Project Showcase, National College of Ireland’s online display of fourth year computing student profiles and their degree capstone projects, reached its high point on Friday, with the presentation of the annual awards for best projects.
Watched live by hundreds of students, faculty, industry recruiters and family and friends of the final year students, the awards were announced by Dean of the School of Computing, Dr Pramod Pathak: you can watch on YouTube.
This year, the College created a new category. Dr Pathak explained: “Each year, our judges come across projects that narrowly miss winning the top prize in their specialist category, but which are particularly notable and deserving of recognition. To address this, the School of Computing has created an 'open' award, where we consider projects from across the school and their broader contribution to computing. We have named this the Ada Lovelace Award, after the first computer programmer, who was not celebrated in her own right until 2009. It is particularly fitting, perhaps, therefore, that the first recipient of this award is a woman.”
The College is grateful to Citi, ESB, eShopWorld, Fidelity Investments and Workday for their sponsorship of prizes.
“Project Showcase allows our students to connect with potential investors and employers,” explains computing lecturer Frances Sheridan. “This year, we added a feature to allow graduate recruiters or VCs to make direct contact with our final year students: this has proved very popular with employers and has worked well for our students, so is a facility we will retain for next year.”
The Project Showcase website will continue to feature graduate projects from 2021 until April next year, when the build-out for 2022 will commence.