We are delighted to announce that Dr Long Tran-Thanh has been awarded funding and support from Google’s AI for Social Good program.

The program focusses on using AI to address some of the world’s biggest societal challenges. Dr. Tran-Thanh’s project, titled Incentive Engineering and Truthful Mechanisms for Grassland Quality and Local Market Price Estimation in Africa, will address the problem of holistic grazing and pasture management in East Africa. The main objectives of the project are: (i) to identify the most efficient ways to evaluate the overall quality of different grazing areas; (ii) to develop a user friendly recommendation system that chooses the next best grazing areas for pastoralists, that takes into account the holistic aspect of pasture management; and (iii) to incentivise pastoralists to truthfully report their activities in order to further improve the system’s predictive ability. The project is a collaboration between the University of Warwick and AfriScout.

We are delighted to report that Dr Josiah Lutton and Dr Pavel Veselý, Research Fellows from the Department of Computer Science, have been named joint winners of a SEM Faculty Post Doctoral Prize.

Each year, the University of Warwick's Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine (SEM) funds a prize for the best Warwick-affiliated research output from an Early Career Researcher. Each department nominates a winner, or joint winners, out of the applications received after a judging process as determined by the Faculty.

Professor Yulan He, who led the Department's selection, commented:

Pavel's paper on quantile summary, co-authored with Professor Graham Cormode, was published in a top-tier conference on theoretical databases, Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) co-located with SIGMOD. The tight lower bound for quantile summaries proposed in this work is a deep theoretical exploration central to data management. The work led to a collaboration with Splunk, a US-based company that focuses on processing machine-generated big data. The follow-up paper has been accepted to the 2021 edition of the PODS conference. The result has a great potential for a broader impact. Josiah's work is on medical imaging. Together with Dr Sharon Collier and Professor Till Bretschneider, they proposed an enhanced 3D segmentation method (with a curvature-based enhancement term), which outperforms the best-of-breed random walker method in Dictyostelium image volumes. The work was published in a top journal, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, with an impact factor of 6.68. Josiah presented his method at the Actin 2020 meeting and was awarded a prize for best imaging in a talk by the Royal Microscopical Society and has been featured in an article in their inFocus magazine.

Dr. Tanaya Guha (PI) has been awarded a research grant by Ford Motor Company through their Global University Research Program to develop the project "Multimodal Learning for In-Car Driver's Activity Monitoring". This 2-year project aims at developing an AI system that can monitor driver's and passengers' safety through audiovisual scene analysis integrated with short-term driving patterns. For example, by creating alerts when a driver is distracted. The project will be developed in collaboration with Ford's AI research at Michigan.