Over the past four weeks, I’ve had the privilege of working with 28 Chemical Engineering students from Imperial College London as part of the department’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP).

The target was to give this talented group of students exposure to how new products are developed in ABB. All the activities were focused on Generative AI and how it can be applied to assist with the teaching within the Imperial Carbon Capture Pilot Plant.

We started with an introduction to different software development methodologies to give a flavour of how ABB creates and brings new solutions to market. We provided the students access to some pre-release test software and the students arranged themselves into three groups. They designed test plans and performed early-stage user acceptance testing on two new Generative AI features we are developing within our self-service support platform My Measurement Assistant+.

The work the students performed was of an exceptional quality and I really enjoyed the professional presentations. The results and great feedback provided will be directly applied to enrich our developments before we release. As part of our collaboration with Imperial every Chemical Engineering student can have access to My Measurement Assistant+ to assist with their studies and work on the carbon capture plant. It was great to hear firsthand feedback on the features that are most needed by the students to assist with their studies.

Most of the students had never performed in a Hackathon before so this was a great chance to think about problems in the plant that needed solving. They then had to innovate, develop value propositions, business models as well as figure out how to create a prototype that would fulfil the brief - all in a very short time period. The quality of the entries and ideas was very high. Each group not only presented their solutions in a pitch session but also created entertaining videos describing their solutions, it was clear they had a lot of fun working on this hackathon.

As judges, we hugely enjoyed the pitch sessions and it was very hard to decide on the eventual winning team. The solution that won the competition was a gamified representation of the Carbon Capture Pilot Plant which included a Generative AI digital twin of the senior lecturer responsible for teaching on the plant – a fantastic idea that can be realised and would add huge value to the students learning about the plant. Many of the teams plan to continue developing their solutions and one group was even talking about how to release it globally.