On Wednesday October 30^th, The University of Salford welcomed guests in The Old Fire Station to its Research and Development Collaboration Breakfast. The event aimed to introduce businesses to a range of R&D partnership opportunities available with the university, designed to drive innovation and transformation for businesses. The morning featured a range of guest speakers, including the university R&D team, who shared insights into the potential benefits of working with the university.

Richard Magennis, Business Engagement Manager, opened the session outlining the university’s business innovation services and the various support programs available to companies interested in pursuing such collaborative research projects.

Dr. Imrana Mushtaq, Knowledge Transfer Advisor for Innovate UK, followed with an in-depth discussion on Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs), explaining how they can be useful in helping businesses innovate ideas into actionable solutions.

Expanding on the university’s collaborative offerings, Dr. Alejandro Garcia-Miranda Ferrari, the university’s R&D Manager, provided an overview of the partnership process, explaining how the university works with providing businesses with support on their individual research and development needs.

Konstantinos Zeimpkeis, Lead Data Scientist at VUE, then shared a real-life example by presenting VUEs KTP project with The University of Salford, detailing the process, challenges and benefits of the partnership, highlighting the positives of the experience.

The final speaker, Chris Cunnane, Business Development Manager, focused on the financial side of R&D, explaining how companies can benefit from R&D tax credits and funding opportunities when partnering with the university on innovative projects.

The event offered business leaders a valuable overview of how collaboration with the University of Salford can support their R&D goals, opening doors to new levels of innovation, funding, and growth.

“Innovation is key for growth, a more sustainable future and futureproofing our local companies in a constantly evolving external business environment. The exchange of knowledge, research and expertise between universities and industry through funding streams such as Knowledge Transfer Partnerships is key to helping businesses develop new ideas, drive positive change and reach their maximum potential”- Richard Magennis – Business Engagement Manager, Business Innovation Services Team

VUE had participated in multiple live projects but only one Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with the University of Salford, a key focus in Konstantinos’ (Kostas’) recent presentation at the R&D Breakfast. He highlighted a notable data science project: First Notification of Loss (FNOL), an identification using video analysis and deep learning which ran from 2021 to 2023 and aimed to develop an advanced FNOL system. Mitesh Rajan, a data scientist who worked with the university contributed significantly to this project.

The objective was to create a prototype capable of accurately identifying loss events, with results achieving over 90% accuracy through the integration of video and telematics data. This prototype was expected to be integrated into VUE’s system pipeline to automatically classify incidents as accidents or non-accidents, notifying relevant parties and further improving VUE’s technology and its capabilities through the KTP partnership.

Kostas, once a Salford University student himself joined VUE through a live project in 2019, lasting 3 months. This project is different to the KTP as it lasts 3 months opposed to 2 years. His contribution to the work done on Driver Behaviour Scoring Models using Machine Learning was highly successful, ultimately leading to his role as a data scientist at VUE, offered by Glen Mullins the Managing Director of the company. Through personal and professional development, Kostas got promoted to Lead Data Scientist here at VUE in 2023, all thanks to the initial opportunity of being a part of a live project with the University of Salford.

Kostas stated ‘’The opportunity to improve skills, parallel to work and drive personal development allowed me to progress within my career. This was all thanks to the live project with VUE which was made possible by the university whilst I was studying my Masters degree’’.

VUE continues to partner with the University of Salford on KTP and live projects due to having talented, thorough, and hard-working students helping improve the business by helping the data science team. The thorough process carried out by the university, demonstrates the support received throughout the entirety of the process.