On Wednesday 6 June, a group of students were given the opportunity to present their 2018 Industry Exchange Network (IXN) projects at the British Computer Society.  

The “Talent IT!” event, held at the BCS Headquarters in Covent Garden, was open to anyone with an interest in IT, academia, research collaboration and the societal impact of technology. This was a fantastic opportunity for students and academic staff from the Department of Computer Science to discuss how businesses and organisations from healthcare to finance, from education to retail, could benefit from joining the Industry Exchange Network.

The Industry Exchange Network (IXN) was created at UCL by Dr Dean Mohamedally & Dr Graham Roberts (UCL Computer Science), and Geoff Hughes (Microsoft UK) in 2011, as an educational methodology enabling students to enhance their degree training in a wide variety of real-world problem-solving projects as part of their courses. Now in its seventh year, the IXN continues to match real-world clients and their problems with UCL Computer Science students, from BSc (Hons) 1st year level through the MSc level.

Following a warm welcome and introductions, Dr Dean Mohamedally and Geoff Hughes took to the floor with their collaborators Professor Neil Sebire, Great Ormond Street Hospital, and Tom Winstanley of NTT DATA UK. The panel session, entitled ‘Robots, Smart Glasses, Speech Services, Oh My!’, gave the group an opportunity to discuss the diverse range of projects students have worked on this year, and the benefits of exposing students to real-world problems, to deliver solutions to clients with niche requirements and expectations. “Having run the programme for seven years, we have seen students develop invention and inspiration, and our graduates go on to change the world, “explained Dr Mohamedally, Principal Teaching Fellow in UCL CS Software Systems Engineering group at UCL. “Our students play a fantastic part in a joint venture with scope for future engineering development.”

 “The industry sector for international software engineering teams is growing significantly as companies rely more on technologies and processes from multiple regions of the world. Bringing this process into academia is the next logical step.”

 Several teams of CS undergrads then got the opportunity to present their project topics which centred around augmenting and improving the hospital. This was a great experience for them to present to CIOs and CTOs in the BCS audience. UCL MSc CS candidates also took part with their kick off of their GOSH projects working on Proof of Concepts such as sensor fusion in clinical settings, AI in medical dialogue, chatbots for trainee medical students and augmented vision for healthcare workers. 

The session ended with a call for “Machine Learning Readiness” on medical and health related data, especially for past archives of health research. This is an important call to action for medical research groups, charities supporting health and public health grant providers to consider the future of their data.

We would like to offer our heartfelt thanks to the British Computer Society for the opportunity to share this opportunity among their network.

We would also like to congratulate the students for the professionalism they showed delivering their talks and demonstrations, and taking audience questions.

Would you like to talk to our team about joining the IXN? Please find out more here.

To learn more about the specialist BCS events calendar in your area, search here.