Welcome to the 2021 Annual Report from the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Embedded Intelligence. You can read here what our students and researchers have been working on this year, of great challenges due to the global pandemic. Despite that, there are great stories inside.

You can read the report about the Centre here. 

This Annual Report gives an overview of all the activities for the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Embedded Intelligence for 2021. It includes information about our:

  • Cohort of students: graduated researchers, those wrapping up their degree now, and the active cohorts.
  • Training and Dissemination of Research events attended by our students.
  • Stories from our graduating students; their reflections on what their PhD journey was and how they experienced it.
  • Our Alumni: where they are now
  • Selected Publications
  • Advocacy of the Centre for Manufacturing and Digital technologies.  

If you have any questions about what you read today, or would like to know more, do not hesitate to get in touch. 

CertificateCohort 3 student Gergely Hantos took part in the Cambridge Spark Applied Data Science Bootcamp.

Gergely, who is based at Heriot-Watt and supervised by Prof. Marc Desmulliez, took part in the 6-months Cambridge Spark Applied Data Science Bootcamp. The course gave an excellent knowledge of the most relevant Data Science skills matching industry needs.

Each student had to carry out a one-month real-life project backed by industry partners that covered problem understanding, data cleaning and feature engineering, visualisation, model selection, training, evaluation and optimisation.

Gergely worked on a project for Entomics, a biological waste valorisation company that transforms organic waste into high value agricultural products using insect larvae as a unique bioconversion engine. The objective was to create a predictive machine learning model that optimizes the bioconversion by predicting the daily waste intake of the larvae.

Gergely delivered a solution that worked with so little prediction error that Entomics was able to use the output immediately. The outcome of this project has opened up a specialised software engineer position at Entomics.Presentation

A conference paper based on the work achieved was delivered for the First Symposium on Smart Systems Integration (SS1S) by Gergely on the 31st of August 2018 in Balatonvilágos, Hungary and is currently under review for publication in Periodica Polytechnica Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Cambridge Spark, the company delivering the course was also impressed by the work, thus they wrote a blog article about the project available here: Project Partner Case Study: Entomics that includes a video interview with Fotis Fotiadis, Co-Founder and CTO of Entomics.

We are part of the Digital Economy CDT Network, that supports and develops training activities for postgraduate research students. In early February we were delighted to attend the annual meeting, showcase and careers symposium held at the Digital Catapult, London.

Day 1 was characterised by fruitful and engaging discussions about the range of training activities and support DEN offers and could offer it student members. Attendees eagerly awaited news about the Summer School 2018, being hosted this year by the Centre for Digital Entertainment and with topics such as AI and machine learning on the agenda it was clear this year’s event was going to draw a big crowd. Day 1 concluded with a CDT showcase, allowing the member CDT’s to demonstrate the quality and quantity of research taking place at their centres and for the researchers to find out more about their peers across the UK. A particular highlight was the VR game simulation from the IGGI CDT team!

Careers was the focus of the following day and saw guest speakers, all who were alumni from CDT members of DEN. Each speaker shared their career journey, the decisions, complications and successes achieved along the way. There were speakers from academia and industry with both SME’s and large enterprises represented. The talks gave a realistic insight to what lies on the other side of the PhD thesis and each speaker shared their thoughts on what a doing a PhD in a CDT has meant to them and what they would do differently (finishing the writing process before getting a job was a reoccurring theme!).

Den Showcase

Several CDT-EI researchers from Heriot-Watt University are undertaking a 6-month training programme in applied data science. The course, which is being run by Cambridge Spark Ltd will take place over 20 weekends from February 2018 to July 2018. The programme will be project-based learning over 9 modules covering topic areas such as cloud computing and databases, neural networks and deep learning. The researchers will also undertake an industry sponsored project as well as attend a final showcase weekend. Lucas Kirschbaum, CDT-EI, Cohort 4 says

The data science course I will attend is an elaborate training in the most recent data processing techniques. Therefore, this course will not only build up fundamental knowledge but also support me understanding the practical aspects of managing the data I collect within the scope of my PhD. I am hoping to gain valuable insights of how to set up customized algorithms for different testing scenarios, validating the data and in general how to approach big datasets.

Cohort 3 researcher, Darius Roman, visited the Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) to attend the Failure Analysis short course, present his research to CALCE students and faculty, and to discuss his research challenges with the CALCE team.

Darius’ PhD research project involves a fusion prognostics approach that incorporates failure analysis, modelling, condition monitoring, machine learning and prognostics techniques to predict the remaining useful life in bottom hole assembly electronics for oil and gas companies, including Baker Hughes a GE Company—his current project sponsor. Following the presentation, Prof. Michael Pecht met individually with Darius to discuss best methods and ideas to contribute to the success of the research and the project. Darius is a member of the Smart Systems Group (SSG) at Heriot-Watt University, where he acts as an ambassador. The group is led by director, Dr. David Flynn, an Associate Professor at Heriot-Watt University and Co-Director of the CDT-EI. The SSG’s view is that global society is placing increasing demands on its critical infrastructure, systems that deliver vital services such as energy, transportation, telecommunications, food and water, the built environment and healthcare. The systems within these sectors are increasingly complex and interdependent, interacting at a global scale. This complexity is required for efficient operation, but also makes them more susceptible to cascading failure under stress. The Group believe we must transform data into actionable information and utilise this insight to create innovative, data informed, Smart Systems that can assess, adapt and respond to dynamic conditions.

The collaboration between CALCE and SSG began with the seminar titled “The Era of Embedded Intelligence” where Prof. Pecht acted as a key note speaker on PHM. The seminar brought together global leaders and innovators in Embedded Intelligence from industry and academia on how this field of research is influencing future product development, business models, resilience of critical infrastructure and exploration within extreme environments. The seminar aimed to promote the importance and impact this area is making to society, and to engage the audience on how we innovate and train the next generation of engineers, scientists and business people – to prosper in this data driven age. CALCE and SSG are currently looking for future collaboration where students and academics alike could visit, exchange research ideas and discuss research challenges. Prof. Pecht will be visiting HWU periodically in an advising and educating capacity to further straighten the collaboration.

To read more about the collaboration visit here

To learn more about SSG visit here

The conference "8th European Conference on Precision Livestock Farming" was held in Nantes France. Cohort 1 research Adrian Ayastuy Rodriguez presented a poster and published a paper titled "Novel activity monitoring system based on smart collar and variational Bayesian learning of multivariate autoregressive hidden Markov models".

Adrian found the research presented at the conference to be of interest and took the opportunity to discuss work on tracking animals and predictive healthcare with peers. In particular, new techniques for measuring animal weight without direct contact and new techniques for location tracking and behaviour recognition.  During the poster session there was significant interest in Adrian’s work and the method used to analyse data. There is potential for new collaborations from these conversations.

On the final day of the conference there was an excursion to SPACE '18 an exhibition of livestock in Rennes. The exhibition allowed Adrian to meet distributors of animal collars, which he has been using throughout his research, and to discuss the technical aspects of sensors, the ergonomics of collars, and as well as the market and industry.

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