The Smith Institute’s annual TakeAIM competition, now in its 13th year, is an opportunity for university students to showcase their work on the industrial stage. STOR-i PhD student, Ziyang Yang, won the runner-up prize and presented at the award ceremony on 21st March.

In discussing her competition entry, titled ‘Smarter, Safer and More Sustainable Internet of Things Monitoring', Ziyang stated: “IoT refers to a network where devices can collect data and send information to a central cloud for further analysis and decision-making. A common application in this domain is real-time monitoring. For example, monitoring critical changes such as spikes in blood pressure for a patient in an ICU through wearable devices, or monitoring the activity of elderly individuals in a smart home to detect sudden falls. However, managing data privacy and security becomes complex because data can be vulnerable to hacking during the devices-cloud transmission.

"How can we use mathematics to ensure privacy while detecting changes in such a real-time system as quickly as possible? In our research, we calculate evidence of ‘being change’ at each device and only transmit this evidence to the cloud when necessary, instead of sending raw data at every time instance. The cloud can then decide whether to trigger an alarm based on the received evidence. This process reduces the risk involved in data transmission. Moreover, our method does not require data storage at the device end, further reducing the risk of data breaches. Our experiments show that surprisingly, our method, with only 5% transmission frequency, achieves similar accuracy when compared to the full-transmission model. This advancement will enhance the privacy and efficiency of monitoring, making it a robust solution for a wide array of IoT applications."

Commenting on the prize, Ziyang said, “Being awarded the runner-up prize is particularly meaningful to me. As a speaker of English as a second language, I am happy that I am recognized for effectively communicating our research, and felt honoured to present it at the award ceremony. It was a great opportunity for me to not only share our work but also to listen to various research presentations and engage in insightful discussions with industry professionals.

"I would like to thank my supervisors, Idris Eckley (Lancaster University), Paul Fearnhead (Lancaster University), and David Yearling (BT), for their continuous support, as well as our former STOR-i women's group for always being my inspiration! Lastly, a huge thanks to the organizers and judges from the Smith Institute, and a big celebration to other fellow finalists."

Details of the competition can be found here: https://www.smithinst.co.uk/takeaim/