A Strathclyde Computer Science graduate has won the Best Engineering Project award at the 33rd annual Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards.
Callum Inglis was awarded the Leidos Best Engineering Prize at the ceremony for developing a low-cost, off-grid sensor monitoring system, capable of remote sensing in areas without any existing infrastructure.
While the system is built to be applicable to many industries, Callum’s demonstration of his system focused on indoor and outdoor air quality data collection, which could ultimately be used to support and inform public health decisions.
Callum said: “I was delighted to have been put forward for the competition on behalf of the university and receive the award of ‘Best Engineering Project’. The subsequent recognition and interest from industry has been great; when accompanied with the networking opportunities of the awards itself, I'm very happy with my achievements.”
Real-world applications
Having an interest in technology from an early age – following the acquisition of his first Raspberry Pi aged 12 – Callum loves identifying areas that would benefit from computer systems. With a breadth of experience across hardware and software, and proven industry applications in Software Engineering, DevOps and Project lifecycle management, he always finds it rewarding to see his projects have real-world applications and bring value to clients & businesses.
During his time at University and following on from previous ad-hoc Software-Engineering work, Callum founded his own company; offering Full-Stack development, B2B Consulting, and delivering a selection of hardware-software solutions for warehouse stock management.
Callum’s motivation for identifying & tackling real-world problems with technology, and some of his work early in the COVID-19 pandemic with mass distributed manufacturing of 3D-printed PPE led him to devise his fourth-year project.
The award was presented at the 33rd annual ceremony held by Scotland’s tech trade body ScotlandIS as part of the ScotSoft2022 conference in Edinburgh. The awards champion budding talent in the Scottish technology industry and highlight the innovation and ideas coming from Scotland’s university students.
To enter, universities submit the best final year software engineering project from among their undergraduate computing science and software engineering courses for the awards.
Tech talent
Karen Meechan, CEO at ScotlandIS, said: “This year, we are celebrating ideas that display an impressive combination of innovation, creativity, and scalability. Each idea brings a potential real term impact to its related sector, making a genuine contribution.
“For decades we have recognised some of the best minds coming from our universities, demonstrating the strength and breadth of tech talent being developed within Scotland.
“In a sector that shows consistent demand for skilled talent, it’s important that, as an industry, we take time to recognise the individuals who truly embody the definition of talent.”