UK Academic Team Blog : Students

The Ultimate Steal: Microsoft Office Ultimate for just £38.95 for students only ending on June 26th

ukacademia — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:28:33 GMT

The Ultimate Steal offer for students in UK Universities and Colleges is close to an end.

You have until June 26th to go on the Ultimate Steal website, validate yourself as a student by providing your .ac email address and you will receive an email with further instruction to pay and download the software.

What you will get is: the latest Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook as well as Publisher, Access, Groove and OneNote. At £38.95, that’s 90% off estimated retail price. But you’ve got to have a student or faculty email address with a .ac domain from a UK higher education institution.

Imagine Cup Registrations

ukacademia — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:44:17 GMT

Hello Everyone,

Interest for the Imagine Cup has been strong and we can confirm the various categories are now open for competition. From experience we know that the next couple of months will be key in getting great UK representation in the Imagine Cup.

Here are just a few of the reasons for encouraging your students to compete:

- PR: The Imagine Cup attracts the attention of both regional and national newspapers, together with technology and education press and news websites such as the BBC. Having students from your university compete in the Imagine Cup is great for raising the profile of your university in two important ways. Firstly it demonstrates the quality of your graduates to IT employers and makes them more attractive as employees (e.g. Dominic Green, UK winner of the 2008 competition) and secondly, it attracts new students to your university.

- Skills Development: Fundamentally the Imagine Cup is about helping students get real world experience with Microsoft technology. The skills learned during the various competitions compliment their studies and are invaluable when students apply for jobs with IT companies.

- Students Inspiration: With every technology interest area catered for, the competition is a great way to channel students’ passion for technology out of class.

We want as many UK institutions and students to get involved with the Imagine Cup as possible, and to help you participate we provide:

- Giveaways for students: Every week we give away web cams and Starbucks vouchers. We also hold a monthly draw for a Dell laptop, providing everything a student needs to see them through their studies and the Imagine Cup competition.

- Donation of an Xbox 360 gaming lab kit for your university: The university with the most registrations will receive 4 Xbox 360s, 8 wired controllers and an assortment of the latest Xbox 360 titles. You are free to use them for XNA development or as a social/recreation area for students.

If you would like to receive regular updates on the registration numbers from your university then please let me know and I will happily send them to you. You can contact me by telephone (0118 909 3409) or if you prefer by email (mailto:ukacinfo@microsoft.com).

And just to give you an idea of how we are doing so far, here are the top fifteen universities with the highest number of registrations:

University	Registrations
Brighton	89
Birmingham City	38
Cumbria	38
Bradford	37
Reading	35
Robert Gordon	35
Derby	31
Nottingham	24
De Montfort	23
Keele	23
Cambridge	20
Hull	20
Imperial College	20
Brunel	18
RHUL	20

If you would like to know more, them please email or telephone me. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Good luck,

Allison

Student Technology Day - Future User Experience Technologies

ukacademia — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:02:22 GMT

Hello All,

Filmed at the Royal Festival on 1st October, please find below the session by Paolo Barone on Microsoft Surface:

If for any reason you cannot view this clip, please do let me know.

Best wishes,

Allison

Student Technology Day - Microsoft Research Talk on CS Inside Halo 3 True Ranking System

ukacademia — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:53:11 GMT

For those of you who joined us at the Royal Festival Hall on 1st October and, especially for those who were otherwise engaged, please find below the session by Thore Graepel, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela and Ralf Herbrich on Microsoft Research Talk on CS Inside Halo 3 True Ranking System:

If you are unable to view the above clip, please do let me know.

Best wishes,

Allison

UK High Performance Computing Award

ukacademia — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:11:22 GMT

Hello Everyone,

The Windows Server HPC team have created a special award for UK Software Design competitors who use the Windows HPC Server in their Software Design solution of the Imagine Cup.

Microsoft want to stimulate the thinking of UK students about how HPC can change the world. We want students to think big, and to use the world’s fastest systems to solve the world’s biggest problems. That’s what the HPC prize in the Imagine cup’s about.

You know how mutli-core is about writing a program that uses more than one cpu? Well HPC (High Performance Computing) is the next step up: it’s about programming for hundreds or thousands of CPUs. This is for all the stuff that needs more compute than you can get from a single server. Think about online gaming, when you have hundreds of people simultaneously modifying a visual database – that needs more power than you can get one a single CPU. Think about calculating the temperature over 20,000 land sites in the UK and then projecting that forward into the future, one minute at a time, for 500 years. This all needs heavy duty computing – and that’s HPC. It’s the A380 of the computing world.

