about
Dr Mike Simpson is a Research Software Engineer working for the RSE Team in the Digital Institute. He graduated with a BSc in Computing from Newcastle University in 2008, followed by an MSc in Computer Games Engineering in 2009. He worked as a Game Programmer at a local studio for two years before returning to the university to start his PhD in 2011. His thesis was titled “Real-time Simulation of Rail Vehicle Dynamics” and involved using software and development practices from the game industry to develop and evaluate real-time 3D engineering simulations.
Since joining the Digital Institute in 2016, he developed software applications for a number of research projects, including projects with the NHS and the Alan Turing Institute. He has presented his work at a number of events, including the international Blender conference in Amsterdam, the UK RSE Conference and the IEEE e-Science Conference in Auckland, NZ.
His research interests include the application of games industry technologies for other applications - such as gamification in education and healthcare - as well as virtual simulation and data visualisation. He also has experience of 3D graphics, web development and software engineering in a range of programming languages. His other interests include Photography and 3D modelling, as well as reading and writing fiction. He also runs a blog where he discusses issues ranging from Video Games to Mental Health.
PROJECTS
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Synthetic Images for Machine Learning / Urban Observatory, TRACK (Transport Risk Assessment for COVID Knowledge) Project
2022-2022- Modelling virtual transport vehicles in Blender
- Writing code to populate the vehicles with virtual passengers and render the results
- Train Machine Learning models with the synthetic images
- Evaluate the effect of the training on the results
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Precision Diabetes / The Alan Turing Institute, British Heart Foundation, University of Exeter, University College London
2021-2022- Developing a classification tool to help select diabetes patients for trials and studies
- Improving an existing diabetes treatment tool with additional information, including visualisation of risk
- Working with a massive dataset from the BHF to look at links between heart disease, diabetes and COVID-19
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Rome Transformed / Newcastle University School of History, Classics and Archaeology
2020-2021- Augmenting and adjusting an existing software solution to suit the needs of the RomeTransformed project
- Collaborating with Archaeologists to support the documentation and discussion of archaeological evidence from sites in Rome
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Degree Apprenticeship in Software Engineering / Newcastle University School of Computing & The Institute of Coding
2020-2021- Module leader on 'Introduction of Software Development'
- Creating material and supporting the move to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic
- General support for Degree Apprentices, many of whom were learning programming for the first time.
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Automating Data Visualisation / Visualisation of Uncertainty / Prof. Nick Holliman (Newcastle University School of Computing) and The Alan Turing Institute
2018-2020- Developing new data visualisation plug-ins for PowerBI
- Creating engaging visualisations of air quality data using Blender
- Development of a pipeline to process and visualise data automatically using Blender
- Creating and evaluating new techniques for visualising uncertainty in data
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ePRaSE / Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals Trust
2018-2021- Lead RSE developing the prototype for the application in collaboration with researchers and pharmacists
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CARA / School of Education, Communication & Language Sciences
2017-2018- Development of new features
- Bug fixing and finalising application for deployment.
education
PhD / Newcastle University
Developed and evaluated a real-time rail engineering simulation using software from the video games industry, in collaboration with NewRail.
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Interests
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