Professor Anthony Christopher Davies
Emeritus Professor,
Department of Electronic Engineering,
King's College, University of London
Prof. Tony Davies was born in Rainham, Kent, England in August 1936. As a consequence of events associated with World War 2, he attended 10 different schools finally spending most of his secondary schooling at Cranbrook School, Kent, England.
Following two years military service in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (British Army), he obtained a First Class Honours B.Sc(Eng.) degree in Electrical Engineering from Southampton University in 1961.
He then spent two years with the General Electric Co. Ltd. at Coventry, where he worked on filter and equaliser design and pulse code modulation.
After this he joined the Northampton College of Advanced Technology in London as a lecturer. This College subsequently received a Royal Charter and became The City University, London.
From August 1968 he spent a year as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and later from August 1973 spent a year as a visiting Full Professor at Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana, USA.
In 1979 and 1980 he taught short courses on Microprocessors in Washington D.C., London and Berlin for the George Washington University.
He was awarded an M.Phil. degree by London University in 1967 and a PhD degree by City University in 1970.
For some years he was a Reader in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at City University where he was also in charge of academic aspects of the University Microprocessor Laboratories from their establishment until they were closed in 1987.
In 1982 he was appointed to a new chair in Information Engineering at City University, where he became Director of a newly formed Centre for Information Engineering.
For a year from September 1987, he held a Royal Society Industrial Fellowship at the Army Weapons Division of British Aerospace.
In 1990, he moved to King's College London. For several years, until August 1996, he was Director of Teaching for the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at King's College. He took early retirement from King's College from October 1999 and was awarded the title of Emeritus Professor. In autumn 2001 he became associated with the Digital Imaging Research Centre, School of Computing and Information Systems, Kingston University, Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, where he was appointed Visiting Professor from January 2002.
His teaching activities have recently been mainly in digital signal processing and software design, and his technical and research interests include signal processing, pseudorandom sequences, non-linear dynamical systems and chaos, digital filters, software engineering, and circuit theory.
Recent research funding includes an EPSRC grant 'Chaotic and Pseudochaotic Signal from Discrete time Electronic Systems', support from the British German ARC programme (for collaboration with Institut fuer Grundlagen der Electronik/Electrotechnik, Technische Universitaet, Dresden), and he has been involved with several projects studying urban crowd behaviour using image processing, supported by EPSRC and by the European Commission.
He was Contractor for a three-year EC TEMPUS grant (with Delft University of Technology, Warsaw University of Technology, and Wroclaw Technical University) 'Education in Signal Processing and Circuits for Signal Processing', which was completed in 1998.
He was Principal Investigtor of an EPSRC supported project on asynchronous real time systems, called COMFORT, which was in collaboration with the Computing Science Department of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is currently Principal Investigator of a follow-up EPSRC project called COHERENT, also in collaboration with the University of Newcastle and with Matra BAe (Dynamics). COHERENT was initially awarded to King's College London but has now been transferred to Kingston University.
He is a member of the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Circuit Theory and its Applications and was Associate Editor of Applied Signal Processing (Springer).
He is a Fellow of IEEE and of IEE, a Member of the British Computer Society, and a Chartered Electrical Engineer. He is also a memberof the European Circuits Soceity. In 2000 he was awarded a 'third millennium medal' by IEEE "for outstanding achievements and contributions" and a Golden Jubilee medal of the IEEE Circuits & Systems Society.
He served on the IEE Council from 1984 to 1987 and was Chairman of the IEEE UK and Republic of Ireland Section for 1992 and 1993.
He has for the past few years been IEEE Region 8 Circuits and Systems Chapter Co-ordinator, and January 1997 to December 2000 was Chairman of the Region 8 Chapter Co-ordination Committee.
He was Vice President for Region 8 of the Circuits & Systems Society (elected from January 1998 to December 2001), and also Region 8 Vice Chair for Technical Activites (elected from January 2001). He was elected (by the IEEE Region 8 membership) to the position of IEEE Region 8 Director-elect, and served as Region 8 Director from January 2003 to December 2004 (which includes service on the IEEE Board of Directors). As Past Region Director, he is still involved with various IEEE volunteer activities (for example, the IEEE TAB Society Review Committee and the Region 8 Nominations and Appointments Committee).
He has served on many other IEEE and IEE committees, including IEE President's Action Group on Software Engineering (1985-1986), IEE Microprocessor Application Group Committee 4, IEE Library Committee (1984 to 1987)
He has been Chairman of the IEE Scholarships Committee (1989-1991) and of the IEE Professional Group on Circuit Theory and Design (E10) from 1979 to 1982,
In 1994/95 he was a member of the Review Committee for Electrical Engineering set up by VSNU to assess the quality of research in Dutch Universities.
He has acted as External Examiner for M.Sc. courses at UMIST (1982-1984), Queen Mary College (1985 to 1987) and Open University (1988-1991), and Strathclyde University (1994-1997), and for Bachelors degree courses at University of Kent (1982-1985), Teesside Polytechnic (1985 to 1987) and Polytechnic of Wales (1986 to 1989), University of Aberdeen 1991-1994). He has been External Examiner for many Ph.D. and M.Phil. students of various Universities including some foreign universities (e.g. Ph.D. for IIT, Kanpur, Ph.D. for Concordia University, Montreal, PhD for TU Dresden, MPhil for Monash University, PhD for Delft University).
He has been involved with the organisation of many international conferences. For example he was Chairman for the 1986 IEE Vacation School on "Software Engineering for Microprocessor Systems" School, General Chairman and Technical Programme Committee member for the 1st IEEE International Symposium on Spread-Spectrum Techniques and Applications, September 1990, London and together with colleagues in Dresden, he initiated the series of International Workshops 'Non-linear Dynamics of Electronic Systems' (Dresden 1993, Kraków 1994, Dublin 1995, Sevilla 1996, Moscow 1997, Budapest 1998, Rønne, Denmark, 1999, Catania 2000, Delft 2001, Izmir 2002, Scuol, Switzerland 2003, Évora, Portugal 2004).