Smart Tech Award

Sponsored by: Optiver

School: School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Celebrating innovative technologies that harness smart solutions to improve efficiencies, connectivity and solutions to industry and communities, sponsored by Optiver.

Exploring the Relationship Between Compression and Explainability in Deep Learning

by  Thomas Day

Supervisor(s): Dr Alina Bialkowski

Modern AI models consume a vast amount of resources, yet many valuable applications run in resource-constrained environments. Compression techniques help address this, but it’s poorly understood how they impact a model’s decision-making process. This project measures how compression (via knowledge distillation) shifts what image models pay attention to, using a novel evaluation approach.

Low-Voltage Network Estimator

by  Samuel Albrecht, Alexander Wallace, Tyler Bergman, James Brunton, Christopher Zhang, Owen Poh

Supervisor(s): Ethan Jones, Julia Drugova, Thilina Halloluwa, Mashhuda Glencross, Jason Weigel

Network planning aide utilising smart meter data to identify the correct low-voltage phase of customers. Data driven techniques provide visualisation of the combined electrical network topology. Intuitive user interface allows for result analysis and interpretation.

Multimodal Agentic AI for Wheat Management Enhancement

by  Selena Song

Supervisor(s): Zijian Wang

Wheat management strategies play a critical role in determining yield. Traditional management decisions often rely on labour-intensive expert inspections, which are expensive, subjective and difficult to scale. In this project, we explore vision-language models (VLMs) and agentic AI to enable scalable, data-driven management support.

Rava

by  Reuben Richardson, Claudia McPherson, Ethan Laskowski, Adithya Mathradikkal, Lundaasuren Munkhbat, Travis Graham

Supervisor(s): Yanzhuo Yang, Julia Drugova, Thilina Halloluwa, Mashhuda Glencross, Jason Weigel

Rava is a one-of-a-kind telepresence device, which transports remote users into the room with immersive stereoscopic vision, crisp spatial audio and seamless device control from an intuitive web application.