ReseaRch Quality assuRance foR the futuRe a ... - Lund University

Panel 16 – systems science
international research consortia or top-level national research organizations
and high quality publication output. The impact of the research
is not easy to measure and is indirectly reflected in joint research with
industry and other institutions, in contributions to standardizations
and/or citations. The recruitment of top-level PhD students is a difficult
problem that is not uncommon to electrical engineering. There is a large
variation of research quality between groups and sub-groups. It could
be desirable to take specific actions to bring all research activities of the
department above a minimum quality threshold. Finally, the panel sees a
problem with the sub-group on networking within the “networking and
security” area.
This given grade is more negative than the grade proposed for some of the
different individual groups. This aims at reflecting the impression of the
panel that this department still needs to better focus and integrate the
work of the various research groups. The panel must acknowledge that
the documents provided for the evaluation of this department were not to
the expected level of clarity making an assessment sometimes difficult. As
the department was only recently established, this is understandable.
As perceived by the panel, both from the documents and the site visit, the
EIT department is still in a transient phase where it appears as a juxtaposition
of autonomous activities inherited from previous departments.
While this is well acceptable for such a transient period, the panel feels
that the reorganization should be taken as an opportunity for EIT to
define itself as a key leader in some specific but broad aspect of telecommunications.
Strong points to build upon include, as we see it, coding
and information theory, cryptography and ciphering for security, wireless
communications and electromagnetic field analysis. The panel does
not see enough skills available at LTH in the area of software science to
justify targeting higher layers of telecommunications architectures (P2P,
services, etc…). The presence of the Control Science Department can be
taken as a unique opportunity to move telecommunications infrastructures
toward more adaptability and autonomy. The panel is of the opinion
that there are many unexploited opportunities for collaboration among
the various research groups within the department that could help in taking
a leading role as outlined above. The cooperation among the various
groups should be a point of attention in the coming years for the recently
established department.
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