Centre for Software Innovation

The Academy offers a managed Internship programme, bringing together ICT students, academics and industry practitioners. It offers organisations the equivalent of a term-length student internship, in which students gain exposure to an applied culture and environment outside of the classroom.

High-performing, highly motivated students will be selected to work in small groups mainly on industry-sponsored, short-term projects with mentoring/coaching provided by industry practitioners and academics. Projects will be professionally managed by an experienced, Academy-based industry project manager.

Student Application

Company Sign Up

External Links: 

Academy Wiki

Projects

The CSI Academy commenced in the summer of 2004/2005. It has operated extremely successfully with close to 100 students and over 40 companies participating since that time. Here are some typical CSI Academy project exemplars and their coverage for your information.

E-Commerce

An e-commerce company used an academy student team to investigate the feasibility of implementing a new secure e-commerce standard into their core product. The company was not convinced that they had the capability or scale to implement the standard but saw that the standard would in the medium term be required by their customers. The student team analysed the standard, available off-the-shelf components and in-house expertise, and proposed an architecture and a methodological approach to implement the standard. On the basis of their report the company implemented a product based on the standard & proposed architecture within 6 months.

Online Learning

A company in the online learning space had developed a framework for implementation of e-learning systems. Configuration of the framework, however, involved significant amounts of repetitive coding. An academy student team investigated the potential for a domain-specific visual language based on an application of the Microsoft DSL Tools technology platform. The aim of the project was to understand how DSVLs and the Microsoft toolkit could be leveraged by the company. Results of the technology exploration were captured by the company in a wiki for reuse by other staff.

Mobile E-Commerce

A company that had developed a mobile e-commerce solution had issues with scalability of their software architecture and usability of the mobile client and desktop interfaces. An academy student team undertook a usability evaluation of the interfaces and a proof-of-concept implementation of a revised service based architecture. Recommendations from both the usability evaluation and the architecture investigation formed the basis for subsequent revisions of the company's product.

Legacy to SOA Architecture

A company developing enterprise systems for a specific market segment was commencing a re-architecture of a legacy product to a new service oriented approach. As part of this they wished to investigate performance and scalability of various architectural choices they had made. An academy student team assisted them with these investigations. In particular they examined the performance of the Hibernate object/relational persistency framework against more conventional JDBC-based approaches under very high data volume conditions. The results were used by the company to decide on their object-relational layer strategy.