Jozef Dobos, a former researcher in the UCL department of Computer Science, completed his secondment at Balfour Beatty, a leading professional and construction services firm in the UK. Jozef is the creator of 3D Repo, an open source version control system for 3D models. During his secondment, Jozef applied his solution on a live project for the Olympic Stadium Transformation (OST) in order to quantify the cost saving improvements resulting from the use of 3D Repo technology. Upon completion of his secondment, Jozef continued his relationship with the construction industry working on a number of innovative projects including the A63 Castle Street improvements in collaboration with Balfour Beatty, Arup and the Highways Agency. He also succeeded in securing additional funding through an InnovateUK grant to develop and test the 3D Repo Bid4Free cloud-based platform for Building Information Modelling (BIM) in the UK and abroad. Jozef and his colleagues explain how the BITE secondment played a pivotal rule in the success of his spin-off company:

Shuai Yuan, a former researcher in the UCL department of Computer Science, completed his secondment at MediaGamma, a recent spin out from UCL which brings state-of-the-art technologies to the online display advertising market. Shuai, whose research interests lie in the area of computational advertising, worked as a lead developer at MediaGamma during his secondment. Upon completion of his secondment, Shuai accepted an offer from MediaGamma to stay on as a Data Scientist with his work now leaning more towards data analytics. Shuai and his colleagues at MediaGamma discuss the secondment and the benefits of the BITE scheme in the following video:

Two of our researchers who have recently completed their secondment, generously funded by the BITE Industry Exchange Award Scheme, have been offered positions at their respective host organisations.

Frank Tutu, a former UCL researcher in the Molecular Beam Epitaxy Group, completed his secondment at Fibercore, a company producing fibers for optical sensing. Frank worked in Fibercore’s development and technical support team carrying out activities related to specialty optical fibers. Upon completion of his secondment, Frank accepted an offer from Fibercore to stay on as a Development and Project Engineer

Edward Challis, previously a researcher in the Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning at UCL, carried out a secondment at Skimlinks, a web start-up delivering affiliate marketing technology services. Ed’s work at Skimlinks focused on implementing and applying machine learning algorithms to extract meaningful information from log files. Upon completion of his secondment, Ed accepted an offer from Skimlinks to continue working for them as a Data Scientist on a part-time basis.

Since May 2014, eight PhD and PostDoc researchers across several UCL departments, have embarked on short-term industry exchange programmes with various companies ranging from start-ups to well-established, multi-national organisations. Examples include Fibercore, ARM, U-blox, Balfour Beatty, Skimlinks, MediaGamma and the Department for Transport.

Researchers interested in undertaking a secondment in industry may refer to our application procedure.