A research paper co-authored by Professor Mark Girolami and colleagues from the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) and The Alan Turing Institute, among others, has won the Hojjat Adeli Award for Innovation in Computing.
By examining machines as part of an interconnected ecosystem, as one would study natural populations, we can gain new insights into their emergent behaviour and performance.
Professor Mark Girolami
The open access paper titled Hierarchical Bayesian modeling for knowledge transfer across engineering fleets via multitask learning was chosen by the publishers Wiley-Blackwell as the most innovative computing paper published in the previous volume or year by the most groundbreaking single author.
The paper was a collaborative effort involving Professor Girolami, Dr Maharshi Dhada (IFM) and Professor Ajith Parlikad (IFM)1, along with teams from The Alan Turing Institute, University of Glasgow, Imperial College London, Stockholm University, and Scania, an industry partner.
In this work, the researchers show that analysing similarities between how natural ecosystems behave and react to their environment can offer insights that can also be used in engineering.
Machines, just like plants and animals, may have shared characteristics but no two will be identical and their behaviour depends on their environment.
The researchers propose analysing machines as an interconnected ecosystem, rather than as individual components. They believe this could offer new insights and help address the problem of data sparsity when predictive models are being built for engineering infrastructure.
However, this type of approach is much less developed for machines and structures. So, this paper aims to better understand how machines behave to help make them more efficient.
The research looks at two case studies as potential applications of this approach. The first considers the survival analysis of components in an operational fleet of trucks and the second predicts the power in a group of wind turbines.
This paper also includes some research undertaken as part of the Turing’s AI for Science and Government (ASG) programme. In particular, research which took place within the theme of Ecosystems of Digital Twins, which is referenced in the Digital Twins white paper.
Professor Mark Girolami, Chief Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute and Sir Kirby Laing Professor of Civil Engineering at Cambridge, said: “We are delighted that our work has been recognised by receiving this prestigious award. By examining machines as part of an interconnected ecosystem, as one would study natural populations, we can gain new insights into their emergent behaviour and performance.
“In addition, our work demonstrates how approaching a problem in a collaborative and innovative way, can help give us new ideas for improving systems.”
Adapted from a news article by The Alan Turing Institute.
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[1] The IfM is a part of the Department of Engineering.
