South Western Sydney team comes out on top

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A group of six students from SWS have been awarded first place in the annual Computer Science CSIT321 major project. The project required 32 groups of students, ranging from 3 to 6 participants, to work with industry partners to develop real-life programming solutions to solve a specific client need. 

The NeuralDev team; David Matthews, Matthew Greentree, Dinol Shrestha, Dalton Le, Arvy Salazar and Andrew Che, spent 34 weeks working together, on delivering a software solution, called ARCLYTICS, for Australia's Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) that provides automatic calculations on the changes to low carbon alloys when heated and cooled. The group worked tirelessly to make their microservices architecture application deliver accurate processing of algorithm data into a workable prototype software package. 

The scope of the project changed several times while consulting with ANSTO, and while this presented some challenges to the group it also provided them with an opportunity to provide extra analytics and tools to ANSTO beyond what they originally anticipated. While the team worked together on all aspects of the project, each team member naturally gravitated to areas they felt more passionately about such as web development, coding and marketing. All teams were required to pitch their solutions to academics and judges at a trade show hosted at the UOW's Wollongong campus.

The NeuralDev Team said the greatest challenges they faced were scheduling and resourcing with the team being split and working from the Philippines, Russia, Vietnam and Australia for some time. With the major project completed, the team is currently considering entering additional competitions shortly.

Of the 32 teams, three were from the UOW South Western Sydney Campus and could be seen working in their groups at various times throughout the year from the time the campus opened to late into the evenings. Congratulations to all the participating teams.