Queen’s School of Computing student Emily Hunter (COMA ’23) represented Queen’s University at the International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (I2MTC) in Ottawa which was held on May 16th-19th, 2022.
Emily was invited to present some of the work she has completed over the past year during her internship through the Queen’s Undergraduate Internship Program.
Emily’s internship is at Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), which is part of the Department of National Defence. One of the topics she has studied is multi-target tracking (MTT). MTT is a complex problem where there are an unknown number of moving objects and sensor data is used to track where they are going. The focus of her work involved investigating how radars can be used to track drones in the air.
At the I2MTC conference, Emily and her team presented a 3-hour tutorial on MTT in relation to instrumentation and measurement. The team working on this project included people from the University of Liverpool and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) in the United Kingdom. Much of Emily’s work in MTT at DRDC has been related to using and maintaining Stone Soup, an open-source framework for MTT which was created by DSTL. The tutorial she presented gave the conference-goers an introduction to MTT and how to use Stone Soup. After discussing several MTT algorithms and how they can each be used, the team presented an example using the Stone Soup framework on simulated drone location data.
“Overall, it was a great experience for me to present some of my work at such a respected conference. Many of the other people attending the conference work on the sensor side of things – developing the sensors that provide the data used in MTT. It was very interesting to hear their perspectives and discuss how we can each adjust our work so that the process from data acquisition to analysis is as seamless as possible” says Emily.
On the final three days of the conference, Emily enjoyed attending workshops and paper presentations. She says:
“It was quite amazing to see the diversity of applications that people were studying even within the same field! I was especially interested in the ways in which researchers were combining machine learning with single target tracking, for example in recognizing shapes drawn in the air with your finger.”
Emily had an amazing time at the conference and was especially grateful for the support from Dr. Yuanzhu Chen who sponsored her attendance.