Associate ProfessorStephen Weddell

   Stephen Weddell received his B.App.Sc. and M.App.Sc. degrees in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Curtin University in Perth Western Australia in 1990 and 1997, respectively, and the Ph.D. in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch New Zealand in 2010. In that same year he was also appointed Lecturer in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, became Senior Lecturer in 2013, Senior Lecturer Above the Bar in 2018 and became an Associate Professor in 2021. He was Director of Computer Engineering Undergraduate Studies at the University of Canterbury for over 6 years and he has led the Computational Design and Adaptation (CDA) research group for 14 years.
Central to Assoc. Prof. Weddell’s research is digital signal and image processing, with a focus on time-series analysis and recurrent neural networks. Key application areas include neuroengineering, where EEG signals are used to detect precursory cues in the brain for classification of specific transient events, optical wavefront design in the field of adaptive optics for astronomical image restoration, and more recently, development of new instrumentation for space situational awareness (SSA).

   For his Ph.D. research, Assoc. Prof. Weddell worked with recurrent networks, specifically, reservoir computing (RC), and designed and engineered RC structures for multiple time-step prediction of signals. These methods were used as part of his Ph.D research to estimate optical aberrations for the restoration of astronomical images. More recently, his group has used cascaded, leaky-neuron structures to predict microsleep events in the brain, and this has been achieved in conjunction with his close collaborator, Prof. Richard Jones, at the New Zealand Brain Research Institute (NZBRI).
Specific research interests include signal recovery using chaotic time-series analysis for single and multiple time-step prediction, pattern recognition and classification with machine learning, and the design of optical wave-front sensors for adaptive optic systems. Other research includes high performance computing architectures, evolutionary computing, stochastic structures to support parallel algorithms implemented in both field programmable gate arrays and general purpose graphical processing units, and since 2018, high resolution imaging of satellites and large space debris objects for space situational awareness.

    In 2018 Dr. Weddell was awarded an NZ$870,000 Marsden grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand for the detection of space debris and unclassified man-made Earth-orbiting objects using telescopes fitted with multi-object, adaptive optical systems, and machine learning tomographic prediction using natural guide star beacons. As Principal Investigator, Weddell has led the CDA group, which supported two Postdoctoral Fellows, five senior academics, and 11 postgraduate students. His group had strong support with specialist international research groups, such as UNSW Space in Canberra, European Southern Observatories (ESO) in Germany, and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canaries (IAC), Spain, and in 2023 worked with NASA to develop specialised instrumentation for Earth-based observations to improve spacecraft positioning in cislunar space.

   Between August 2022 and September 2024, Dr. Weddell was an Associate Professor and part-time staff member in Physics at the University of Auckland, where he worked in a related field of free-space optical (satellite) communications. Associate Professor Weddell retired from UC in May 2024. Early in 2025 Dr Weddell was invited to briefly return to UC as a part-time Lecturer. As an Adjunct Associate Professor, he continues his research at UC in adaptive optics and space situational awareness. Over the last 21 years Associate Professor Weddell has published more than 100 peer-reviewed international journals and conference papers in related fields.