An Abertay University graduate was awarded a top industry prize for her innovative space balloon project at the Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards.

Amy Parent was selected by a panel of judges for the awards hosted by ScotlandIS, the trade body for the digital technologies industry.

Her dissertation project focused on a system that can be used to control communications from high altitude balloons.

She won the Leidos Software Engineering Project Award for her work in developing the reusable technology, which can be used by meteorologists and researchers.

Abertay staff nominated Amy, who completed a Bsc (Hons) Computing this year.

A member of Abertay Space Agency, she is also part of a project seeking to launch to break the world record for the highest 360-degree pictures taken from a balloon on the edge of space.

She said: “I was incredibly grateful to be nominated as it’s a project I was passionate about and have put a lot of work into.”

The Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards are given for the best undergraduate software projects drawn from across all students studying computer science and software engineering in Scotland.

An awards ceremony was held at Edinburgh International Conference Centre on Thursday October 5.

Each university nominates the top software engineering project submitted by its final year undergraduates.

The projects are judged against a number of criteria including Level of Innovation, Level of Knowledge, Previous Research, Commercial/Social Relevance, Quality of Engineering, Planning &Organisation, Quality of Presentation and Technical Difficulty.

Abertay lecturer Dr Jackie Archibald said: “Amy produced an excellent project. It was one of many developed by 4th year students on BSc Computing that embraced advanced aspects of technology.

“BSc (Hons) Computing at Abertay gives students the opportunity to explore and develop technology from desktop to web to mobile and beyond.”