On 24th June, SustAI joined MINDS for the annual CDT Showcase, a day where postgraduate researchers put their work in front of industry partners, policymakers, academics and one another. The room brought together technical depth and real-world application, which is exactly where SustAI research is meant to sit.
Postgraduate researchers presented work with real industry relevance to partners, policymakers and academics
Two SustAI projects showed how AI can make established methods faster and more sustainable. Nastja Vodopivec has been testing physics-informed neural networks as an alternative to conventional computational fluid dynamics. On an airfoil optimisation problem, her method returned a result in ten minutes where the standard approach took five hours, a trade-off between speed and accuracy that matters a great deal to industry. Niall Vyas presented probabilistic solvers for the differential equations that underpin climate science and energy systems, returning both a solution and a calibrated measure of how much to trust it.
The day opened with three voices from beyond the University. Francesca Parmigiani of Microsoft Research Cambridge, a Southampton alumna, spoke on research in the AI era. Jack Lewis of Ada Mode shared lessons from AI in the energy sector. Daniel Jopling of IOP Publishing looked at how AI is changing scientific publishing, and what becomes scarce when plausible answers are cheap: trust.
Jack Lewis of Ada Mode, which builds AI solutions for critical national infrastructure, summed up what the day showed: "This mix of innovation and application is exactly what industry needs to develop the next generation of sustainable technology."
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