Work with us
Case studies
Below you can read examples of our work with research groups across the University.
The Bluebird project: Safe AI for Air Traffic Control
Collaborators: ECEHH, Cornwall County Council
Working with the ECEHH and Cornwall County Council, the RSE group have developed LCAT, the Local Climate Adaptation Tool, an open-source tool which supports local decision makers across the UK to plan and adapt to climate change. The live tool can be accessed here.
LCAT brings together complex climate models, adaptation options and health impact evidence all in one place, and importantly, generates recommendations for appropriate adaptation approaches, to support the health and wellbeing of local people. These recommendations are based on the best available peer-reviewed evidence. LCAT has been co-designed with over 100 different local decision-makers across the UK and is one of the outputs of the EU BlueAdapt project.
The RSE group have been responsible for everything from climate data analysis, to the app's deployment, to front and back-end development, and more. We developed scripts in PostgreSQL and Python to process large NetCDF climate data files, improving previous processing times by >95%. Working with the project team, we have developed new front-end features, iteratively improving the UX/UI of the tool based on stakeholder feedback. Finally, we worked alongside Digital to develop the LCAT deployment pipeline, deploy the first version, and maintain and manage new releases of LCAT going forward.
We've had some excellent press around LCAT as we have rolled it out, from Cornwall County Council and the Local Government Association. And we are very proud to say that LCAT won the Socitm Sustainability Initiative of the Year award in 2024.
“Working with the Research and Software Analytics group has been game-changing for the LCAT project. Their knowledge, expertise and engagement with the project has allowed us to be responsive to user feedback and need, and iteratively develop an award-winning decision-support tool on climate change adaptation. This development would not have been possible without them.”
Prof. Emma Bland, ECEHH
Collaborator: The GW4 Alliance
X-disciplinary Challenges from Industry for Technical Expert Development (X-CITED) is an EPSRC-funded programme that will develop the skills of Research Technical Professionals (RTPs), supporting them to work with industrial partners in addressing real-world challenges.
You can read more about the project here, and read an interview with Nic Whippey, senior RSE and X-CITED lead, here.
Collaborators: Dr Steven Rieder, Professor Clare Dobbs, Dr Thomas Guillet, Department of Physics and Astronomy
AMUSE (Astrophysical Multipurpose Software Environment) allows different astrophysical codes to run and communicate with a common interface. The RSE Group worked to integrate basic functionality of Arepo, a moving-mesh gravity and magnetohydrodynamics code, into AMUSE. This will lead to follow-on work expanding this integration, for example testing Arepo in conjunction with stellar evolution and gravitational dynamics codes which are part of AMUSE. This will make it ready for use by researchers.
Collaborators: Departments of Computer Science and Engineering, The Alan Turing Institute and NATS
PI: Professor Richard Everson
The Exeter RSE Group have a longstanding commitment to project Bluebird, a Prosperity Partnership with the National Air Traffic Service (NATS) and The Alan Turing Institute. This project aims to deliver the world's first AI-supported system that can control UK airspace.
The RSE Group has aided in the development of a data-driven, high-fidelity model of UK airspace that can be controlled via machine learning and other AI algorithms. Other tasks have included the implementation of algorithms used for aircraft trajectory prediction and atmospheric modelling, the creation of a web-app based human-machine interface to display, monitor and control simulations, and the development of a data pipeline, which feeds the model with data from thousands of aircraft from across the UK.
We ended last summer with a highly successful full stack evaluation, working with NATS to evaluate our first generation of air traffic control algorithms. Currently, the group is working to improve the aircraft trajectory modelling used in the simulations, supporting researchers by implementing continuous testing and evaluation of their algorithms, and developing a gamified simulation, where the general public can test their air traffic control skills against an AI controller.
Collaborators: Wellcome Trust, Dr Chloe Onoufriou
The University of Exeter is developing an open-source and widely adaptable tool for allowing researchers to 'cost' the carbon impact of their research project. This tool has completed phase 1 of development and been through initial testing at UoE to develop a proof-of concept model. You can read more about the project here.
Collaborator: Prof Lars Johanning, Department of Engineering
The Cornwall FLOW Accelerator project developed a simulator to compare strategies for floating offshore wind (FLOW) farm operations, looking to help reduce the associated carbon footprint. The RSE Group provided the much-needed technical expertise, with the RSEs involved giving guidance on the project's development from a software engineering perspective, writing software to combine the core components of the simulator into a unified whole, and developing a graphical user interface.
Collaborator: Prof Pierre Friedlingstein FRS, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
The RSE Group are working with the Global Carbon Budget (GCB) Office, which publishes authoritative research tracking the trends in global carbon emissions. The RSE Group are developing a new website that provides users with access to GCB data and enables them to explore it through an interactive data visualisation dashboard. This will increase the impact and influence of the GCB with policy makers and non-academic organisations. The RSE Group have also improved the codebase and processes used for creating analyses for the annual GCB report, making it easier to maintain and more accommodating to dataset updates. This is helping to streamline the development effort required to produce each year's report.
Collaborator: Dr Oleksandr Kyriienko, Department of Physics and Astronomy
The aim of this project was to scope the potential of quantum machine learning methods for fraud detection to inform the quantum effort at HSBC. The RSEs involved in the project provided classical machine learning expertise, prompted valuable discussion, helped benchmarking quantum machine learning algorithms against their classical counterparts. The results of this project gave rise to a publication and fed into HSBC strategy.
Collaborator: Professor Katharine Tyler, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy and Anthropology
This project involved the creation of an interactive app that forms part of an exhibition website entitled ‘Red, Amber, Green Britain’, which makes research findings on inequality in the context of Brexit and COVID-19 accessible to those outside of the academic community. The RSE Group provided the much-needed technical expertise to develop the app, which was featured at the Science Gallery in Detroit in their recent exhibition ‘Tracked and Traced’.