Bashir Mohammed Ali Al-Hashimi (born 5 January 1961)[2] is a computer engineering researcher, academic, entrepreneur and higher education leader. He is Vice President (Research & Innovation) and ARM Professor of Computer Engineering at King's College London in the United Kingdom.[3][4] He was the co-founder and co-director of the ARM-ECS Research Centre,[5] an industry-university collaboration partnership involving the University of Southampton and ARM.[6] He is actively involved in promoting science and engineering for young people[7] and regularly contributes to engineering higher education and skills national debates.[8][9] He is the chair of the Engineers 2030 working group, a national campaign overseen by the National Engineering Policy Centre and led by the UK Royal Academy of Engineering. The campaign centres around accelerating change and the future workforce of engineering.[10]
Early life and education
Bashir was born in Baghdad, Iraq and he came to the UK in 1978 to study and went to the University of Bath where he obtained an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. He got a MSc in electronics engineering from the University of Cardiff in 1986 and his PhD degree (1989) was received from the University of York. He worked in the electronics industry following his PhD in 1989 and joined the Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at University of Southampton in 1999.[11]
Research and academic career
Bashir focuses on low power design and test of integrated electronic circuits and systems. His research focuses on understanding the interaction between hardware and software in constrained computing systems such as in mobile and embedded applications and how such interactions can be used through theory and experiment to achieve systems energy optimisation and enhanced hardware dependability. He has made theoretical and experimental contributions to the field of hardware-software co-design,[12][13] low power semiconductor chips test[14] and test-data compression of digital integrated circuits[15][16] and energy-harvesting computing.[17][18]
In 2009, he established the Pervasive Systems Centre.[19] He has published 6 books (including Many-Core Computing: Hardware and Software, IET (2019)[20] and nearly 400 referred technical papers.[21][22]
He was the project director for PRiME,[23] an EPSRC funded five-year programme (2013–2018) researching in the areas of low power, highly-parallel, reconfigurable and dependable computing and verified software design.[24]
He was also the project director for the EPSRC funded Holistic battery-free electronics project,[25] aiming to develop ultra-energy-efficient electronic systems for emerging applications including mobile digital health and autonomous wireless monitoring in environmental and industrial settings.This project addressed one of the UK Electronics Design community Grand Challenges, “Batteries Not Included”. The project has played an important role in shaping and influencing the academic research agenda worldwide in powering Internet of Things devices in a sustainable way.[26]
He has held various academic leadership roles, starting with serving as Deputy Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton. In 2014, he was appointed Executive Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering at Southampton and in 2018, as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences,[27] where he remains a Visiting Professor at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS).[28] In 2020, he joined King's College London to lead the Faculty of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, leading the change to Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences at King's.[29]
In 2012, he was awarded the Outstanding Service Award by the IEEE Council for Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) for serving as the General Chair of DATE 2012.[38]
Bashir is an Elected Trustee of the Royal Academy of Engineering Board[40] and completed in 2023 a term as chair of the Academy's Awards Committee. He is a Board Director of the ERA Foundation[41] and a UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF)[42] Board Trustee and Director.[43]
He was a member of the Research England Expanding Excellence in England (E3) Fund Assessment Panel[44] and he served as a panel member on the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014[45] and the REF 2021 Engineering Panel.[46]
^Gonciari, P.T.; Al-Hashimi, B.M.; Nicolici, N. (June 2003). "Variable-length input Huffman coding for system-on-a-chip test". IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems. 22 (6): 783–796. CiteSeerX10.1.1.107.2601. doi:10.1109/TCAD.2003.811451.
^Gonciari, P.T.; Al-Hashimi, B.M.; Nicolici, N. (March 2002). "Improving compression ratio, area overhead, and test application time for system-on-a-chip test data compression/Decompression". Proceedings 2002 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition. pp. 604–611. doi:10.1109/DATE.2002.998363. ISBN978-0-7695-1471-0. S2CID195857239.
^"IoT Conference Report"(PDF). IoT Conference Report. The Royal Society. Archived from the original(PDF) on 23 October 2019. Retrieved 11 December 2018.