The Defence Data Research Centre (DDRC), a consortium led by the University of Exeter in collaboration with the Universities of Liverpool and Surrey and funded by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), recently conducted its annual Data Study Group in collaboration with The Alan Turing Institute. The event was held in Newcastle Upon Tyne.
This intensive ‘collaborative sprint style research activity’ brought together diverse organisations from industry, government, and the third sector for a week-long endeavour.
Eighteen multidisciplinary researchers and academics from around the world pooled their expertise to tackle a synthetic data challenge. The data study group worked with a large dataset of images as the basis of training data. The challenge centred on synthesising additional training images to understand the robustness of a synthetic data generation method. The groups explored different methods of efficiently validating synthetically generated images. Our groups also explored the strengths and limitations of different techniques, seeking to address issues around the scarcity of real data.
The week was a massive success culminating in presentations and reports to exhibit and publish the delegates findings. As we speak our Centre’s professors are reviewing the final reports and look forward to any potential applications and further publications.
The Data Study Group offers a unique opportunity for researchers and scientists hailing from various cultures, disciplines, and career stages to exchange knowledge and harness the strength of their diverse backgrounds.
Professor Richard Everson said: “It was great to see the wide range of ideas, enthusiasm and hard work that the Data Study Group brought to a challenging problem in computer vision and machine learning. Fantastic to see the way groups with a diverse range of backgrounds and skills came together to address the challenge.”
Dstl principal scientist Glen Hart said: “I'm always impressed by the fact that you can take a group of people who have never met before, with diverse backgrounds, levels of knowledge and experience, and put them together, give them a hard problem and then get results at the end of a week of long days. In that respect, this data study group delivered, and delivered some interesting ideas that Dstl can follow up on.”
The Defence Data Research Centre is eagerly looking forward to its next challenge.
To learn more about the Centre and future DDRC Data Study Groups, please reach out to us at info@ddrc.uk.