ECS Celebrates Student Achievements at Inaugural Showcase

The School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) hosted its first annual Student Showcase at The Steel Yard in London, coinciding with London Tech Week and Future Worlds’ Demo Day. The event showcased a selection of exceptional work done by students this academic year.

Over 60 attendees, including students, faculty, industry partners, alumni, potential employers, and investors, took part, reflecting the diverse ECS community.

Dr Adriana Wilde, ECS Careers Fair and Student Showcase Coordinator, explained, ‘This event was a celebration of our students' talent, creativity, and problem-solving skills. They consistently rise to the challenges posed to them, thanks to the support of our faculty and their access to state-of-the-art facilities. I'm incredibly proud of their achievements.’

The showcased projects tackled real-world issues, addressing challenges presented by both industry partners (typically in Group Design Projects) and leading academics (specially in Individual Projects). In addition to these types of projects, coursework samples from both Electronics (ELEC) and Computer Science (COMP) modules, as well as a project from Biomedical Engineering (BIOM) were displayed.  Extracurricular activities were also showcased by a student society, highlighting the breadth and depth of student work at ECS.  Holding the event in London facilitated the attendance of our industrial contacts based in the area and made it an exciting field trip for our worthy presenters. Informal feedback received from students attending was very positive. In the words of Toshna Rane (MSc Computer Science student), ‘Thank you for selecting my project for the ECS Showcase event. It was an incredible honour to present my work along with such talented peers. The opportunity to interact with industry professionals and receive valuable feedback has been immensely beneficial’.  A survey is to be conducted to collate feedback from other attendees, to inform preparations for next year.

Special recognition goes to students in the following categories: 

Individual projects: 

• Theo Rangarajan, “Evaluation system design for neuromorphic photonic integrated circuits”
• Harry Lockwood, “CCTV skeleton-based fight detection”
• Joe Pater, “Balancing Robot”
• Toby Godfrey, “LLMs for Multi-Robot Coordination” 

Group Design Projects: 

• Alp Ortakci and David Mate, “NANA : A low-cost approach for autonomous forest navigation using mobile robotics” with Professor Jadu Dash from the School of Geography as client,
• Ishaipiriyan Karunakularatnam, Owain Jones,  Alfie Kupper, Michael Penston, “Rusticated Silverfish: Deployment System for Swarm Robotics” with Roke as clients,
• Edward Clewer and Rhys Jenkins, “Convert-a-Car” with Embedism as clients. 

Coursework:  

• Rithin Menezes and Toshna Rane, HealthHub, for the COMP module Web and Cloud Development Applications
• Britannio Jarred, Niall Morrison, Josh Pattman, and Alfie Kupper,“Q-Octo: an off-road endurance rover with climbing wheels” for the ELEC module Bio-inspired Robotics)

First-year PhD in BIOM:  

• Lucy Hodgins, “Hand and wrist rehabilitation using functional electrical stimulation”. 

Student Society: 

• Alex Colville, George Peppard, and Tommy Poll from Southampton Robotics Outreach (SRO).

For more details and information on how to get involved next year, please contact Dr Adriana Wilde.