry", UK Research and Innovation

2017 - "Groundbreaking computer software to improve UK resilience to extreme events", UK Research and Innovation

2018 - "Challenges in Enabling Quality of Analytics in the Cloud", ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality

2020 - "Cyber Security in connected autonomous vehicles", UK Research and Innovations