Our work with BT wins global telecoms award

Our collaboration with BT has won a Global Telecoms Business (GTB) Innovation Award for their joint project AI-R for service delivery.

This recognises our successful partnership to apply artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and novel mixed reality systems for improving the deployment of engineers to deliver service. This is the second time our work with BT has won a GTB award, the first was in 2015.

The GTB Awards recognise the industry’s most innovative and successful project partnerships between the operators and vendors over the last 12 months and showcases the very best projects featuring entries from across the globe. The awards are given to the most innovative projects and initiatives undertaken by organisations in the telecommunications industry.

Getting BT’s engineers to start their day at the right location is a key enabler to delivering services to BT’s customers. Applying AI technologies to optimise resource deployment has led to a 0.5% increase in productivity and a 2.9% reduction in fuel consumption, a saving of over £200,000 a year in fuel costs and further £2 million savings in operational costs. Secondary benefits also include an estimated savings of 2,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide CO2.

We're now working with BT to trial novel mixed reality technologies which allow collaborative working using novel augmented reality holograms. Essex researchers are providing their world leading expertise in the areas of multi objective optimisation, type-2 fuzzy logic systems as well as intelligent environments.

The University of Essex team included Professor Hani Hagras, Andrew Starkey and Anasol Pena-Rios. The BT team was led by Professor Gilbert Owusu and Dr Sid Shakya.