University Engagement: Successful Completion of Industrial Placement
Date
16th April 2020
Location
Tewkesbury
Description
Currently, Amiosec offers a range of opportunities for students of all types: from Summer placements through to fully-funded PhDs. In the last few weeks alone, we have been busy with our University engagement programme by dreaming up future projects, interviewing candidates for this year’s summer placements, and wrapping up our current undergraduate work placement.
This year’s Winter placement started in late-January and over ten weeks saw James — our student from Lancaster University — study the impact of hardware offload in a commodity processor. It was a tricky project that involved large amounts of self-directed learning, perseverance, and problem-solving.
The project started with a week-long visit from James where he met the Amiosec team and took a crash-course in embedded Linux development that involved: bringing up a new development board and learning how to cross-compile his code. (Most importantly we found time to take him out for a curry!)
After leaving our offices, James spent the next seven weeks using his newly mastered embedded development skills to measure the performance of a real-world use-case on his hardware platform. He used this time to delve a bit deeper into both the software and hardware technologies available to him and write code to exercise them. Perhaps, one of the biggest challenges during this years project was having James dig into the internals of a complex open-source software framework.
Unfortunately, we were not able to invite James back to our office this year to present his findings; instead, we opted for a virtual visit via Zoom where James presented his findings to the whole company. A presentation that helped to break-up the monotony of the lock-down!
Now that James’ project with Amiosec is complete we wish him the best of luck as he returns to Lancaster to work on his final-year dissertation.
