Computer Science News

UCL CS Students Visit NII Tokyo

From 12 to 16 February 2018, a team of six students from UCL Computer Science visited the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo with Dr Ghita Kouadri. This year marks the seventh year of a partnership between UCL Computer Science and the NII.

Abdul-Qadir Ali and Elham Binshaflout acted as joint team leaders, and were joined by classmates John Wilkie, Daniel Munkacsi, Norah Aba Numay and Siqi Miao. All six students were chosen for their professionalism, academic knowledge and motivation.

“Our UCL CS students play a fantastic part in a joint venture with scope for future engineering development,” explained Dr Dean Mohamedally, a Principal Teaching Fellow in UCL CS Software Systems Engineering group. “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.”

The proposed project for the week was to design and implement a point-of-sale system. Dr Kouadri supervised and led the UCL CS students who formed teams and attended a series of lectures on topics such as agile methodologies, product design in software development, Test Driven Development (TDD) and Pair Programming.

There were further opportunities to test out some of these systems first-hand. “After a demonstration of TDD, we were allowed to give it a go ourselves. This was done by modifying a system that simulated a vending machine and required a lot of collaboration between team members. It was a really good team building exercise!”

The week also allowed time for the students to engage with Japanese culture and the sights of Tokyo. “Each of us had the opportunity to tour some interesting sites in Tokyo. Most of the team chose to visit the Imperial Palace, which is about five minutes’ walk from the NII centre. The palace gardens are quite large and have a variety of interesting plants including plum trees that were in blossom. We also learned that the Japanese author Haruki Murakami used to go on jogs around the gardens.”

At the end of the week, Deputy Director General of NII, Dr Shinichi Honiden, expressed his appreciations to both UCL students and the Japanese representatives from the various companies for devoting their time and taking part in this year’s activities.

Dr Mohamedally and Dr Kouadri praised the team’s positive and open attitude to the challenges they were set. “We are proud of our students for representing UCL Computer Science and our Software Systems team with the highest integrity and international stature, with our colleagues in Tokyo.”

 

View the team’s photos in our CS-NII trip Flickr album.


Posted 21 Feb 18 09:53
  • 2019: 5 items
  • 2018: 44 items
  • 2017: 69 items
  • 2016: 65 items
  • 2015: 49 items
  • 2014: 43 items