Impact

UoA 11 - Computer Science and Informatics

Impact

We are committed to conducting research of international excellence, that achieves economic and societal impact with an interdisciplinary focus.

Our impact case study selection demonstrates impacts achieved across a number of Research Centres in unit 11. These include PARK’s (Planning, Autonomy and Representation of Knowledge) collaborative research with British Telecom, SMEs and Transport Authorities which uses Artificial Intelligence to recover urban data and improve traffic management systems.

In addition, research conducted in The Centre for Visual and Immersive Computing (CVV) based on computer vision, visualisation, machine learning, and software has found extensive use in real-world tasks such as tracking and semantic segmentation and further research undertaken by the Technology Acceptance and Mobile Learning (TAML) group has led to impacts in educational settings across over 190 countries, including being used to teach the UK computing curriculum in schools.

The following impact case studies have been entered for the REF 2021 submission. Find out more below.

 

Case study: New AI Technologies for Enriching and Recovering Value from Urban Data with Applications to Traffic Management

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers great potential because of the tremendous volume of data that can be harvested from the instruments and sensors connected to it. However, because the data collected is in different formats it needs to be normalized before it can be combined and put to useful purposes, such as driving AI-enabled decision engines.

Researchers have developed tools to normalize the data rapidly enough for information from multiple sources to be used in real-time; and have discovered new methods that input this data and scale up to a city region on-the-fly generation of goal-directed traffic-management strategies. IoT technology generated from this research has been used by BT in 20 collaborative projects involving industrial and public organisations. Development of software to automate the new methods of generating goal-directed traffic-management strategies has led to the creation of a spin-out company and enabled a change in professional practice by urban planners.

 

Case study: Enabling Better Mobile Learning for Digital Skills Development

Challenges in access to education, and the well-publicized digital skills gap, call for innovative methods and supporting technology to promote education. Research at the University of Huddersfield has led to two innovations: WRS, a communication device to give rapid feedback to learners, and iDEA, a learning platform based on sound technology acceptance principles.

Together, they have influenced changes in best practice for government and professional bodies, revolutionized professional standards and training, changed educational practice in primary, secondary and higher education, and encouraged continuing personal and professional development and lifelong learning. This impact has been felt by millions of users covering over 95% of the world’s countries, delivering worldwide impact in educational attainment.

 

Case study: Enabling Social and Commercial Impact from Innovations in Visual Computing

Computer vision, visualization and machine learning are state of the art techniques that require enormous computing power. Researchers at the University of Huddersfield have accelerated their practical application by developing techniques that enhanced data processing capability, thus enabling more data sources to be used, the data to be processed more rapidly and more knowledge to be derived.

Key impacts resulting from the underpinning research include:

  • A Public Security Department in China installed software that removed the need for human operators for CCTV cameras, subsequently saving £8m in costs.
  • Global brand, Phoenix Bicycle, was able to update its factories in China to be greener and more efficient, opening up new markets using new computer vision techniques.
  • A Chinese supplier of augmented reality-based wearable devices for the visually impaired exploited University of Huddersfield patents, leading to significant growth in their customer base and greatly improving the quality of life for users.