In November of this year, Cohort 2 AgriFoRwArdS Student Harry Rogers travelled to Rome in Italy to the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval (KDIR).

Harry was awarded the Best Paper Award at the conference for his research paper titled ‘Evaluating the Use of Interpretable Quantized Convolutional Neural Networks for Resource-Constrained Deployment’. Harry developed a novel Quantization Aware eXplainable Artifical Intelligence (QXAI) pipeline to effectively compare Quantized and floating-point Convolutional Neural Networks, demonstrating their potential for real-time deployment on resource-constrained devices.

When asked about his experiences of the conference, Harry said:

I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Frans Coenen from the University of Liverpool. His insights and contributions to Machine Learning are well-known, and interacting with him was great. Additionally, meeting the invited speaker Professor Tony Bagnall and his PhD student Chris Holder was great.

I am thrilled that I won Best Paper, and it was a surprise initially to be nominated. I am also very happy that I will be able to say during my PhD that I won a Best Paper award.

The conversations at the conference also have meant that I have had more research directions to go in with the paper and I will try to pursue these during my PhD.

The AgriFoRwArdS team would like to say a massive congratulations to Harry, its always wonderful to hear of our students being internationally recognised for their hard work!