Dr. Dean Mohamedally, a Senior Teaching Fellow in UCL-CS's Software Systems Engineering Group, has arrived in Japan with a party of Software Systems Engineering students who will take part in a joint exercise in programming robots for embedded systems - an area in which Japan has particular expertise. Their partners will be students from the TopSE project; a collaboration between Japanese universities and industry.

The students will work in two teams each of which has UCL and TopSE students. They will design and develop software for LEGO Mindstorms which allows the construction and programming of robots.

The UCL-CS students have begun their stay with a trip to NTT,  the Japanese equivalent of BT or AT&T. Dr Mohamedally reports:

"Today SSE made friends with Dr Tsuyoshi Kitani, Head of Research and Development at NTT Data Japan and his team on their top floor headquarters (NTT Data is the 9th largest software services company in the world). Dr Kitani is himself a researcher in AI from Carnegie Mellon and answers to the CEO of NTT Japan.

We heard about NTT's progress on grid based crowdsourcing from mobile devices to reveal new trends from phone networks (we are already data points!). He gave a demo of rapidly extensible cloud resourcing hardware that puts current load balancing solutions on the market to shame. He also showed us a formal activity method for software engineers that brings development time down by up to 30%. I am hoping to cite this in future teaching as it uses Eclipse and Java and is growing throughout Japanese consulting companies. He talked about NTT's methodologies, his interests in requirements and formal specification with M2M (machine to machine) and searching through very large and rapidly changing data warehouses  - NTT Data provide all of the OS and data connectivity for hundreds of thousands of vending machines, security systems and all of the traffic awareness sensors in Japan. There is also a lot of design and analysis work being done on energy sector systems."