Awards with Industry

The winners of the Callista Tertiary Student Project in the 2009 iAwards in NSW, for instance, were UNSW COMPUTING students Min'an Tan and Andrew Clayphan. Their project created a new way to evaluate dynamic quality control mechanisms for internet-scale software systems.

This projects was developed by the students as part of their final undergraduate year course of study. The results achieved in these, and other exceptional UNSW COMPUTING projects, show just how rewarding an undergraduate course at UNSW can be!

Min'an and Andrew were supervised by NICTA researchers working in the ArMaTure project, which is creating technologies to help companies work together with fluid and adaptive inter-operation. ArMaTure collaborates with companies working in the Australian lending industry, and also with government departments.

"Many of the UNSW student projects we supervise were completed in collaboration with industry partners," says NICTA researcher Liming Zhu, adding, "It's great when industry awards recognise the excellent work done by these students."

Student projects can create ideas at the cutting edge of research. As well as winning the iAward, Min'an and Andrew's project work was included in papers published at the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing. Their supervisor, NICTA researcher Jenny Liu, explains: "A research publication from your undergraduate project will put you in a great position if you want to apply for a PhD scholarship."

But it's not just awards and publications that students are winning. "Many of my students have got jobs with companies because they have seen demonstrations from the project." Liming Zhu says. "A great student project can help you launch a great career, whether you want to work in industry or do a PhD."

Min'an and Andrew's success follows from Toby Rahilly who won the National Callista Tertiary Student Project iAward in 2008 for his "Experiments in Concurrent Implementations of TransLucid"