A key element of all of our degree courses is the importance attached to project work. We believe that you need to be given first hand experience of working on real practical problems that are both challenging and relevant to any future career. This means working on several different projects throughout your course, either on your own or within a team. We always supervise your work, giving you help and guidance, but you will also take the lead in coming up with ideas and designs, organising workloads, choosing appropriate implementations and making sure that the project stays on track.
These project skills are highly valued by industry and we make sure that our graduates develop plenty of experience.
The second-year group project is a good example. The remit is to design and implement a software product to the point that it could be marketed and sold, usually as shareware on the internet. This means a team of students coming up with an idea, setting out a design and specification and then completing an implementation which will work for the customer.
On the G403 four-year course, there is also a group project in the third year, in which teams of students design and implement an interactive computer game. This can be done on a variety of specialist equipment, such as our single-seat motion pod or surround screen immersive room, or over a distributed network of workstations. These projects are often supervised by collaborators from industry, and our annual third-year Games Day when we assess and play the games is one of the highlights of the year. Final-year individual projects form a critical part of all the degree courses and are given high priority. They are carried out with a member of staff and one of our research groups, often in close collaboration with an Industrial Partner or a group from another subject within the University, such as Medicine, Archaeology or Mathematics. We suggest ideas for projects, usually relating to our research or prompted by suggestions from external partners, although we are also happy to explore any project ideas that you have yourself.
Michael Howard BSc Computer Science graduate
Creating jazz improvisation using probabilistic algorithms
The goal of this project was to design an automated system that could
create an improvised jazz solo using stochastic algorithms and Markov
chain models. The system was capable of parsing a chord sequence of a
number of sections, each with variable length, and creating a MIDI file
that contained both the chords and a novel jazz solo. The application was
capable of both export and playback of the MIDI file. Part of the
difficulty in generating improvisation is that a musician needs to
develop a vocabulary of scales and phrases that he or she can play
intuitively. A Vocabulary Engine was used to approximate realistic
human improvisation through the use of 'phrases' that could be stored
and reused. Listener experiments were conducted with professional
musicians to compare the system output with solos created by real
human musicians. Results showed that the system was capable of creating
jazz solos that were comparable to a real advanced-intermediate level
pianist.
On most of the courses, the project work is spread over the whole year, culminating in the submission of a project report and a Project Demonstration Day in which all the projects are presented and assessed.
The exception is the final-year individual project on the four-year MEng course, on which you work full-time and which also involves producing a business plan. The work usually involves implementing a proof of principle demonstrator of some new technology or application which then underlies a potential business. The project culminates with the submission of the business plan and project report, and demonstrations of the work at our fourth-year project day. Working full-time on this type of project will give you valuable experience whatever your subsequent career turns out to be. In fact several of our graduates have used this experience as a start-point for their own business.
