Newsroom team
23 November 2018: The nexus between theory and practice is what drives the University of Canberra’s Students + Industry Program. The Program enables students to engage in a different industry experience, which adds to their learning in a direct, hands-on way.
This semester’s celebration of the Student + Industry Program was held on 2 November. Hosted by the Faculty of Science and Technology in collaboration with Careers UC, the event allows selected students to present their project work to the broader UC and Canberra community.
The celebration showcases the University’s partnerships with industry and research. It gives students and the faculty an opportunity to hear from industry as well as creating an opportunity to strike up new conversations with industry and professional bodies.
Duncan Hellmers, the Rapid Innovation Manager at Breville, provided the keynote address and spoke about how his team of engineers and designers bring new and innovative products to the market, especially by using everyday components to develop prototypes in very short time periods to gauge feasibility and user interest in a highly competitive market.
The collaborative event featured presentations from seven student projects, which were selected for their diversity, quality and maturity.
One of the projects undertaken by UC student James Noja is the PwC Industry Based Learning program. This initiative involves a talented student from the University of Canberra’s Bachelor of Business Informatics Degree in a six-month, credit-awarded, full-time placement with PwC’s Technology Consulting team.
Another project, GourmetBot, developed by Hayune Lee, Christian Moir and Hans Oon, focused on developing technologies for an industrial robot that interactively cooks food with humans.
Dex-Net 2 Implementation, by Declan Laros, utilises the Dex-Net 2 research paper by Berkley automation, which is designed around planning the best possible grasp on an object by utilising a neutral network, trained from simulated data, and then using this planned grasp to pick up the object.
How Big Data will influence security and privacy strategies is a project developed by Dave Teh. Big Data and data science offer individuals, organisations and societies new capabilities in extracting data, analysing information and deriving useful insights. However, these attractive capabilities expose us to new, and as yet unassessed, security and privacy risks. Dave Teh’s study aims to highlight the importance of a thorough consideration of information security in a Big Data environment.
The Arboretum Sensor Network Platform is an innovative project by Dinusha Sandirigama, Sushant Ghimire and Jade Chitts. This project is a real-time, dynamically controlled, synchronised sleeping, wireless mesh sensor network to automate the collection of soil moisture data at the National Arboretum Canberra.
Integrating IoT Devices to the Cloud is a project by Evan Paterson, Stephen Guo and Antonio Njeim. The overarching aim of this project is to connect different IoT devices to the Cloud using ROS to control and collect data to be analysed. The aim of the group’s project was to work with the drone and connect it to a Linux machine running ROS. Within this semester the group managed to get the simulator working so they could control the simulated drone from the Linux machine.
Robot Integration to the Cloud of Things is by Ward Barakat and Kelvin de Mamiel and, as the title explains, Ward and Kelvin are working towards robot integration to the cloud.
These innovative projects were presented to the audience of industry and professional representative on 2 November at Careers UC following a keynote address from Duncan Hellmers, Rapid Innovation Manager at Breville.
A project feedback session moderated by Dr Damith Herath, UC Faculty of Science and Technology, and an industry panel and networking session provided students and event attendees with further clarity and purpose around each project, as well as an opportunity to share developments and future collaborative ideas.
The Student and Industry concept is vital to ensure the University courses and programs being undertaken are relevant and real-world ready, preparing students for the work force now and into the future.
The Student + Industry guest list included:
- Xero
- Instaclustr
- accenture
- wipro
- Epicon
- EvoEnergy
- TCS
- PwC
- ISACA
- APS ICT grad and cadetship programs
- CBRIN
- ACS
- Engineers Australia
- Ok Rdy
