With the activities of the SPRING (Sensing and PeRception for INtelliGent systems) group moving to Queen Mary, today we had our first group meeting in the Mile End Graduate Centre, with some wonderful views of the City, including the Shard in the background.

We had most of the team in attendance, with PhD students Pierpaolo Serio and Yufeng Zhang connected via Teams. Luyao Wang, first year PhD candidate in the group, presented her project to the team members, in preparation of her upgrade, a key milestone in a PhD journey. She did an amazing job in summarising her research into fifteen minutes, and received a lot of constructive feedback to improve her work.

LuYao's project is focused on improving the safety of automated driving functions, enhancing our usage of perception sensors'data to improve the robustness of perception and data fusion. In her first year she has already created a dataset for weather classification in the context of driving scenarios, stay tuned to know more.

This meeting came at the end of Prof Valentina Donzella's first week at Queen Mary School of Engineering and Materials Science, a week in which the group celebrated two more outstanding achievements by group members:

• Anima Raham, PhD candidate, has got her paper "Advancing Blink Detection in Driver Monitoring with Improved Eye Landmark Analysis" accepted to ITSC, the flagship conference of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation System Society. A well deserved trip to the Golden Coast awaits you Anima!
• Jocelyn Wang, PhD candidate, has just got her review entitled "A Survey and New Perspective of Sensing in the Dark for Intelligent Transportation Systems" accepted to the IEEE T-ITS, one of the top tier journals in our field. Well done to all the members of the team who supported her: Boda, ZiXiang, Anima, Daniel.

The group is very proud of the work of these three female PhD candidates, they are certainly an inspiration to the next generation of Engineers working on Sensing, Perception and Intelligent Systems.