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Edward Oughton

  • Assistant Professor

    Contact Info

    Edward Oughton
    Name
    Dr. Edward J. Oughton
    Job Title
    Assistant Professor
    Office Number
    Exploratory Hall, Room 2411

    Affiliations

    Departments

    Research Areas

    • Infrastructure
    • Spatial computing
    • Computational modeling
    • Policy

    Education

    PhD, University of Cambridge 

    MPhil, University of Cambridge

    About

    Edward has expertise in spatial computing, geographic data science, image processing, and risk analysis. His research is highly multi-disciplinary, drawing on engineering and computer science analytical techniques, to answer emerging research questions.

    Having been awarded over $1.7 million in research funding (PI: $1.05m, Co-PI: $0.22m, Other: 0.43m), Edward has led many projects for organizations including the National Science Foundation, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Cisco, Meta (Facebook) Connectivity Lab, Canadian Space Agency, Airbus, Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, HM Treasury’s National Infrastructure Commission, UK Department for Transport and UK Met Office. 

    Edward holds an MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge and completed post-doctoral research at the Cambridge Judge Business School Centre for Risk Studies. Prior to GMU he was a Senior Research Associate at the University of Oxford where he retains an Honorary position. In Spring 2025 he is on sabbatical at MIT’s department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

    Edward is looking for motivated graduate students to work on data science topics. Please get in contact if you are interested in working on high-impact papers.

    Selected Publications

    Gallagher, J.E., Gogia, A. and Oughton, E.J., 2025. A Multispectral Automated Transfer Technique (MATT) for machine-driven image labeling utilizing the Segment Anything Model (SAM), IEEE Access, 13, pp. 4499–4516. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3522236.

    Gallagher, J.E. and Oughton, E.J., 2025. Surveying You Only Look Once (YOLO) multispectral object detection advancements, applications, and challenges, IEEE Access, 13, pp. 7366–7395. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3526458.

    Gallagher, J.E., Oughton, E.J., 2023. Assessing thermal imagery integration into object detection methods on air-based collection platforms. Sci Rep 13, 8491. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-34791-8.

    Schneir, J.R., Mölleryd, B.G., Oughton, E.J., Mas-Machuca, C., 2023. Guest editorial: Techno-economic analysis of telecommunications systems. IEEE Communications Magazine 61, 22–23. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCOM.2023.10047852.

    Kumar, S.K.A., Oughton, E.J., 2023. Infrastructure sharing strategies for wireless broadband. IEEE Communications Magazine 61, 46–52. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCOM.005.2200698.

    Oughton, E.J., Hapgood, M. A., Richardson, G.S., Beggan, C.D., Thomson, A.W.P., Gibbs, M., Burnett, C., Gaunt, C.T., Trichas, M., Dada R., Horne, R.B. 2018. A risk assessment framework for the socioeconomic impacts of electricity transmission infrastructure failure due to space weather: An application to the United Kingdom. Risk Analysis, 39: 1022–1043. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13229 (Best Paper 2019).

    Awards

    • NSF RAPID Collecting Perishable Critical Infrastructure Operational Data for May 2024 Space Weather Events ($85k) (PI).
    • NCAR-NSF Early Career Innovator Award (2023), Uncertainty quantification of space weather socio-economic impacts from critical infrastructure failure ($360k) (PI).
    • Cisco (2023), Evaluating the policy implications of next generation wireless broadband technologies: 6G versus Wi-Fi 7 and 8 ($50k) (PI).
    • NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) Planning Grant (2023), Center for Climate Risks Assessment (CCRA) ($20k) (Co-PI).
    • International Monetary Fund (2022), Digital infrastructure costing estimator ($48k) (PI).
    • NSF Convergence Accelerator (Track G) (2022), Secure texting over non-cooperative networks and anti-jamming enhancement in 5G ($52k out of a total of $750k) (Co-PI).
    • Planet Labs (2022), A new generation of open online tutorials for satellite image analytics in Python ($25k) (PI).

    Contact Info

    Edward Oughton
    Name
    Dr. Edward J. Oughton
    Job Title
    Assistant Professor
    Office Number
    Exploratory Hall, Room 2411