Joy as university shares top award

Academics honoured for links with business

Paisley’s university has been given a special commendation award for an innovative knowledge exchange project.

The Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards 2018 are run by Interface and were held at the Royal Bank of Scotland Conference Centre, in Edinburgh, to celebrate and reward collaborative business and academic partnerships.

The University of the West of Scotland ( UWS) received this award for its project AALART – Low- pixel Automatic Target Detection and Recognition – that it undertook with multinational electrical systems group Thales UK and CENSIS.

Professor Milan Radosavljevic, associate vice principal (research) at UWS, said: “We are delighted that our project with Thales UK and CENSIS has received a special commendation award at the Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards. These awards play an important role in recognising innovative and impactful knowledge exchange between universities and business.”

The project saw the development of unique technology, enabling automatic detection of humans and vehicles from up to 1500m using thermal imaging.

The project has many applications, including robots with better eyesight and drones to spot defects in buildings before they collapse.

The study is based around the concept of “deep learning” which mimics the way human brains behave to create an artificial intelligence that learns on the job.

The collaboration between UWS and Thales UK was set up by CENSIS, Scotland’s Centre of Excellence for Sensor and Imaging Systems.

It is one of eight innovation centres backed by the Scottish Funding Council to foster closer collaboration between academic researchers and industry.

The academic team was led by Dr Pablo Casaseca from the Artificial Intelligence, Visual Communications and Networks (AVCN) Research Centre at UWS in collaboration with Dr Chunbo Luo, currently at the University of Exeter. The UWS team also integrated Professor Qi Wang, Dr Huaizhong Zhang, currently at Edgehill University, and Mr Jesús Monge-Álvarez, a PhD student from AVCN.

The Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards promote and celebrate knowledge exchange in Scotland, encouraging more businesses to consider Scotland’s universities and research institutions as a collaborative partner to stimulate innovation.

We are delighted our project has received a special commendation award Professor Milan Radosavljevic