Submitted by Jonathan Goddard on Fri, 05/04/2019 - 12:03
Every year the Cambridge Ring celebrates the successes of companies founded by graduates of the Department of Computer Science and Technology.
The winners of the 2019 Hall of Fame Awards are:
Company of the Year:
PolyAI
PolyAI aims to revolutionise call centres with its state-of-the-art conversational AI. The founders of this London start-up met at the Computer Lab while working on their PhDs. Unlike other customer service chatbots, PolyAI’s AI technology is able to follow a conversation and interpret meaning according to context, producing more authentic and effective interactions.
Product of the Year:
Pur3 Ltd for Pixl.js
Pur3 Ltd was founded by Gordon Williams, and develops hardware and software. Their Pixl.js has won “Product of the Year”.
Pixl.js is a smart, wireless display, which uses Bluetooth Low Energy. With the Espruino JavaScript interpreter it only needs tiny amounts of power to run.
Better Future Award:
Gemma Gordon for her work on bridging virtual reality with climate change education
Gemma Gordon works on the LABScI Imagine project, which aims to create virtual learning environments based on US national parks. This gives children who cannot access nature, such as hospitalised paediatric patients and students of limited means, the opportunity to interact with it through cutting-edge technology delivered via readily-available Google Cardboard VR headsets.
Lessons cover topics with a STEM focus, including: plate tectonics; erosion; desert adaptations; local flora and fauna; human geography and anthropological history. The Imagine project seeks to provide environmental and climate change education, and enable students who cannot go on field trips to understand their connection to the natural world.
Publication of the Year:
Noa Zilberman, Gabi Bracha and Golan Schzukin for "Stardust: Divide and conquer in the data center network"
The paper presents Stardust, a scalable fabric architecture for data centre networks. It separates the simple network-fabric from the complex network-edge. Stardust applies system-switch architecture on a data centre scale, while attending to the scalability limitations of network devices: resources, I/O and performance. The resulting network fabric devices are a radical change from commodity Ethernet switches, eliminating significant overheads in DCNs. The approach is practical, power-efficient, cost-effective, scalable, and, critically, deployable.
