Kainos Sponsored Final Year Projects
In collaboration with Queen’s University and Ulster University
Supporting and developing young people is core to Kainos’ philosophy. A trait which is perfectly reflected in the various schemes ran internally like the Kainos Academy.
Kainos’ CEO, Brendan Mooney stated that these programmes are to:
“find talented young people and help them fulfil their potential, through world-class training and mentoring”.
The Applied Innovation team’s goal is to help Kainos look forward, identifying the next big opportunity and bringing technology to our customers faster. One of the ways we help Kainos do this is through the FYP scheme by generating and supporting creative and risky projects in areas of interest to the students, the team and Kainos. These projects incorporate emerging and innovative technology to highlight the value and subsequent positive impact when applied to business scenarios.
Index
What Is The Final Year Project Scheme? ☍
The Students And Their Projects ☍
Hear From Those Involved ☍
Get Involved ☍
What Is The Final Year Project Scheme?
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The Final Year Project programme, often abbreviated to FYP, is a Kainos initiative which sponsors a final year university student of Queen’s University Belfast or Ulster University, completing computing degrees. Kainos equips each student with a mentor who provides technical assistance and guidance throughout the year.
Despite the ongoing pandemic, this year’s scheme has been our most progressive yet!
Engagement. For the first time Kainos casted its net to include Ulster University as we continue to search for the best talent from both local universities.
In-house support. Kainos supported each final year student by providing them with an industry professional in their project’s field who mentors them throughout the year. In addition to this, Kainos also supplied further expertise in business and engineering capabilities through dedicated teams which the students could make use of. These teams also provided workshops throughout the year to provide practical and personal support, from requirements modelling to source code management and presentation skills to cloud containerisation. Utilising internal personnel within Kainos not only provides them with the best know-how, but also increases their networking within the company.
Pandemic challenge. This year, however, was not without difficulties. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak towards the end of the university year, students were unable to part-take in our yearly internal FYP showcase. This presented a previously never experienced challenge for our students, mentors and specialist teams. However, the Kainos staff and students showed tremendous adaptability and determination in completing their projects, making use of online tools such as virtual meetings and visualisation boards.
The Students And Their Projects
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This year saw a total of 6 projects completed by students from both Queen’s and Ulster universities. The projects made use of a range of exciting technologies including eye-tracking, natural language processing and image alteration detection. The practical applications also spanned a diverse range from dynamically altering webpages for greater accessibility to preventing unconscious bias in the recruitment process.
Grace Turkington: Personalised healthcare letters
Machine Learning / Natural Language Processing
The healthcare industry is one that is at capacity with the Royal College of Physicians describing it in 2016 as, “under-funded, under-doctored and overstretched”. This has not changed, and in recent times with the pandemic, strain across all departments has only increased. According to the NHS England 1 in 20 healthcare appointments are missed every year, equating to over 15 million. One observed reason for this resides in the language and tone used in call-out letters.
Grace’s project looked at solving this problem of low conversion rates by using machine learning to detect personality types of patient letters according to the Big Five personality theory. This can then be analysed for sentiment and structure to further understand the style of the letter to allow the professional to alter it to better suit the addressed person. This solution will help to support healthcare clinics to attain higher attendance rates for appointments, improving operations efficiency.
Jonathan Hughes: Webpage accessibility
Online Accessibility
Within the IT industry companies must abide by website accessibility guidelines such as the WCAG. Guidelines like these aim to standardise websites’ characteristics to make them accessible for users with disabilities relating to visual, auditory and speech. There is a growing need to alter existing webpages to make them tailored for users, who are spending increasing amounts of time online; a recent report highlighted this number to be over 6 hours a day. Combining this with the fact that the number and variety of people joining the online world is increasing year-on-year; accessibility of websites needs to be as dynamic as those on it.
Jonathan’s solution to this growing problem is a webpage agnostic tool that allows the user to customise web components. These alterations are stored for each user through profiles which allows for changes to be persisted onto all sites or specified for chosen pages. This paves the way for dynamic accessibility to be a common occurrence within web applications and browsers.
