[2015] Marija Pinkute, a final year MInf student, whose project is aimed at the automatic generation of Tweet messages for news articles, came second in the prestigious award. Image The Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards, now in their 26th year, are given to the best undergraduate software projects, drawn from across all students studying computer science and software engineering in Scotland. Each university submits the best final year undergraduate software engineering project from amongst their students. Marija Pinkute, a final year MInf student, whose project is aimed at the automatic generation of Tweet messages for news articles, came second in the prestigious award. The Awards are organised by ScotlandIS, the trade body for the digital technologies industry and were presented at the ScotSoft2015 dinner in front of over 600 guests from across the industry. Brilliant young minds defying computing science and programming The aim of Marija Pinkute’s project is to automatically generate summary tweet messages from news articles. Going further than current title and caption generation systems, her model takes an article, selects the most important pieces of information and combines them together to produce a more complete subject of 140 characters. Marija was supervised by Professor Mirella Lapata. Marija is about to receive a First Class Masters of Informatics (MInf) with Honours degree. She lived and studied in four different countries before completing the International Diploma Programme in her homeland Lithuania. She entered directly into the second year of Computer Science (BSc) at the University of Edinburgh. After two years, she switched to the MInf degree. Her academic interests lie in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering. Marija received a cheque for £2000 from sponsor BCS, and a trophy from ScotlandIS. This article was published on 2024-03-18
