UBC Students Tackle Maritime Surveillance Problem to Win Intelligent Systems Challenge

Two UBC Science students have devised a software algorithm to help detect suspicious maritime activity to win a real-world intelligent systems competition hosted at UBC Okanagan this week.

Over the past year, teams of university, college and high school students from across the country were challenged to develop computer software that could examine incoming surveillance data and detect a cargo ship meeting up with another ship at sea.

Adam Williams (Computer Science and Physics) and David Fagnan (Math and Physics) came up with the best solution, and received the grand prize and a cheque of $6,000 in the 2009 Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association-Precarn Intelligent Systems Challenge.

"The competition was a wonderful experience as it was very exciting and inspiring to learn what is involved in programming for current real world problems," says Williams. "The fact that there were so many talented teams kept us motivated throughout the competition."

The competition featured hundreds of students from across Canada competing at both the undergraduate and graduate level. The prize for the graduate student category was received by Yichuan Tang from the University of Waterloo.

"I wholeheartedly support these real-world competitions," says Simon Peacock, Dean of Science at UBC. "They help engage Canadian students in the challenging field of intelligent systems and deepen their understanding of the ways that new innovations in computer science can contribute to Canada."

This was the inaugural year of the competition, and MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates also contributed the challenge.

"The Intelligent Systems Challenge for 20089 has been a huge success," says Dr. Harold Zwick, Director of R&D at MDA. "Student teams across Canada have proposed a variety of very interesting solutions. We believe that the ideas generated will lead to improved solutions to challenging problems."

The CAIAC Precarn Intelligent Systems Challenge is a series of annual competitions among university, college and high school students. The students work on computationally challenging, real world problems faced by Canadian companies, organizations and society.