BCS-in-Scotland sponsors ScotlandIS Young Software Engineer of the Year awards

Andreea Lutac being awarded her prize by BCS Deputy President Paul Martynenko.

BCS-in-Scotland continued its sponsorship of the second prize at the Scotland IS Young Software Engineer of the Year awards which were presented at the ScotSoft 2016 dinner on 6th October 2016.

The Young Software Engineer of the Year awards are given for the best undergraduate software projects, drawn from across all students studying computer science and software engineering in Scotland. Each university nominates the very best final year undergraduate software engineering project to be submitted for the awards.

The BCS prize of £2000 was won by Andreea Lutac of Glasgow University for her project her project developing real time robot camera controls.

Andreea is fascinated by robots and the increasing ways these are being used. She spotted a problem with the widely used Robotics Operating System (ROS) and decided to see if this could be solved. Whilst ideal at small scale, the ROS has reliability issues at scale and so industrial robots normally use customised technology platforms. Andreea investigated using the Erlang programming language, a world leading technology known for its reliability at scale, to address this. Her project compared real time face tracking using the two different systems ROS and Erlang, to prove that Erlang would successfully address the reliability and scalability issues in ROS.

Andreea, grew up in Romania and studied for her undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow. Last summer she worked at JP Morgan’s software development centre, and has spent this summer continuing her research at Glasgow University. She will shortly be starting a Masters in Robotics, Systems and Control at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Her work has also won her the BCS Edinburgh Branch Student Prize for best project evaluation.

The first prize, sponsored by Sopra Steria, was awarded to Stuart Whitehead of Robert Gordon University University for his project developing a software platform for internet of things (IoT) applications.

The third prize, sponsored by Edge Testing, was awarded to Ana Ciocarlan of the University of Aberdeen for her innovative ehealth project to monitor colorectal cancer.

The Leidos Software Engineering Award went to Graeme Sutters of the University of Strathclyde who developed a smart travel app.

More details from ScotlandIS ...