Submitted by Rachel Gardner on Wed, 18/03/2026 - 17:42
An app that assists beekeepers in identifying sick bees, and an open-source tool to help blind people learn how to program from scratch, were two of the winning Group Design Projects created by second-year students this year.
There was also an award for a contribution by students to the challenge of building reliable, open compiler infrastructure that can handle the complexity of modern hardware description languages like SystemVerilog.
All our undergraduates complete Group Design Projects during their second year. Doing so gives them experience of working on a real software development project and a taste of what it's like to work with professional clients. This year clients ranged from industry to academia and included Nokia Bell Labs, Bending Spoons (the company behind Vimeo, Eventbrite and WeTransfer), Cambridge University Library and the French Space Academy, to name just a few.
The projects spanned a wide spectrum of topics. These included creating more energy-efficient homes (for example, through the development of a Draught Detective phone app for builders) as well as helping students manage their finances better through a Wise Banking app.
Awards were given in three categories:
The Most Impressive Technical Achievement Award.
Runners up were Team Hotel for their project Digging for Data, a project focused on methods of retrieving data from obsolete floppy disks, including data from a collection of papers by former Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock that are held in the archives at Churchill College. The challenge included reverse-engineering texts and tables from the disks.
The winner was Team Sierra for their compiler infrastructure project System Verilog for CIRCT, which extended the CIRCT-Verilog compiler so that a wider range of 'real world' SystemVerilog examples can be compiled in CIRCT's core MLIR dialects.
The Most Impressive Professional Achievement Award.
Runners up were Team Mike for their project Intuitive Business Data, in which they were challenged to create a novel programming tool for business data processing that would be easier for non-technical businesses users to use.
The Winner was Team Kilo for their project From AI to BI. In this, they worked with the Cambridgeshire Beekeepers Association to create an app that analyses photos of their hives taken by beekeepers and help them detect if their bees are infected by serious diseases like European foulbrood.
The Best Contribution to a Better Future Award.
Runners up were Team Echo for their project Cold Bridge Diagnostics, which uses computer vision methods to analyse photos of houses and spot 'cold bridges' that are leaking heat from inside the house on winter days.
The winner was Team Delta for their project on Coding for Blind Learners, which involved creating an open-source tool to help blind people learn to program from scratch in a text-based language.
Many congratulations to all the winning teams and everyone who participated.
