Saturday 31 March 2018

Hanging Garden at Nineveh: the Assyrian World Wonder


Hanging Garden at Nineveh: the Assyrian World Wonder later attributed to Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon the 3D model was developed with the Computing department at the University of Northampton. For more details on this project contact Ali Al-Sherbaz







All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with. Twitter: @scottturneruon

Saturday 24 March 2018

Blockchain: No Thunder No Wonder

On 12th March 2018 two members, Dr Ali Al-Sherbaz and Dr Scott Turner of the University of Northampton's Computing team presented a session for the BCS Northampton group and the wider public on Blockchain. During the presentation  some of the work that has been happening at the University ( https://computingnorthampton.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/bcs-northampton-blockchain.html) including work from both staff and students was used as a vehicle for discussion. 

A lively, enjoyable and engaging discussion happened; with various members of the audience raising their views on blockchain and bitcoin, and where they felt the future of this technology lay. Below are the slides from the session:





All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with. Twitter: @scottturneruon

Friday 23 March 2018

University helps inspires next generation to get into computer coding

Taken from: https://www.northampton.ac.uk/news/university-inspires-next-generation-to-get-into-computer-coding/

Winning Team with WCIT Master
The University of Northampton is playing a role in trying to plug Europe’s IT skills gap, by inspiring the next generation to get into computer coding.
The European Commission has predicted that in 2020, there will be a shortfall of almost one million ICT professionals in Europe. An O2 report also finds that over 745,000 new ‘digital workers’ will be needed by 2017.
Computing and coding was introduced into the UK school curriculum, in 2014, and a year later, the University of Northampton kick-started a project to help further inspire primary aged children to get into IT.
The University joined forces with Northamptonshire County Council, the Code Club and The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists (WCIT) to launch a coding competition for county schools.
The initiative has been such a success, that the competition has now been opened up to surrounding counties, with a view to a UK-wide contest being organised by 2020.
Scott Turner, Associate Professor and Principal Lecturer in Computing, said: “The competition is something the Computing team at the University is proud to be involved with and believe it not only fits with our passion for promoting the relevance of Computing, but gets across to children how much fun programming is.
“The aspect of fun is crucial, because if it’s fun, all of a sudden it doesn’t feel like ‘work’ and that will hopefully spark a passion inside the children which will stay with them as they get older.
“If they see coding as something they can do at such an early age, they lose their fear and they should become more open to continue studying computing as they get older. And with the demand for digital workers ever increasing, the opportunities for the next generation will be countless.”
The latest competition, which was for eight to 11-year-olds, saw school groups, code clubs and even individual children produce videos of a game they had written, using the Scratch coding system, to promote healthy lifestyles.
The overall winners were Team Jarl, which comprised pupils from Wellingborough’s Park Junior School – pictured.
Headteacher, David Tebbutt, said: “We have put a great deal of time developing a whole school approach into coding. This competition allowed some of our more able children and members of our ‘Coding Crew’ to develop their skills further. Working together in collaboration as part of a team, the children were able to hone their skills and share ideas with their peers.
“We are very grateful to WCIT as sponsor, Code Club, The University of Northampton and Northamptonshire County Council for all their support in developing this competition. We very much look forward to the 2018/19 competition and are already planning potential entries.”
All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with. Twitter: @scottturneruon

Tuesday 20 March 2018

Computing Publications January-March 2018





  1. Al-Mahmood, A. and Opoku Agyeman, M. (2018) On wearable devices for motivating patients with upper limb disability via gaming and home rehabilitation. Paper presented to: IEEE International Workshop on Internet of Things: Networking Applications and Technologies (IoTNAT 2018), Barcelona, Spain, 23-26 April 2018. (Accepted)
  2. Edan, N. M.Al-Sherbaz, A. and Turner, S. J. (2018) Design and implement a hybrid WebRTC signalling mechanism for unidirectional & bi-directional video conferencing. International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE). 8(1), pp. 390-399. 2088-8708.
  3. Edan, N. M.Al-Sherbaz, A. and Turner, S. J. (2018) Performance evaluation of resources management in WebRTC for a scalable communication. In: Computing Conference 2018 Proceedings. London: IEEE. (Accepted)
  4. Ofori-Attah, E.Wang, X. and Opoku Agyeman, M. (2018) A survey of low power design techniques for last level caches. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 0302-9743. (Accepted)
  5. Slavova, Y. and Mu, M. (2018) A comparative study of the learning outcomes and experience of VR in education. In: IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR 2018). Germany: IEEE. (Accepted)
  6. Yu, Y.Kaiya, H.Yoshioka, N.Hu, Z.Washizaki, H.Xiong, Y. and Hosseinian-Far, A. (2018) Goal modelling for security problem matching and pattern enforcement. International Journal of Secure Software Engineering (IJSSE). 8(4) 1947-3036. (In Press)

All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with. Twitter: @scottturneruon

Sunday 18 March 2018

Miniproject: Excel to produce simple Neural Network (Google Sheets can be used)

In a previous post, Experiments in Teaching Neural Networks , examples of how to build a neuron in Excel and how to train a single neuron were shown and these examples were taken from exercises the students build in the class.