Conn O’Neill: Automated cognitive behavioural therapy
Machine Learning / Natural Language Processing
Mental health is a growing concern globally and within the UK, with NHS England recording that 1 in 4 adults experience mental health illness. This issue is increasing due to healthcare cuts, a lack of skilled workers and other factors such as pressures on social media. Cognitive behavioural theory or CBT, is a field focused on contextualising thoughts and personal self-esteem into categories to identify effective thought changing exercises. These sessions are usually carried out in person and at a cost but as mentioned before, budget cuts and lack of workers means seeing someone in a timely manner is difficult. Social taboos around therapy discourage those from seeking help to receive it. Living in an ever-digital world however, means that more people are turning to online resources for support. Online charities such as Samaritans and Mind have an online presence, but there has also been an increase in those asking for help through chat rooms, online forums and even some corners of social media.
Conn’s developed a platform that can provide early indicators of negative thoughts and promote positive thinking by analysing text inputs. The platform is capable of recognising 10 common thinking distortions each with their own thought changing exercises to promote healthier thinking. The interface is inviting and scalable which means it can provide some much needed support to overwhelmed mental health workers.
Tiago Ramalho: Deepfake detection
Deep Learning / Computer Vision
Kainos is a top provider for the conversion of documents from paper to digital; a multi-million dollar industry. However, this comes with its own challenges in regards to security and fraud detection. Fraudsters are adapting to this change of digitalisation by using photo alteration software to create inaccurate documents for exploitative and personal gain — at the company’s expense. One example of this is by replicating C-level signatures on confidential documents; an advanced technique of whaling.
Tiago’s project combated this threat by developing an image processing application to automatically detect altered images. The computer vision model can pinpoint the area(s) a photo has been manipulated and provide this to the user through a heat map, giving the user confidence of its decision. This application has many uses within the digital space: analysing documents for altercations heightens security within digital document exchanges, whilst checking uploaded images to social media can prevent ‘fake news’ and skewed reality from being spread.
James Crone: Unconscious bias remover for recruitment
Machine Learning / Natural Language Processing
Bias, whether unconscious or conscious, plays too much of a part in the recruitment process for businesses, one of the primary points this can effect is during CV review and selection. Businesses require the best talent for the variety of roles on offer but seeing a candidate’s suitability within the company is difficult.
James has created an automated and scalable, cloud-based solution which is a drastic improvement on the time-consuming manual method many companies implore today. The solution uses natural language processing to anonymise candidate CVs, to ensure ethical decision-making; increasing applicants trust in the final outcome. The technique developed is a ‘one-size fits all’ solution for all resumés, whilst preserving individuality in format and layout. The impact of James’ project cannot be understated: this unbiased hiring process can lead to a more diverse, inclusive and performant work environment which benefits both the individuals and the business.
Patrick McGranaghan: Webpage accessibility analysis
Data Analytics / Eye-tracking / Online Accessibility
Industry 4.0 is amongst us with developments in artificial intelligence, robotics and immersive reality. However, one colossal change revolves around human-computer interaction. Websites are the #1 interaction tool between a user and a business so understanding how users interact with them has large implications on the business’ return of investment. Involving the user when developing and testing a website is invaluable. However, with improvements in eye-tracking quality and availability, usability testing is becoming less subjective as we can track a user’s eyes through the testing process; user research 2.0.
Patrick’s contribution to this field is a website agnostic application that tracks and analyses users’ interactions online through their gaze. Using this, Patrick can draw out conclusions regarding user attention for website components; insights that would otherwise be unrecorded. This solution provides factual information which can support UX, or user experience, designers when creating sites.
Hear From Those Involved
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We asked those involved in this year’s programme how they found it, see what they had to say below!
Why were you interested in this project?
“I saw the value of the [recruitment bias removal] project and its purpose […] I know the reputation of the company and its values, so I knew that my project would be well supported.”
— James (student)
How did you find Kainos’ involvement in the Final Year Project scheme?
“I found that Kainos were hands-off which I appreciated. Guidance and suggestions given were helpful, especially when I was writing the dissertation.”
— Jonathan (student)
What was the main benefit of your involvement for the students?
“Making a positive impact on the careers of junior engineers and helping them develop and improve their skills to enhance their careers.”
— Shaun (software engineer)
Get Involved
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If this round-up blog excited you about the prospect of a Queen’s or Ulster University Kainos sponsored final year project or you want to hear more about the program or the projects mentioned here, get in contact with us at FYP@kainos.com — we’d love to hear from you!
Check out our video from last year’s students to see how they found the overall experience!
As ever, we look forward to this year’s set of exciting, innovative projects!
