Today marked the completion of our ground-breaking and collaborative Open Innovation mini‑project with the University of Portsmouth’s School of Computing. We were visited by the members of the module to show them around our offices and to demonstrate some of the innovative projects that we are working on.
In partnership with the School of Computing, Cervus created a mini‑project for the Open Innovations in Data Science module of the 3rd year of the BSc (Hons) Data Science and Analytics degree, which challenges the students to apply themselves and their skills to solving real-world problems. In this mini‑project, we asked the students to explore ways of deriving rapid understanding from large volumes of abstract and contextual data. Led by their tutor Rekha Hadi, the students threw themselves enthusiastically at the challenge and we were completely blow away by the excellent work produced by both teams of students.
This was the first time that either we or the School of Computing had attempted this type of collaboration, and it was a hugely rewarding experience all round. The School saw it as an interesting and amazing opportunity for their students and a chance to branch out in terms of collaboration. Feedback from the students themselves indicated that they had enjoyed the project, had learned a lot, and had appreciated seeing the challenges that a real-life Data Science company encounters. As for us, we also got enormous benefit from the project. We met a group of clever, innovative and engaging students, who – not being fettered by the constraints we encounter regularly – were able to approach the problem from a different angle, give us loads of new ideas and present us with clever ways of solving the challenge we put before them. And we got to join tutor sessions for the project and work with the students on their solutions. Win – win – win!
Cervus is constantly seeking to push the boundaries with what has traditionally been done with data and we are keen to collaborate with universities and other organisations to innovate and create ingenious ways of solving problems and delivering insights.
