UiA student receives award at international conference
Henrik Brådland won an award for best master's thesis at the three-day INTAP conference which recently took place at the University of Agder.
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By Gunnar Langeland
While Henrik Brådland received the award for the best presentation based on master's theses, Associate Professor Filippo Sanfilippo received the prize for the best presentation of a research paper in competition with international and local researchers.
“I didn’t see it coming. I was very surprised”, says former UiA student Henrik Brådland
The master's thesis and his presentation persuaded the jury. It won the prize for best student thesis during the international technology conference INTAP (International Conference on Intelligent Technologies and Applications).
INTAP is an international conference on intelligent technology and applications. This year's event is the fourth of its kind, and the first to be organised by UiA. The conference has previously been held in Pakistan and Gjøvik.
38 studies were presented
The conference lasted over three days and had a total of 90 participants. Several renowned researchers were there, among them Dr. Shugen Ma from Japan and Dr. Domenico Prattichizzo from Italy.
This year's event was organised by UiA and Oslo Metropolitan University at UiA’s campus in Grimstad. During the conference, 38 studies on different uses of so-called intelligent technology were presented.
Brådland's paper shared the victory with papers from two other students. One from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, and one from the Technical University of Denmark.
Brådland presented a simplified version of his master's thesis to the jury. He showed how artificial intelligence can be used to train robots in how car batteries are constructed. The goal is to automate the battery recycling process.
“A consequence of the green shift is that more car batteries will have to be recycled. These batteries are advanced and disassembling them by hand is currently not profitable. We will therefore need smart robots that understand how car batteries are constructed and how to take them apart”, Brådland says.
His thesis was written in the spring of 2021. Brådland says the support from the University of Agder has a lot of credit for the quality of the thesis.
“I had two very good supervisors that I met every week. In addition, we got to use a large robot, and we could use our own lab. The fact that UiA has decided to dedicate so many resources to student research is crucial to my thesis.”
Of a total of 249 submitted research papers, 38 were presented at INTAP 2021.
These people received an award for their research papers:
Best student papers:
- Hina Suzuki, Hanxiong Chen, Kazutaka Furuse and Toshiyuki Amagasa for the paper: Dense Nearest Neighborhood Query.
- Wenjing Dai, Xiufeng Liu, Alfred Heller and Per Sieverts Nielsen for the paper: Smart Meter Data Anomaly Detection using Variational Recurrent Autoencoders with Attention.
- Henrik Bradland, Martin Choux and Linga Reddy Cenkeramaddi for the paper: Point Cloud Instance Segmentation for Automatic Electric Vehicle Battery Disassembly.
- Best paper: Filippo Sanfilippo, Tomas Blažauskas, Martynas Girdžiūna, Airidas Janonis, Eligijus Kiudys and Gionata Salvietti for the paper: A Multi-Modal Auditory-Visual-Tactile e-Learning Framework.
Important conference
While Henrik Brådland could celebrate that his master's thesis received an award, Filippo Sanfilippo was content with both the award for his own research and a successful conference.
The host of the INTAP conference, Filippo Sanfilippo, could be pleased with a successful conference and winning the award for best research paper.
“I am very pleased with what we achieved. The conference went really well, and we have received positive feedback from participants. Very interesting researchers joined us, either physically here in Grimstad or remotely via video”, says Sanfilippo.
The aim of the conference is to provide an internationally respected forum for scientific research in the computer-based methods and technologies of collective intelligence and their applications.
Filippo Sanfilippo believes the conference is important for the University of Agder.
“INTAP is an important arena for UiA to establish new contacts with other universities. In this way, we can easily create a collaboration between student activities and research that works for both parties”, says Sanfilippo.