Orchid Project

“HAC-ER: A disaster response system based on Human-Agent Collectives” won the best paper award (Innovative Applications) at the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) in Istanbul.

Using just one PowerPoint slide and no additional props or electronic media, postgraduate researcher Davide Zilli had just three minutes to present his research on looking for a critically endangered insect – the New Forest Cicada – using a smartphone app that he developed to track the Cicada’s high-pitched sound.

Winner of the Outstanding Staff Team award: Joulo Project

Joulo created a low-cost device to provide people with better understanding of the home heating and advice on how to reduce energy costs, with project rolled out to over 2,000 households, and across the Highfield campus.

Davide Zilli won the Silver medal in the Engineering category this evening for presenting his ORCHID PhD work at the SET for BRITAIN competition.

The Buildsys 2014 best demo was awarded to Jack Kelly, Nipun Batra, Oliver Parson et al for NILMTK v0.2: A Non-intrusive Load Monitoring Toolkit for Large Scale Data Sets. The toolkit contains: a number of importers for existing public data sets, a set of preprocessing and statistics functions, a benchmark disaggregation algorithm and a set of metrics to evaluate the performance of such algorithms. Specifically, this release of the toolkit has been designed to enable the use of large data sets by only loading individual chunks of the whole data set into memory at once for processing, before combining the results of each chunk. The demo is on line: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/nilmtk/nilmtk/blob/master/notebooks/BuildSys_2014_demo.ipynb

Zoltán Beck has achieved third place – and best in the UK – in the ninth annual International Microelectronics Olympiad. Olympiad topics for 2014 included Digital IC Design and Test, Analog and Mixed-Signal IC Design and Test, Semiconductor Devices and Technology, and Mathematic and Algorithmic Issues of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). The final stage of the competition involved a challenging contest consisting of advanced engineering tasks requiring complex solutions.

Matteo Venanzi, a PhD Student on the ORCHID Programme, along with colleagues at Microsoft research wrote a paper entitled “Community-Based Bayesian Aggregation Models for Crowdsourcing” that was the Best Paper Award Runner-up at this year’s World Wild Web Conference. The paper can be downloaded here.

The BuildSys 2013 best paper was awarded to A Rogers, R Wilcock et al for their paper ‘A Scalable Low-Cost Solution to Provide Personalised Home Heating Advice to Households’.

Matteo Venanzi and his colleagues from MSR and Microsoft Bing were one of the winners of the Crowdsourcing at Scale 2013 Shared Task Challenge.

Long Tran-Thanh’s dissertation was the runner up in the British Computer Society’s Distinguished Dissertation Award competition for 2013.