To win the HPC prize you don’t need to have a working system – but tell us how your design would scale-out from one CPU to a thousand. And explain how all that power would help. The award will be given to the Software Design teams who demonstrate technical competency with HPC, have a real world need for high performance computing and present the commercial viability of their implementation.

HPC is used in lots of places – last year the two winners used HPC for genetic engineering and motorway design. People in the UK use HPC for everything from theology to thermodynamics, archaeology to aerodynamics, gaming to genetics. How could you use it?

If you’ve got questions please contact your local HPC or SuperComputing Centre. Or email Michael...

Good luck and hope to see you at the finals.

Best,

Allison

DreamSpark

ukacademia — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:33:17 GMT

DreamSpark is a Microsoft program for placing key tools into the hands of students. It includes:

Visual Studio 2008
Expression Studio 2
Windows Server 2008
XNA Creators Club memberships
…and more

These tools are available to provide students with the equipment they need to build the next generation applications whether they are games, rich internet applications, desktop or server based applications.

To help you spread the word about DreamSpark we have put together a promotional kit for you to place in communal areas on campus:

The kit includes:

Banners for email and web
Posters
Postcards
Laptop stickers

To request a promotional kit, please email ukacinfo@microsoft.com with the following information:

Name
Institution Name
Address
Telephone
Email Address

(This offer is only open to UK universities and colleges. We will not use the details provided for any other activity unless you ask us to).

Microsoft Research Asia - 10th Anniversary Innovation Forum

ukacademia — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:29:56 GMT

On August 12, Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft^®, joined visionary technologists from Microsoft Research (MSR) Asia, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, and the University of Hong Kong, to celebrate a decade of ground-breaking collaboration during the Microsoft Research Asia's 10th Anniversary Innovation Forum.

Gates, who delivered the keynote speech, said that Microsoft’s relationship to academia in the Asia Pacific region remains vital and that cultivating the next generation of researchers should continue to be a focal point of MSR Asia’s work. “For the last 10 years, great collaborative work between Microsoft Research Asia and the region’s world-leading academic researchers has resulted in a wide range of exciting technology innovations,” Gates said. “As Asia becomes more and more of a global centre for innovation, I have no doubt that Microsoft Research Asia and its academic partners will have an even bigger impact on the world of technology.”

At the MSR Asia Innovation Forum, Bill Gates said that the success of Microsoft depends on its ability to attract and retain the best talent from around the world—something he believes MSR Asia is doing well.

To learn more about this collaboration and to hear Bill’s speech, click Innovation.

Best wishes,

Allison

News from the Faculty Summit

ukacademia — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:03:08 GMT

Lee Dirks, the Director for Education and Scholarly Research, announced five new ‘lifecycle’ tools for academics and researchers. The tools are as follows:

Research Information Centre
Creative Commons (an add-in to Microsoft Office)
Article Authoring (an add-in to Microsoft Word)
E-Journal Hosting Service
Research Output Repository Platform

To hear more about these tools from Lee, please visit Channel 8.

If you have any questions, do contact me and I’ll see if I can get them answered for you.

Best,

Allison

Coming soon - the ability to publish your XNA game on Xbox Live Marketplace

ukacademia — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:23:00 GMT

We are excited to announce the impending release of XNA Games Studio 3.0 this summer giving (among other things) the ability for all XNA authors to publish games to Xbox Live Marketplace and in the process, to earn reputation, fame and even income. This represents a huge opportunity for your students. You can read all about this on the XNA Team Blog and also FAQ on the XNA forums.

To compliment this new development we have opened out access to the XNA Creators' Club via DreamSpark. This new programme gives access to key developer tools for all students (and academics). In addition, the XNA Creators Club website is going to get a bunch of new features too.

Finally, start saving up, XNA Game Studio 3.0 will also enable multiplayer gaming on the Zune over a wireless link. The Zune has not yet hit the UK market but we know you will want one when they arrive.

Claire

Why Rare recruits games graduates

ukacademia — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:46:00 GMT

The academic team has enjoyed working with Rare over the past 18 months and it seems they have enjoyed it too, so much so that Nick Burton has put pen to paper (OK, type to screen) to bring our attention to some great facts.

You might be surprised to learn that 90% of roles at Rare go to graduates. You might have forgotten that Rare offer free lectures to games students. Read the article here in Gamasutra, to find out why.

Claire

PS Don't forget to share this with your students!

Inspiration Online

ukacademia — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:57:00 GMT

Have your students been inspired recently? Our Inspiration tour sold out early on and continues to be a huge success. If your students missed it then they can now see it online because we are releasing the sessions on Channel8.com, our international video blogging site for students. You can see the first session here, the rest will be online in the next few days.

Claire

PS: That's Ed on the left and Ben in the centre. Many of you have asked if that is me on the posters, the answer is no :)