BCS Edinburgh Branch

BCS-in-Scotland sponsored Young Software Engineer of the Year award at Scotland IS Gala 2008

The BCS in Scotland continued its annual sponsorship of the Young Software Engineer of the Year award (second place) at this year's Scotland IS Scotsoft gala dinner held on 9th October 2008. This year the BCS prize of £1000 went to Adam Wilson of the University of Aberdeen for his project "Case Based Reasoning in Intensive Care". The prize was presented by BCS Vice-President Professor Andrew McGettrick.

Scotland IS chair Eddie Chance, Adam Wilson and BCS Vice-President Professor Andrew McGettrick

Adam Wilson is congratulated by Bill Milne (chair of BCS-in-Scotland)

Adam used artificial intelligence to develop a solution that helps Intensive Care clinicians make faster more accurate decisions using a data base of prior case evidence. His C-BRIC solution was developed in Java and utilised real-world clinical data supplied by Glasgow Royal Infirmary (GRI). The fully customisable rule-sets allow clinicians to set their own abstraction details, making the system extremely flexible and the case base formation specific to a clinician’s requirements

Adam incorporated an existing Artificial Intelligence Case Based Reasoning shell developed at Edinburgh University, to enable unknown new cases to be matched by searching through a rich data base of prior cases to find the closest matches cases with known outcomes.

He tested the resulting applications with clinicians at GRI, and confirmed the potential benefits of the system, providing a framework for future development, and the possibility of use in Intensive Care Units.

Adam hails from Ardrossan, and enrolled at Aberdeen University after several years in retail management, first at a well-known burger chain, and then successfully running a mobile phone outlet in Aberdeen.

Background

The Young Software Engineer of the Year awards are given for the best undergraduate software projects, drawn from across all students studying computer science and software engineering in Scotland. Each university nominates the very best final year undergraduate software engineering project to be submitted for the awards.

The awards are organised by ScotlandIS, the trade body for software and ICT. This year’s standard was very high with a wide range of projects. The judges use a number of criteria when scoring the projects including : • Level of Innovation • Technical Difficulty • Quality of Engineering • Level of Knowledge & Previous Research • Planning & Organisation • Commercial and/or Social relevance • Quality of presentation.

The complete list of winners is on the Scotland IS web site news page.