Researchers from the University of Southampton are re-thinking machine learning architectures and algorithms for future intelligent devices as part of a new Centre for Spatial Computational Learning.

The international collaborative research centre has secured over £1.2m of funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to tackle challenges associated with the Internet of Things (IoT) and autonomous computing’s increasing need to embed intelligence into devices.

The new Centre is led by Imperial College and involves collaborators in Southampton, Toronto and California, alongside industrial partners at Arm, Imagination Technologies, Xilinx, Corerain, and Maxeler Technologies.

Experts from Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, including Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi and Dr Geoff Merrett, will focus on energy-efficient computation for intelligence.

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Four past and present students from the University of Southampton have been named among the most talented young electronic engineers in the country in the BrightSparks 2019 awards.

Emma Curati-Alasonatti, Nathan Ruttley, Louisa Smith and Ricki Tura were honoured in Electronics Weekly’s (EW) 2019 cohort in a ceremony at the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s Maxwell Library in London.

The students are all present of former UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF) scholars through a scheme available to Southampton undergraduates as a partnered university.

Stewart Edmondson, UKESF CEO, said: “We are delighted to congratulate the four scholars who made the list this year. This is a fantastic result; double the number selected in 2018. We are extremely proud of the quality and high calibre of the students that join our undergraduate Scholarship Scheme – one of the reasons the value of the scheme is increasingly recognised by companies right across the electronics sector – and it is heartening when they receive public recognition.”

Fourth year Electrical and Electronic Engineering student Ricki Tura was commended for creating a document generating tool that reduces the amount of errors in IP documentation plus his dedication to growing the popular Electronics and Computer Science Society (ECSS). The current UKESF scholar, sponsored by UltraSoc, was also recently named the UKESF Scholar of the Year at this winter’s TechWorks Awards.

Electronic Engineering graduate Emma Curati-Alasonatti, now at Arm, was recognised for a recent project focused on hardware vulnerabilities as well as her devotion to running after school code clubs for primary school children. The success comes just months after she also scooped a TechWorks Award, having been named Young Engineer of the Year.

Fellow Electronic Engineering graduates Nathan Ruttley and Louisa Smith were UKESF scholars from 2014 to 2016 and 2011 to 2014 respectively. Nathan, now of RPD International, was honoured for his leadership on a smart home radiator valve, while Robogals Southampton co-founder Louisa, now of Imagination Technologies, was celebrated for her work on a complex module that controls the scheduling and resourcing of a graphics processing unit.

Dr Geoff Merrett, Associate Professor at the University, said: “It’s great to see so many of our current and recent students recognised in this year’s awards, and this is a testament to their outstanding quality, drive and ambition. It’s heartening to see how their careers are developing, and their trajectories towards becoming the industry’s future leaders.”

The EW BrightSparks 2019 awards were presented by TV journalist Steph McGovern and included an inspirational address from Katie Cresswell-Maynard, Chief Executive of Engineers Without Borders, on how engineers can make a positive impact around the world.

Postgraduate research student Jenny Walker impressed in the Southampton Three Minute Thesis (3MTⒸ) Grand Final with a novel approach of applying deep learning to the deep sea.

Jenny, a visiting member of the Vision, Learning and Control Research Group, tied an audience vote to share the event's People's Choice Award with overall winner Gabriela Sitinova.

The pair enthralled a packed lecture theatre with impactful three-minute PhD presentations at the Grand Final, part of the University Doctoral College's three-week Festival of Doctoral Research.

"I'm amazed to have made it this far and so flattered that I was one of the audience's favourites," Jenny says. "It's really reassuring, at the halfway mark through my PhD, to have such strong public support for the work that I'm doing. This competition has really boosted my confidence and motivation for scientific outreach."

Jenny completed a BSc in Computer Science at Southampton before joining the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute (SMMI). She is using machine learning to segment images of the seafloor, with a view to eventually extracting data such as estimated biomass and biodiversity indexes from the images.

"I'd dabbled in coding before arriving at Southampton, but it was that first year of my undergraduate degree that really gave me the foundation I needed to get into more complex areas of computing like machine learning and computer vision," she explains. "I really fell in love with computer vision in my third year and my dissertation was on classifying bird species present in audio files. It inspired me to apply for the PhD I'm doing today."

The Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar has also been recently recognised with a Student Poster Competition prize at the International Symposium on Underwater Technology in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

"The oceans contain a huge portion of life on earth and their health is a key indicator to the health of the global ecosystem," Jenny explains. "There's a serious lack of research into how to adapt deep learning systems, developed for big data problems with thousands of labelled data points, to the smaller, specific problem domain of deep sea imagery. I hope my research will provide a springboard for many researchers after me into this vastly unknown field."

University 3MT Champion Gabriela Sitinova is exploring new methods of inserting and studying atoms within a spherical Buckminsterfullerene molecule, or 'buckyball'.

"Single atoms or molecules encapsulated inside these C60 fullerenes have spectacular physical and chemical properties," she explains. "We have so far optimised our methods of known compounds and recently published novel fullerene CH4@C60, which is the largest molecule placed inside to date. I hope that desired molecules will soon be produced on a large scale thanks to our methods and that their properties will be utilised in cancer diagnosis and novel superconducting materials."

The 3MT success completed a profitable week for Gabriela in which she also gained a second place poster prize in a Doctoral Research Showcase.

"This competition has helped me realise how much I love what I'm doing and I'm thrilled that the judges and audience have appreciated it," Gabriela says. "It's a really fun process to think how to communicate your research in a way that is understandable and interesting to a non-scientific audience and the whole competition has helped me overcome my fear of talking in front of people."