Officials from industry, government and the third sector have collaborated with Exeter's academic experts to deepen their shared understanding of large datasets of images.
The data study group was a week-long 'collaborative sprint-style research activity' held by the Defence Data Research Centre (DDRC), a consortium led by the University of Exeter in collaboration with the Universities of Liverpool and Surrey and funded by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl).
It saw 18 multi-disciplinary researchers and academics from around the world pool their expertise to tackle a synthetic data challenge.
The challenge centred on synthesising additional training images to a large dataset of images to understand the robustness of a synthetic data generation method.
The groups explored different methods of efficiently validating synthetically generated images, looking at the strengths and limitations of different techniques and seeking to address issues around the scarcity of real data.
The week-long event, which was hailed as a massive success, culminated in presentations and reports to exhibit and publish the delegates findings.
Professor Richard Everson from the University of Exeter said: "It was great to see the wide range of ideas, enthusiasm and hard work that the Data Study Group brought to a challenging problem in computer vision and machine learning. Fantastic to see the way groups with a diverse range of backgrounds and skills came together to address the challenge."
Dstl principal scientist Glen Hart added: "I'm always impressed by the fact that you can take a group of people who have never met before, with diverse backgrounds, levels of knowledge and experience, and put them together, give them a hard problem and then get results at the end of a week of long days. In that respect, this data study group delivered, and delivered some interesting ideas that Dstl can follow up on."
The data study group offers a unique opportunity for researchers and scientists hailing from various cultures, disciplines, and career stages to exchange knowledge and harness the strength of their diverse backgrounds.
