The competition, launched in September and open to all students and staff attending Scottish universities, generates a number of extremely high quality and innovative proposals, underlining Scotland’s global and historical reputation as a centre of excellence for engineering.

The winner of the £25,000 first prize went to the University of Edinburgh, for a proposal from Dr Ben Panter relating to a ‘real-time novelty filter to detect improvised explosive devices (IEDs) from reconnaissance imagery.’ Dr Panter also won the £5,000 personal prize associated with the winning entry.

Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen claimed the runner-up spot worth £2000 with a team consisting of Dr Laura Muir, Prof. Ian Richardson (right) and Abharana Bhatt.

Third place, worth £1,000, was won by Xuexing Zeng and Prof Tariq S Durrani from Strathclyde University in Glasgow

Last year’s competition focused on the area of laser technologies and was an outstanding success, with the University of Strathclyde securing first prize. Since then Thales has pursued three of the ideas with the winning entrants and plans to agree on funded projects that will bring their ideas into reality.

David Lockwood, MD of Thales UK’s optronics facility in Glasgow, says:
”We are extremely proud to continue to foster the spirit of innovation within the Scottish engineering community. The scope of the competition and its prize fund are truly unique in the history of engineering in Scotland and the results have clearly generated ideas which have an encouraging future.”