The winners of the Postgraduate Summer Research Showcase (PSRS) have been announced.
The competition, which took place in Whitworth Hall on 12 June, featured around 150 posters alongside a range of images which showcased our postgraduate students’ research to a wider audience.
Here’s a full list of the winners:
PGT Images
Winner – Filip Modrzejewski, ‘Protecting NATO’s Eastern Flank’
My MSc Research is focusing on incorporating Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms for the use in aviation. This solutions shall contribute to better safety in the sky as well as more efficient flights with reducing pilots workloads. As a part of this research, the military solutions are studied to understand different models and approaches to this subject. The picture shows Polish Air Force F-16 fighters during NATO’s mission Baltic Air Policing 2019 block 49, where their main aim is to protect airspace of Baltic states with the usage of modern technologies.
People’s Choice Online Winner – Mohamad Ramez Bouaram, ‘Green soil – a sustainable option for the civil engineering industry’
Agricultural wastes are causing a huge negative impact on the environment. This problem is being tackled through the present project about green soil. This involves mixing soil with agricultural waste in the form of ash which provides a sustainable solution that reduces the amount of agricultural waste by introducing it to the soil. To characterize the green soil, a number of tests are being conducted, and the attached photo is from a soil compaction test. These tests give the density of a green soil, a key parameter used to reflect a soil’s ability function as a support for a civil engineering structure such as a building, a tunnel or a highway. This test will be repeated on several soil mixes each with a different percentage of agricultural waste in the form of ash to determine the best percentage of ash that should be added to the soil.
People’s Choice Winner – Muhammad Mohib Khan,
The world’s most valuable resource is now ‘data’, not oil. The production of data has seen enormous growth over the last decade. Much of the data being produced today is unstructured, in natural language like research articles, blogs, etc. The unstructured data can be converted into a graph-based structure called Knowledge Graphs to leverage this data for Artificial Intelligence(AI) systems. An example is a knowledge graph over bio-medical research articles to make a decision-support system to help doctors in treating patients by making more ‘informed’ decisions using latest medical research. The aim of this research is to investigate how to extract big knowledge graphs from large-scale unstructured text, like medical research articles, to support AI systems. A knowledge graph is a graph that store entities and their relationships. The graph structure can best be represented by tree’s ‘leaves’ and ‘branches’ as shown in the picture. The leaves of the trees depict ‘entities’ like a person or a place which are ‘nodes’ of a graph. The branches connecting the leaves depict the ‘relationships’ between those entities like ‘birthplace’. The image shows that just like trees, graphs can grow indefinitely and easily represent large-scale data in a structured way.
PGR Images
Winner – Marina Rosca, ‘The impact of treatment: rheumatoid arthritis and my dad’
These are Stepan’s fingers, my dad and he is at high risk of being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) due to his family history. Dad is already showing signs of early disease, such as stiffness, and inflammation in his fingers. This impairs his movement and will eventually reduce his quality of life. About half of those suffering from RA die from cardiovascular disease manifesting in heart attacks or strokes. This is believed to be due to the great level of inflammation associated with RA. Some treatments have been shown to reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes, and uncertainty remains about others. My work is looking at a recently approved drug, tocilizumab, a protein that has been highly effective in treating RA but while also increasing cholesterol levels, which is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. As RA disease is already a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, treatment with tocilizumab might be further increasing this risk. Using one of the largest databases which is based here in Manchester, I am hoping to quantify the risk for heart attacks and strokes associated with tocilizumab treatment. This will allow doctors to make more informed decisions and treat someone like my dad more effectively.
People’s Choice Online Winner – Jorge Mendoza, ‘Ettringite needles in artificially cemented sand’
Ettringite needles formed between the grains of silica sand from samples used to reproduce natural cementation present in carbonated soils.
People’s Choice Winner – Nuno Nobre, ‘Parallel computing: many hands make light work’
Just like different people are better suited for different tasks, heterogeneous processing units in our phones and laptops can perform computations at different speeds and energy costs. My work is concerned with how to best distribute the different pieces of work of the apps you use everyday across the different processors of your device to make them run faster and more efficiently.
Posters
Winner – Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences – Mobin Malik
Runner Up – Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences – Sahil Maharaj
Winner – Faculty of Humanities – Lawrence Rabone
Runner Up – Faculty of Humanities – Yutaka Yoshida
Winner – Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health – Emily Eisner
Runner Up – Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health – Siobhan Crilly
For more information on the competition, check out the PSRS website.