ECS students take on the Internet of Things in Group Design Project

ECS students produced a Home Recommender system for webpages, sponsored by Imagination Technologies, as part of this year’s Group Design Project.

The Group Design Project comprises the first half of the final-year of the Master of Engineering degree in Electronics and Computer Science. Working intensively in groups of four of five, the students aim to produce a working system for their industrial sponsor. This year Imagination Technologies asked their group to produce a Home Recommender system which would analyse Web traffic on a home network and, based on the webpages visited, suggest new relevant webpages that people might be interested in (similar to Amazon’s ‘Customers who bought this item also bought’ system).

The students were able to use Imagination’s latest Minimorph and FlowWorld technologies, along with the accompanying software. They were also able to experience producing a real-world system, using technology that has been deployed in millions of shipped products.

The Minimorph ran an HTTP proxy server that performed word-frequency analysis on the webpages accessed by the users on the home network. The output of the analysis was then sent to an external server which trawled websites like BBC and Wikipedia, and performed word-frequency analysis on the webpages found. The word-frequency results from the Minimorph were then compared against the results from the trawled websites to find the top matching webpages. These URLs were put on to FlowWorld which was then accessed by the Minimorph and the links displayed back to the user.

The students, Jack Andrew, James Justin, Peter Halles, Rajan Soni and Aljay Massiah, describe the process in the project video.

Imagination Technologies have sponsored a Group Design Project for a number of years, with students working on audio fingerprinting, JPEG encoding or decoding, and motion JPEG. Imagination Technologies were very pleased with the success of the project, and the fact that the students were able to produce a fully working system. The project was supervised in ECS by Dr Denis Nicole.

More information about the project, and about the Minimorph and FlowWorld technologies, is available on Imagination Technologies website.

The Group Design Project runs from October to December each year. Initial expressions of interest in sponsoring a project should be made by the end of May and companies interested in sponsoring a project can contact Joyce Lewis for more information.