Richard Blumenthal graduated in July 2013 with a BSc Computer Science with Industrial Year and his final year project was chosen to be in the Top 8 of the Undergraduate Awards’ global award programme.
Out of the many thousands of international entries, Richard made it into the ‘Highly Commended’ category and has been invited to attend the awards ceremony in Dublin where the Prime Minister of Ireland Enda Kenny was present. For more information, please see the ‘Computer Sciences and Information Technology’ 2013 category:
http://www.undergraduateawards.com/winners/highly-commended/2013-highly-commended
Richard pitched his final year project to Marks and Spencer, METRO newspaper, and applicants on Open Day and scored an outstanding mark.
Richard’s project was an Android App that utilises NFC technology inside smartphones. NFC is an acronym for Near Field Communication which enables smartphone users to instantly communicate with NFC tags at close range. The App enables merchants to display NFC enabled posters advertising discounts to customers where the merchant can be effortlessly “liked” on Facebook and subsequently the merchant can view unrivalled analytics on their customers.
This app generated a lot of internal and external interest. Here is an example of an NFC enabled beer mat poster can be seen in this article:
Richard thanks the University’s Careers department for enabling him to develop his Android Development skills as they awarded him a £1,800 bursary to embark on an Android Development Internship in Shanghai, organised by: www.tictwo.com. Richard mentioned that this internship in Shanghai helped him gain the necessary skills to develop a killer App for his Final year project. The image below shows Richard at The Bund whilst in Shanghai.
One of Richard’s aims for this project was to widen his technical skill sets of which he achieved; the below image shows a flavour of the technologies used in the project.
About UndergraduateAwards.com:
• Candidates get entered internationally from various high calibre Universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Auckland and Hong Kong etc.
• UndergraduateAwards.com has been in existence since 2009 and is a prestigious and international academic awards programme and aims to celebrate and support the world’s brightest and most innovative undergraduate students by recognising their best projects.
• Google and KPMG are partners in this award and the award is also affiliated with Top Universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, Columbia, MIT, Princeton and Carnegie Mellon etc.
For further information on this project, feel free to contact Richard on rblu@mail.com or www.linkedin.com/in/richardblumenthal or visit the School’s library to read Richard’s thesis.