Graduate showcase at the UAL Creative Computing Institute
T20 – UAL Creative Computing Institute
Our co-founder, Paul Kettle, recently joined an industry judging panel at the UAL Creative Computing Institute Summer Festival, where students exhibited their final graduation projects. He joined fellow judges Matt Webb, Nic Mulvaney, Ivo Vos, Zara Kerwood, and Lawrence Zeegen, to tour the exhibition and award projects that demonstrated exceptional skill, creativity, and innovation.
Paul presented the Expanded Interface award to Diana Galindo, one of six categories looking for novel forms of interface and interaction to expand the ways in which we mediate, manipulate, or otherwise engage with computational systems. Paul commented: “I was so impressed by the range of future-looking work on display, but what stood out was Diana’s response to a real problem she had experienced firsthand, and its potential for broad appeal and positive change.”
The winning project, Debris Lore, is a response to the 53 million metric tonnes of plastic waste predicted to enter our aquatic ecosystems by 2030. Inspired by a worldwide open-source initiative, Precious Plastic, the app runs an object detection model using smartphone hardware.
The aim is to replace a time-intensive analogue process by assisting researchers and volunteers to classify different types of waste more easily during beach cleanup campaigns in citizen science projects. The user simply points their phone camera at objects they find to identify and classify them. The data captured can then be used to inform policies, legislation, and the development of sustainability action plans.
Other student submissions of note included Ava by Serafin Lichtenhahn, an immersive installation where participants become active collaborators in the unfolding narrative of artificial reasoning. Road Imperfection Finder by Ondrej Zika also caught our attention, an investigative research project utilising the power of machine learning to explore how wealth distribution affects the quality of roads.
AW Springboard
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