Rate My Professor Julie McCann

Julie McCann is Professor of Computer Systems and Head of the Adaptive Emergent Systems Engineering (AESE) group in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. Her research specializes in spatial computing systems that blur the lines between digital components and physical environments, enabling collaboration, swarming, and conjoining functionalities in sensor networks, cyber-physical systems (CPS), and the Internet of Things (IoT). These systems are designed to be ephemeral, with dynamic behaviors and roles evolving over time. McCann addresses key challenges such as scalability, robustness to failures, resource minimization, energy neutrality, and decomposability. She innovatively applies models from biology, economics, social behaviors, and physics to configure and optimize collective systems. Her practical contributions include decentralized algorithms, cross-layer protocols, and dynamical solutions tailored for low-power, low-resource wireless devices, with applications spanning space exploration, agriculture, and infrastructure engineering. By harnessing cyber-physical interactions, her work enhances system performance, resilience, and security.

McCann holds prominent leadership positions, including leading the Resilient and Robust Infrastructure Grand Challenge within the Data Centric Engineering programme at the Alan Turing Institute, Principal Investigator for the NRF-funded Singapore Eco Cities initiative, Deputy Director of the PETRAS National Centre of Excellence (leading the Logistics 4.0 project), and Imperial College PI for the EPSRC Science of Sensor Systems Software (S4) programme grant. Previously, she co-directed the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities, the NEC Smart Water Lab, and the cross-Imperial Smart Connected Futures Network. She serves as Associate Editor for the IoT Journal, has chaired leading conferences such as Infocom, Sensys, IPSN, and EWSN, and chaired the Department of Computing Equality and Diversity Committee from 2018 to 2021. A Fellow of the British Computer Society and Chartered Engineer, McCann teaches the Pervasive Computing module and consults on computer-based futures for TV and film. Her seminal publications include 'A survey of autonomic computing—degrees, models, and applications' (2008, cited 1283 times), 'A survey on the IETF protocol suite for the Internet of Things: Standards, challenges, and opportunities' (2014, cited 1079 times), 'Modulation and multiple access for 5G networks' (2017, cited 655 times), 'A survey of potential security issues in existing wireless sensor network protocols' (2017, cited 354 times), and 'High-Dimensional Crowdsourced Data Publication With Local Differential Privacy' (2018, cited 350 times). With over 9,600 citations, her scholarship profoundly influences autonomic computing, IoT protocols, and wireless security.