The following questions are aimed to capture a snapshot of an individual student within one the CDT cohorts. During proposal development, hypothetical students (with real Southampton supervisors, and hypothetical industrial ones) are used to help shape the training programme and give light to how the CDT would be experienced from the perspective of the student. If successfully funded, the same questions will be reused to help us tell the stories of our actual students.

Describe the student’s previous academic and/or professional background

XXX graduated with a UG masters in engineering with an autonomous systems pathway from a European University. Some of the XXX’s prior undergraduate experience was focussed around path planning algorithms for autonomus systems using sensor data.

What is the student’s motivation for joining the Geospatial AI CDT at Southampton?

XXX is interested in developing advanced data processing methods using mapping data acquired by autonomous platforms for conservation.

Who are the student’s supervisors? What is their research topic/area?

XXX’s primary supervisor is in Engineering specialising in autonomous systems, their co-supervisors in Geography/Earth Science and they have a Marwell Wildlife as an industrial sponsor. Their research topic related to using autonomous systems to gather conservation data – looking at distribution of wildlife in the natural environment.

How has the Geospatial AI CDT provided a technical training programme that is tailored to the student’s needs and their research topic/area?

XXX has been trained in developing production level software, shared code development with version control – contributing to larger software packages, with software integrated documentation and testing environments. XXX also trained in management of large environmental datasets (terabytes), ontology and use of browser based public labelling frameworks for multi-user annotation of environmental data, and GIS for visualising data outputs.

How has the Geospatial AI CDT provided training required to allow the student to become a future leader in the field? Are there any particular transferrable or generic skills that this student has mastered?

Through training provided by the CDT XXX is able to communicate effectively and go into in depth research discussions with both engineers and environmental scientists. They are able to moderate and facilitate communications between engineers and scientists. They are able to understand the specific details of scientific problems, including cultures of how data, ontologies and performance metrics are dealt with in their application area. They also understand the conservation priorities and drivers that impact species distribution. XXX understands the specific data acquisition and processing workflows, and is able to group these details in a more abstract way to understand the structure of a problem and identify different applications that follow the same structure from the perspective of an engineer. XXX is able to draw these insights and abstractions without annoying anyone in the process.

This helps XXX understand and communicate different perspectives of a problem, allowing them to distinguish between constraints and opportunities that are real vs those that are only perceived due to a lack of cross-disciplinary understanding. They can communicate these insights and identify non-obvious links to other domains that they leverage to advance their own research. XXX’s unique blend of skills gained through the CDT allowed them to secure a competitive position leading a small team in their sponsor organisation after completing the PhD programme.

In what ways has this student excelled in working in a group within their cohort during the training programme? How has the training programme facilitated this?

XXX can efficiently implement high-quality solutions and has experience delivering large-scale software produced in a collaborative manner. They are passionate about coding and have contributed to a number of open-source projects. However, prior to the CDT, XXX has only collaborated with fellow engineers and therefore had no prior experience in interdisciplinary projects. The series of interdisciplinary workshops organised throughout the CDT have gradually built XXX’s ability to communicate effectively across disciplines and taught them the best inclusivity practices. The workshops helped XXX become the figure that seamlessly brings together the environmental scientists and the technical team.

The CDT has provided training to teach XXX to communicate effectively across disciplines. This has been enabled by a series of low-risk interdisciplinary group problem solving workshops that are conducted throughout the first year. These match students from one discipline with those from another discipline (eg., 5 engineers and 5 environmental scienctists), who are presented with a real-world challenge that they spend 2 days to address with an experienced facilitator/moderator capable of ensuring that this is a safe environment for researchers in training to express their views, and make mistakes with no negative consequence on their PhD research. These sessions start with a talk on communication and inclusivity. Having shared discipline perspectives (us vs them), the two groups come up with a solution and develop a short presentation about their solution, and about the process they followed to arrive at their solution. Sessions are held 4 times throughout the year, providing an opportunity for students to reflect on how they are applying the principles in their own research, and ensure the anchor points for interdisciplinary research are embedded in their thinking.

Has the student generated any intellectual property during the programme? (Briefly) what is it? Do the findings impact the public, private or third/voluntary sectors, and elsewhere?

XXX has developed workflows that are adopted by their project sponsor and end-user communities of their work. During their second internship placement, and employment, they embed their method into their host organisation’s workflows.

Which CDT partner(s) are (co-)sponsoring the studentship award?

Conservation group – Marwell Wildlife

If the student has undertaken the internship who was it with, and what did they do?

Marwell Wildlife end of y1, Marwell Wildlife end of y2

If the student has finished where are they going next?

Job in conservation at Marwell Wildlife end of y3.5

By using internships as an opportunity to engage with their project sponsor, XXX has created an employment opportunity for themself and maximised benefit to the sponsor.

How have Southampton’s unique facilities and broad range of Geospatial and AI expertise benefitted the student?

The supervisors value interdisciplinary research and see applications as something that drives method development, which would not necessarily be the case with a traditional PhD. The supervisors accept that the research contribution in their individual area of expertise may be smaller than a discipline focused project, and less likely to feature in discipline specific top journals. However, they recognise the value of strengthening the link between different disciplines and the unique opportunities these present to an individual.

The cross-disciplinary nature has given the opportunity for XXX to go out into the field and follow the entire process of data acquisition through to analysis and insight generation, understanding the constraints that apply at each state of the process – where this is enabled by close supervision from their application embedded supervisors. XXX has benefitted from the presence of experience research technicians, software engineering groups and large data storage and processing capacity that have supported these initiatives and accelerate the XXX’s progress.