UWS project receives Special Commendation Award at the Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards 2018

 
    UWS received a Special Commendation Award for an innovative knowledge exchange project at the Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards 2018.

    The awards, which are run by Interface and were held at the Royal Bank of Scotland Conference Centre in Edinburgh on 22 February 2018, celebrate and reward impacts achieved through collaborative business and academic partnerships.

  The University received this award for the project, AALART – Low-pixel Automatic Target Detection and Recognition, that it undertook with multinational electrical systems group, Thales UK and CENSIS. This collaboration saw the development of unique technology, enabling automatic detection of humans and vehicles from up to 1500m using thermal imaging.

    The AALART collaborative project has many possible applications including robots with better eyesight and drones to spot defects in buildings before they collapse. The study is based around the concept of “deep learning” which mimics the way human brains behave to create an artificial intelligence that learns on the job.

  The collaboration between UWS and Thales UK was set up by CENSIS, Scotland’s Centre of Excellence for Sensor and Imaging Systems. It is one of eight innovation centres backed by the Scottish Funding Council to foster closer collaboration between academic researchers and industry.

    Professor Milan Radosavljevic, Associate Vice Principal (Research), said: “We are delighted that our project with Thales UK and CENSIS has received a Special Commendation award at the Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards. These Awards play an important role in recognising innovative and impactful knowledge exchange between universities and business.”

    The academic team was led by Dr Pablo Casaseca from the Artificial Intelligence, Visual Communications and Networks (AVCN) Research Centre at UWS in collaboration with Dr. Chunbo Luo, currently at the University of Exeter. The UWS team also integrated Professor Qi Wang, Dr Huaizhong Zhang (currently at Edgehill University), and Mr Jesús Monge-Álvarez (PhD student) from AVCN.