On Friday, May 27th 2005, Minister Noel Ahern, T.D. officially opened the final year project display of the School of Computing's graduating classes. Over 50 representatives from a range of leading computing employers also attended the display.

Speaking at the champagne breakfast which preceded the display, Minister Noel Ahern, T.D., who formally opened the event, commended the students on the quality of their work. He also commented on the remarkable range of subject areas addressed by the projects, which reflected the strong dependence of every aspect of industry and society on computing technology in industry, and hence the immense variety of employment opportunities available to graduates of computing studies.

The more than 150 projects displayed ranged from the very old - investigating if the Book of Leinster was the work of just one or of many scribes, to the very latest - editing video images on mobile phones. For those interested in flying, there was a helicopter simulation, while another project 'PoachProof' aimed to detect plagiarism. In the education area, there was a tool to assist the learning of Chinese, while the controversial topic of e-voting also featured. The range of computing skills evident was impressive also, with many students employing the latest techniques, technologies and programming languages in their work.

Download a copy of the projects booklet (pdf)

Among the companies and bodies who attended the display were AIB Capital Markets, Alphyra Group, Bell Labs, Cellusys, Crannog Software, Damovo, EirplayGames, Enterprise Ireland, IDA, Irish Computer Society, Microsoft, MoneyMate, and Xilinx.

The project display comes the day after a Dublin City University survey revealed that there are currently in excess of 8,000 IT vacancies advertised in Ireland. Professor Michael Ryan, Head of the School of Computing at DCU, also highlighted that all of last year's DCU's 145 computer graduates are now in full time jobs and the School of Computing has continuous inquiries from companies seeking to hire graduates. In addition, the School of Computing was unable to meet the demand from companies this year for 3rd year students to do six month paid placements.

The employment outlook certainly looks excellent for this year's graduating classes of the B.Sc. in Computer Applications and B.Sc. in Applied Computational Linguistics, many of whom have already secured employment prior to graduation.

If you are interested in receiving information on next year's event, please contact Laura Grehan at tel: (01) 700 8608 or email: laura.grehan@dcu.ie to be added to our mailing list.