2012 winners - Graphical System Design Achievement Awards

This year's awards were held at The Institution of Engineering and Technology, Savoy Place, London on 19 November. Dr James Truchard, President, CEO and Co-founder of National Instruments attended the ceremony, giving recognition to innovation and engineering excellence in the UK and Ireland.

Dave Wilson, NI Director of Academic and Proficiency Programs, announced the Application of the Year, highlighting that "NI helps engineers and scientists find solutions for some of the world's toughest challenges, ranging from improving medical device development to bringing mobile phone coverage to rural areas, and we want to take the time to honour them. The Graphical System Design Achievement Awards has become more than an awards ceremony; it's a forum for those who are changing the world".

Application of the Year 2012 and winner of the Advanced Control Systems category: Controlling a Hydraulic Motion Compensated Gangway to Improve Access to Offshore Wind Turbines by Andrew Clegg Industrial Systems and Control, demonstrated a complex cyber-physical system that epitomises the graphical system design approach for building advanced measurement and control systems. The Turbine Access System will have a positive impact on the lives of turbine maintenance personnel, as well as on renewable energy creation and is a superb example of UK engineering at its best.

Other winning applications were recognised for their engineering expertise and innovation using graphical system design within the following categories:

Transportation: Thales UK Tests London's Underground Rail Network With CompactRIO and LabVIEW by Anthony Afonso, Thales UK.

Energy: A Green Energy Solution for use in Remote Locations and Developing Nations by Dr Mike Rendall, Diverse Energy.

Life Sciences: Improving Ultrasonic Tumour Therapy With Passive Acoustic Detection by Christian Coviello & Jamie Collin, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford.

Automated Test: LabVIEW Balances the nEXT Generation of Turbo Molecular Pumps by Gerard Johns, Edwards.

Student Design Competition: Kinesthesia - A Kinect Based Rehabilitation and Surgical Analysis System by Chris Norman, Dominic Clark & Barnaby Cotter, University of Leeds.

Special Recognition Award for Graphical System Design in the Classroom: Creating a Unified Platform for Engineering Teaching and Research at Kingston University by Gordana Collier & Andrzej Ordys, Kingston University London.

Special Recognition Award for British IP Commercialisation: Take Any Bottle Onto an Aircraft Thanks to Cobalt Light Systems and LabVIEW by David Crawford and Stuart Bonthron, Cobalt Light Systems.

To learn more about this year's finalists and the Graphical System Design Achievement Awards, including how to submit an entry to the 2013 contest, visit uk.ni.com/gsdawards.