We recently hosted another “Girls Into IT” session in the School, with 30 school pupils learning about and enjoying Computing. The girls built and programmed Lego Mindstorms robots and also learned about Cybersecurity in our networking lab. Here are some photos of the day – very nice to meet you all!
The School was recently nominated for a Times Higher Education Award in the “Most Innovative Business University Collaboration” category. This was for our relationship with the NHS Wales Informatics Service.
Although we did not win, we were delighted to have been nominated for this prestigious award. Here are some staff members at the Awards Ceremony in London.
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!
We are proud of two of our recent graduates, Ryan Vismonte (3rd from left, above) and James Jones (2nd from right) who have secured full time work, just days after graduating from the School of Applied Computing.
Ryan has been employed as a Graduate Engineer with Sony. After a year of training, he will become a Test Engineer for Sony, testing electronic circuit design of producta before they get manufactured for mass production. James has been employed as an Electronic Systems Engineer with Cellnovo where he will be working on diabetes monitoring devices.
Ryan studied on our MEng Computer Systems and Electronics programme and James studied on our BEng Electrical and Electronics Engineering programme. Many congratulations to you both from all of the staff in SOAC!
We have some winners in our SOAC “Best Project” Awards! These awards are presented to 3rd year students who have achieved the highest mark in their category for their Final Year Project. Some categories were very close run this year. Congratulations to all students – the standard was extremely high. Here are photos of the winners (with some staff sneaking in too!)
Myles Anderson – Best Project (Survey)
Adam Packer (left) – Best Project (Research) and Dan Tucker – Best Project (Development)
Simon Downes – Best Project (Experiment)
James Jones – Best Project (Electronics)
Our Degree Show at Techhub in High Street, Swansea was another great success last Thursday. Our graduating 3rd year and MEng/MComp 4th years and MSc students were showing their project work which was undertaken during their final year. We were joined by family, friends and employers. Here are some photos of the evening:
Thanks to Associate Professor Nik Whitehead and BSc Computer Networks student Simon Downes who spoke in our Faculty Lunchtime Research Committee yesterday. Nik spoke about beacons (Internet of Things) and Simon spoke about environmental control via a network. Here are some photos of them in action. If you missed it and would like to catch up, students and staff can find the slides and a link to the video of the talks on Moodle.
The School are excited to have been awarded a Bronze Green Impact again this year, well done to SOAC Green Team Sue Maw, Sue Williams and Gaynor Thomas!
Student Simon Downes from BSc (Hons) Computer Networks won an award for his environmental-related project work including work on automatic temperature control for computer labs – Simon will be giving a talk at our Faculty Lunchtime Research Seminar 1pm-3pm on Wed 17th May in MH503 if you’d like to know more!
Finally, Gaynor won an “Environmental Hero” award for her work in drastically reducing paper consumption in SOAC by leading the move to online module boxes (and the associated online-only submission from students for most assignments)
Well done everyone and here are some pictures! For Doctor Who fans, the awards were held in the library used in the episode “Silence in the Library” 
🙂 #soachasbeensaved
UWTSD Applied Computing Blog 