Upskilling the next generation

The University of Adelaide offers third year students in Computer Science and Electronic & Electrical Engineering a Software Engineering Project subject. 

Companies are invited to set the projects, ensuring topics are industry relevant. Each student group can choose to enrol in the project that interests them the most. More than half of the 450 students enrolled in the Maptek projects in 2024. 

Involvement in previous years has taught Maptek what makes for an ideal project that students find both engaging and challenging. 

Engagement with higher education is an important pathway for Maptek’s future development capability. A benefit for Maptek is meeting smart students and giving them a taste for the types of applications and algorithms we develop, which helps with attracting future employees. 

Several of our experienced developers were first exposed to Maptek as students or recent graduates. A past winning entry has been incorporated into Maptek DomainMCF and will be part of Maptek Vestrex parallel performance experimentation this year.

Will Reid, Global Development Strategy Manager and Simon Ratcliffe, Head of Experimentation and Technology ran two projects in parallel for the first time in 2024. They needed to design the projects to keep multiple teams engaged across the semester while balancing team capabilities. 

Two purpose-built components were required to manage the projects. The first was a cloud computing environment for running jobs, using learnings from the Maptek Evolution Cloud Service. The website sees an arbitrary Python or win64 .exe code provided by student teams run on a virtual machine within a testing framework. The machine can be selectively provisioned. The competition website displays a live leaderboard of team progress.

The second component was a set of Python scripts or executables to provide inputs and process outputs from the competition entries in the testing framework, scoring the entries as they are tested, to progressively challenge the teams with more difficult problems as the semester progresses.

This system runs and assesses student work 24/7 and easily scales to handle the high load of multiple teams competing for top spot on the leaderboard in the final hours before competition deadline. It also provides an easy mechanism for responding to student support requests.

Novel projects

One project required students to compete for speed and compression coalescing block models—a common requirement in Maptek Vulcan and DomainMCF. This popular competition was recycled from previous years with several enhancements. 

The other project required students to compress a human voice audio stream such that it could still be understood. Low bandwidth radio communications such as LoRaWAN or some constrained underground radio systems can use novel algorithms to improve communications between equipment and the control room by reducing the amount of information that needs to be sent. 

Artificial intelligence techniques are bringing great gains to classical compression methods and it was exciting to see several teams adopt this route for their project success.

Both Maptek projects proved very popular. Over 4200 entries were processed, taking about 15,000 minutes of compute time during the semester.  

Maptek acknowledged the innovation of students at the prize ceremony where the top students were invited to present their work.