The lift in my halls had been broken for nine days. A paper sign on the doors read Engineer Notified, and the edges had started to curl. Every morning I walked down six flights past that sign and thought the same thing. Somewhere in a database, this lift exists as a ticket. A human had to notice it, type it, route it, schedule it. By day nine, the paper was older than the problem. I remember standing on the third-floor landing one rainy Tuesday, late for a lecture, thinking the lift knows it’s broken. Why is paper doing the talking?
That question has followed me ever since.
I’m a Computer Science student at the University of East London, and most evenings I’m building AI agents that whisper to American truck dispatchers. They scan thousands of freight loads in seconds, matching trucks to cargo so fewer lorries roll across highways half-empty. It sounds small. It isn’t. Empty miles burn diesel for nothing, releasing millions of tonnes of carbon just to move air. My agents don’t drive trucks. They just help trucks stop wasting themselves.
That’s when sustainability stopped feeling like a poster on a wall and started feeling like a verb. Efficiency is sustainability. Every wasted trip, every replaced-too-early machine, every lift waiting nine days for a paper sign to do a sensor’s job, all of it is a city forgetting to listen to itself.
This summer, I’m flying to Tampa to join the Tampa Bay Wave accelerator with Sensfix, and this is where the broken lift finally gets its voice. Sensfix builds the nervous system for connected facilities: IoT sensors, AI, and mixed reality, stitched into a platform where devices self-schedule, self-dispatch, and self-ticket their own repairs. Machines that say, I am unwell, here is what I need, here is when. The result isn’t just convenience. It’s a 50% drop in mean time to repair, a 75% jump in first-visit success, and a failure rate squeezed below 1%. In plain English: fewer service trucks crossing town for nothing. Equipment that lives longer instead of being tossed. Buildings that breathe more efficiently. Cities that waste less of everything: fuel, parts, hours, attention.
I want to be in the room where that gets built. Not because Florida is sunny (though I hear it is), but because the problems Sensfix solves are the same ones that left me climbing six flights of stairs, and the same ones my dispatcher agents chip away at one load at a time. A smart city isn’t one with more screens. It’s one where the machines, the trucks, the buildings, and the people stop talking past each other.
I have a notebook full of half-finished ideas about how software can quietly remove waste from the world. This scholarship would put me inside one of the companies actually doing it.
The lift in my halls eventually got fixed. The next one shouldn’t have to wait nine days.
