Congratulations - Thomas Li

Published in the Research School of Physics Event Horizon
Vol42 Issue19 16–20 May 2016

Heyang Li (Thomas), a PhD candidate at the Department of Applied Mathematics won the Nasscom Student Innovation Award for IT Technical innovation. This competition is open to all university students in Australia. The competition involves an initial written application and a final round of presentations to an independent panel of eminent judges. Thomas competed with 14 other finalists from various elite universities in Australia to win this prize. The prize includes a free trip to India to visit one of their elite software companies, attending the CeBIT gala dinner in Sydney, and potential mentorship opportunities.

His winning application is based on the work he and Roger Qiu (an ANU alumni) developed (using many skills learnt during Thomas' PhD), it's named illuminate - intelligent underground photogrammetry for mining. According to Thomas: "Australian mining companies can attain competitive advantage through photogrammetry assisted tunnel mining. Presently underground mines employ geologists to visually examine tunnel photos to decide on drilling directions. This manual classification takes days, which causes the expensive underground machines to drill in suboptimal digging paths. Instead, we developed an accurate/efficient algorithm to automatically/autonomously classify those photos using algorithmic computing." For more info, see: http://illuminate.io/