Student projects

Student projects with external clients provide a unique opportunity for companies to access the expertise of our students and staff. They provide the space to explore new ideas and technologies, but are also a great recruitment opportunity allowing you to observe the work of selected final-year students in the context of your own business.

Projects are supervised by staff with you, the client, providing requirements, advice, technical support and feedback as needed. Please contact us if you want to suggest a topic. In order to explore any of these options, please send us a small project brief.

Second year group projects

Software Engineering projects (Year 2)

These are typical software engineering projects developed by teams of 2nd year students. The focus is on group work, project management, as well as on developing an understanding of software development processes and methodologies. This includes analysing requirements, evaluating design solutions, implementation, testing as well as reflecting on the legal, economic and professional impact of their work.

The group projects start in February and are completed in May. If you are interested, let us know by November of the year before.

Final year projects

Computer Science projects (Year 3/4)

These projects run throughout the third year of our undergraduate programmes, so students are close to graduation. Topics vary, but all projects consist of a practical software development component as well as providing documentation covering the technical and engineering background, requirements, design, implementation and testing.

The projects run from October to May of the following academic year. Proposals are published in March.

Industrial Mathematics projects (Year 3)

In this module our third year undergraduate students in mathematics apply their mathematical thinking, modelling, and data analytics skills to tackle real business problems. Students work in groups and in close collaboration with the industrial partners who provided the business problems. The projects start by mid-October and are completed by the end of the following May.

The list of business problems is finalised and shared with the students by mid-September. If you are interested in this opportunity, please do not hesitate to get in contact. We welcome new projects every year.

MSc projects

Computing individual project (MSc)

These projects are the final part of our MSc degrees. Students are often more experienced and have a variety of IT-related backgrounds. Projects range widely from software development via exploring new technologies, to research. The MSc projects run twice a year, for 3 months full time: a Summer round from mid-June to mid-September, and a Winter round February to May.

The project proposals are published in November for the February - May period, and in March for the June - September period.

Data Analysis for Business Intelligence projects (MSc)

These projects are final year MSc student projects aiming collaborating with industrial partners in solving real-world industrial problems. Students work with data in business environments, using mathematical, statistical and computational skills – including data mining and practical database coding skills.

The project proposals are published in May for the July - September period, and in February for the March - June period.

Actuarial Sciences with Data Analytics projects (MSc)

These projects combine technical expertise and transferable business skills of our MSc students in the worlds of insurance, pensions, healthcare, banking, business management and risk assessment. Our students bring mathematical and statistical knowledge and problem-solving skills to help businesses in evaluating the long-term financial implications of the business decisions.

The projects are embedded within modules starting in October and ending in April.

Examples

We have particularly good experiences with projects of an exploratory nature, such as feasibility studies into new technologies or approaches, on behalf of industry partners. Examples of projects include:

• Integration of video access and control into a web client: This is part of an ongoing cooperation, which also includes development of mobile clients. See Security Guards' Roving Eye - University saves firm £80,000.
• Integration of security solutions into a SaaS dashboard: Various security tools for monitoring, role-based access control, firewalls, etc. were integrated into a single SaaS-based management and information front end.
• jTouch - An extension to the touch event interface within modern web browsers: A high-level multi-touch interface for javascript was implemented to simplify web application development for mobile devices.
• A refactoring tool for removing side effects from Java methods: Program analysis was used to find out how to split a method with side effects into two, using the "Separate Query from Modifier" refactoring to improve code quality.
• Website interaction mining: Analysis of web interaction traces (access logs for a given website), to discover patterns of user behaviour. This information can be used to customise websites to such behavioural patterns.
• A mobile app for the Museum of Photography: Just an example of a variety of such projects, where a Web application is migrated to a mobile app, mostly based on Android because of familiarity with Java.