University of Cumbria Computing and Business projects 2013-14

We have moved into a new Computing facility this year based at Paternoster Row in Carlisle City Centre which is situated in the new Business Interaction Centre. This year the students have been presented with projects sponsored mainly by clients internal to the University (the news of past success is spreading internally!).

• The first project group this year will be using the Lego Mindstorms kit to develop a remotely operated Robotic Avatar. The principle will be similar to the iPad controlled robot shown at TED in February 2013. Ideally the Avatar will display the face of the remote operator on a screen and show a live video and audio feed back to the operator. Think Skype mounted on a remotely controlled vehicle!
• A second project team will be aiming to do something new with freely available open data. This will either have a social enterprise focus or provide some way of generating revenue from such data. The actual task to be achieved and the data to be used is completely open to the students to choose! The early stages are therefore focussing on identifying the range and scope of data sets that are available as well as looking at potential markets and uses for such data.
• The third team this year are working with the Faculty of Health and Science at the University of Cumbria to develop an interactive teaching / assessment tool based around the creation of region tags, time tags and observational recording of videos. The aim is to produce a tool which educators can use to drop in a video and then identify key things in that video (by time, by a specific region in some frames for example). the video can then be watched by a student and their interactions recorded and an assessment / feedback provided on their performance.

The Business School are also running a pilot project this year of the client-led project (we call it the Consultancy Project) on one of the Business Programmes. More details to follow on this as the project takes shape.