Many younger student visited the School of Applied Computing today for a Taster Day. Students from Dyffryn Haf, Coleg Ceredigion and Bryntawe spent time programming Lego Mindstorms robots and making a computer game using a software package called Unity. They also did Web Design and a networking demo.
Great to meet so many young enthusiatic people today – here are some photos of them in action!
Our first Faculty Lunchtime Research Seminar of the academic year kicked off today with Mr Terry Stubbs, Research Development Manager, Welsh Government. He talked about “SMART funding, delivery and support in Wales and the benchmark in approving projects.” He is SMART Innovation expert for Universities and Colleges, South Wales, collaborative research, development and innovation projects.
Terry’s talk centred on ways to access funding for projects to benefit Wales, both now and into the future.
Many thanks to Terry for his talk! Staff and students can access the video of Terry’s talk via Moodle.
On Friday, 13th October, many of the BSc/HND Computer Networks and Cybersecurity students visited CISCO HQ at Bedford Lakes, near London. We made and early start from Swansea, arriving at CISCO just before 11am.
CISCO are a world leader in networking and communications for the Internet and we were fortunate that they had agreed to give us a tour and demonstration of their latest technologies. We started with some insight into CISCO’s social responsibilities (they are named most years in the “100 best companies to work for” list.)
Following this, we toured the facilities:
We were also shown the latest video conferencing facilities, which include features such as facial recognition to detect the person who is currently speaking and focus on them:
Following the tour, CISCO associates told us about some routes graduates take to join CISCO as employees. One such method is the CISCO Sales Associate program (CSAP). If successful, candidates train for a year (fully paid) before starting their new roles. Some of our students are now planning to apply. Since they will already have gained CCNA (possibly CCNP) certifications by the end of their studies, this will give them a headstart in the selection procedures.
After lunch, we saw even more impressive video conferencing facilities which are designed to be as realistic as possible, with participants on the screen being kept at actual size and the use of directional audio:
We then had a cyber-security demo, and were interested to see that UWTSD had a traffic spike on Friday 5th October 2017! Wonder what caused it?! We also saw the various procedures CISCO have in place to deal with zero-day attacks (an attack that is brand new)
Finally, we had a demonstration of the CISCO Spark smart whiteboard which allows people remote and local to collaborate. On the picture below, you can see the participants at the top of the board. One of them was at the Oslo office. One of our students also collaborated via their phone.
All in all it was a very worthwhile trip – many thanks to Kapilan for organising it and for CISCO staff for hosting us!
UWTSD Applied Computing Blog 