Current projects

• Road pavement condition monitoring: building intelligence into roads to enable pro-active maintenance, ensuring a healthy road network.
• Intelligent traffic monitoring, using a combination of RFID and computer vision to authenticate vehicles on-the-go, enabling law enforcement without traffic disruptions.
• Intelligent traffic management by predicting future traffic states and taking optimal steps to streamline traffic flows on congested road networks.
• Compliance management of road transport, using real time monitoring to reconcile legal compliance with streamlined trade flows.
• Supply chain intelligence to optimize cargo flows through the intelligent management of customs and multi-modal transport.
• Intelligent mining, aimed at integrating automation into human-driven activities to simultaneously optimize productivity, safety and environmental responsibility

Research focuses

• Intelligent Condition Monitoring:
  Based on understanding the operation and failure modes of complex systems, key variables are monitored in real time and  failure mode indicators are extracted from field data to inform pro-active corrective activities aimed at maximising production while safeguarding operation assets. 

• Intelligent Classification and Prediction:
  Artificial intelligence techniques, like convolutional neural networks, are applied to complex operational data sets to recognize and detect operational entities, modes and failures, to predict future states and to provide decision support towards improved management. 

• Intelligent Automation:
  Complex tasks that require the interpretation of vast amounts of data and taking decisions at speeds that are beyond human abilities are automated through a combination of monitoring, signal processing and control to achieve levels of performance that are not possible through manual operation.

Q&A

What is the role of artificial intelligence in engineering?
Artificial intelligence endeavours to learn from the human senses and human intelligence to solve problems that are beyond the abilities of humans.  This involves applications that either generate too much data for humans to process, that requires speeds of reaction that is too fast for humans, or that include relationships that are too complex for the human mind to unravel. AI models learn both from human experts and historical data to allow us to solve problems that previously appeared to be impossible, thus extending the frontiers of human abilities.