This year a new activity was produced that uses the ideas from the build a neuron in Excel activity but does this multiple times in the same worksheet, so we have three neurons. The exercise then connects the outputs from two of them to the inputs of a third neuron building an XOR gate (which a single simple neuron can not implement), the video below shows all of the stages.





Does it have to be in Excel? No, it works as well in Google Sheets, as do the others build a neuron in Excel and how to train a single neuron.

All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with. Twitter: @scottturneruon

Friday 16 March 2018

How good are our graduates? Shannon O'Dell

Taken from https://www.northampton.ac.uk/news/graduate-shannon-leads-team-of-12-for-communications-giant/


Shannon O'Dell
The confidence and knowledge a Computing graduate gained from her time at the University of Northampton helped her to snare a hotly contested job with a communications giant.
Shannon O’Dell leads a team of 12 apprentices in her role as Dynamic Operations Service Lead with BT, at the firm’s operations centre in Ipswich.
Shannon, who graduated in 2016 from the Computer Network Engineering course, is also responsible for customer experience and service reporting at the centre, based in Adastral Park, which is fast-becoming the technology super hub for Europe.
Shannon said: “I would recommend the course to others as it helped me develop and grow my ideas, supplying me with the confidence to apply and succeed in a large corporation such as BT.
“Throughout my course there were opportunities to expand and research areas of interest including security, artificial intelligence and also the Internet of Things. There was no fixed route of learning, with the course supplying a varied selection of subject area. The approachability of lecturers was also a strong positive for me, as they were always keen to discuss theories and ideas.
“My degree gave me the foundation knowledge which I now apply to our strategies and processes as part of the leadership team, cascading these skills down to our operational team members.”
Shannon added: “My ambition for my future career is to continue to grow and learn about the ever-evolving technologies by helping manage and deliver them to the public domain. This may take the route of career climbing but also side steps into the various different organisations to help me gain the skills to be an excellent engineer. I also hope to become a chartered engineer in the future.”



All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with. Twitter: @scottturneruon

Tuesday 13 March 2018

Computing for Social Good 3 : Emmanuel receives prestigious tech award

Taken from: 

Emmanuel receives prestigious tech award for first class effort








A graduate teaching assistant at the University of Northampton, who overcame academic struggles and is now taking on a PhD, has been awarded an IT Award from the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists (WCIT).
Emmanuel Ofori-Attah enrolled on the Computer System Engineering course in 2014, with limited knowledge about programming, but a determination to learn.
Whilst many would have quit or changed courses, I decided to continue with the course having faith and believing that God will guide me through even though I was struggling with understanding basic programming concepts,” said Emmanuel. “Despite all these problems, I was able to overcome the obstacles and barriers and achieved a first class degree.
Emmanuel’s story caught the attention of the WCIT’s judging panel, which awarding him the Outstanding IT Student Prize 2018.
The awards were created to recognise outstanding undergraduate and postgraduate IT students within the UK, with students from 12 universities shortlisted.
Emmanuel said: “This award means a lot to me and most importantly, it shows that no matter how hard, your course is, you can still overcome it.
“What I love about computing is that it allows me to bring my ideas into life. I love how the modules are set up and the support you receive from staff is amazing.  I think the relationship the lecturers create with the students makes the course more enjoyable.
“In the future, I hope to stay in academia and hopefully become a teacher, allowing me to offer back the help I received from my lecturers.
WCIT Master, and founder of the awards, Dr Stefan Fafinski said: “As well as celebrating academic success, the WCIT Student IT Awards also recognise the remarkable contributions to society these students have made. The fact that they are all acknowledged to be outstanding students makes me very proud to be part of these awards.”





All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with. Twitter: @scottturneruon

Monday 5 March 2018

Computing for Social Good 2: The Big Bang (Northants)

A member of the computing team, Dr Scott Turner, took part in the Big Bang Northants #TBBNorthants on 28th February 2018 at Silverstone. This event is part of the The Big Bang Near Me programme bringing science and engineering to young people.The Big Bang Northants event celebrates STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) across Northamptonshire in its many and varied forms.

So Computing provided two contributions:
- Robots and building (and programming) junk-based robots ('junkbots');
- Games Art students - Mechanic Panic showing their game.

To give a sense of what happened here are some of the related tweets:
















Some of the Games Art students where exhibitors.
















All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with. Twitter: @scottturneruon