Group design projects

The Cambridge undergraduate programme in computer science includes a strong design theme influenced by Crucible research, including research into computer science project work by Sally Fincher and Marian Petre. Students in their second year undertake an intensive design project working for an external client. Professional clients are often recruited via the Computer Lab Ring and Industrial Supporters Club. Annual prizes are sponsored by IBM and Credit Suisse, and Hardware and equipment has been loaned or donated by a wide range of companies, including a substantial number of Android handsets from Google, Raspberry Pi computers, mBed controllers from ARM, XMOS boards and others.

A selection of these projects with explicit connection to interdisciplinary research concerns includes:

• African SMS Radio
• Energy market forecast
• Party Line Detection
• Critical Care for the World
• Scanning and feedback from chemical structures
• i-Professor
• Phone programming for children
• Passive airflow comfort control
• Race the Wild
• From Hogwarts to hackers
• Safer social media
• Project Darknet
• Sound Garden
• Road-pricing game
• Intelligent graph reader

Clients from companies affiliated with the Crucible network include:

• Russell Bender from Potential Difference
• Jonathan Baldwin from Madingley Hall
• Steve Platt from Cambridge Architectural Research
• Vivian Chan and Nilu Satharasinghe from Sparrho
• Dave Betts from CEDAR Audio
• Steve Basford from Grant Instruments (the Passive airflow comfort control project)
• Lee Smith, Matthew Gretton-Dann, Andrew Chapman, Bhaveet Shah, Bernard Ogden, Tejas Belagod, Renato Golin, Fabien Royer, Pawel Moll from ARM
• Steven Gilham, Simon Frost, Feng Huang and Nick Wise from Citrix
• Diarmid Mackenzie and Oliver Nicolson from Data Connection
• John Piper from Kodak European Research (the Image license retrieval project)
• Jonathan Boardman from Aveva (the Process plant exploration project)
• Richard Jebb from PCF Ltd
• Steve Poole from IBM
• Robert Aish from Autodesk
• John Tucker from Metaswitch
• Amyas Phillips and Ben Coppin from AlertMe
• Laura James and Will Billingsley from CARET
• Simon Geard from CAD Schroer (the Statistical persuasion authoring project)
• Mick Kellman from SolidWorks
• Clifford Dive from Qualcomm
• Michael Jennings from Google
• David Roberts from Symbian
• Michael Dales from CamVine
• Peter Cowley from ZedCam and MeLock
• Hok-Him Poon from Bloomberg (the Energy market forecast and Party Line Detection projects)
• Matt Segall from Optibrium (the Scanning and feedback from chemical structures project)
• Alex France from FFEI
• Tariq Khokhar from Aptivate
• David Singleton and Hugo Hudson from Google
• Marko Balabanovic from Lastminute.com
• Mike Lloyd
• Jonathan May from XMOS
• Alex Anderson from FrontlineSMS (the African SMS Radio project)
• Kenny Mitchell from Disney Research
• Cinu Jose from Amadeus
• Douglas Squirrel from YouDevise
• Alice Easey from Red Gate
• Nicolas Graube from CSR
• Nic Greenway from Credit Suisse
• Craig Mills from United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre

Crucible Theme: Design education