School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics Semester Abroad Scheme
Students from our partners at Saveetha, VIT, SASTRA, and SRM are eligible to apply to our Semester Abroad Scheme

The School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics (SECaM) invite BTech and BE students in their eighth semester who are taking courses in the areas of electronics; robotics; computer science or electrical engineering to join the second semester in Plymouth in January/February 2022 to complete a project alongside our own BEng students.
This year, nominated students will be able to apply for one of our proposed projects listed below.
The application process is competitive and applicants will be judged via the following criteria:
We will not accept applications for projects that are not listed on this page.
To apply please complete the application form along with the following supporting documents:
The application deadline for 2022 is Friday 10 December 2021.
Successful students will be notified by Friday 17 December 2021.
Applications must be emailed to: ScienceandEngineeringInternational@plymouth.ac.uk
Application deadline – Wednesday 1 December 2021
Induction session – Friday 28 January 2022
Project start date – Monday 31 January 2022
Project end date – Friday 27 May 2022
Electrospun Nanofibre Membranes
Supervisors: Dr David Jenkins
Electrospun Nanofibre Membranes 2
Supervisors: Dr David Jenkins
Detection of Nanoplastics in Water
Supervisors: Dr David Jenkins
A Brain Computer (Music) Interface BC(M)I system for neurodegeneratively affected human control
This project is jointly with Professor Eduardo Miranda to design better electrodes and portable wireless amplifiers for the current BCI sytem. If we put everything is a single board we could eliminate laptop/computer and make it communicate direct with a robot to assist affected persons.
http://neuromusic.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/
Supervisors: Dr David Jenkins and Professor Eduardo R. Miranda
Surprise and other emotions
Supervisor: Dr Marco Palomino
Data Analysis (Assistive Robots)
The Emotion of Trends
Supervisor: Dr Marco Palomino
Maritime Cyber Security
Supervisor: Dr Kimberly Tam
Any access to a service typically requires a number of personal information details to be disclosed to the service owner. A considerable number of such online services have been subject to cyber attacks in recent years, exposing the data of the users.
The aim of this project is to characterise data required by online services forms, rank it in terms of associated privacy/personal disclosure risks and provide the users with information about the risks that they are exposing themselves to by sharing this data.
Supervisor: Dr Bogdan Ghita
Improving security for smart home environments
A typical smart home environment will include a combination of networking equipment (router/wireless access point) traditional computers (either workstations or laptops), mobile computers (smart phones and tablets) and IoT devices. All these devices come with inherrent vulnerabilities and risks, which vary from one category to another.
The aim of this project is to investigate smart home environments and isolate devices with various vulnerabilities/risk levels in such a way that a) attack on a device will have a minimal impact on the rest of the network and b) functionality of the device is preserved under normal conditions and minimally affected when a vulnerability or an attack are identified"
Supervisor: Dr Bogdan Ghita
3D animated presentations
PowerPoint is a well-known standard tool for presentations. It allows to create content pages of various kinds of media (text, figures, video) and connect them using transitions caused by keyboard clicks or a pointer device. Transitions can be animated (although most commonly used are immediate page changes only). PowerPoint creates flat, 2-dimensional presentations. Goal of the present project is to build a system that allows to create presentations in 3 dimensions with 3D-animated transitions. This would make use of formal descriptions of content elements (like Title, Table, Bullet List, Figure etc) and possible transitions (whatever works in 3D). A presentation would be written as a plain text file with additional annotations / tags / syntactic elements that describe the form of presentation and transitions (similar to simple html or LaTeX; a WYSIWYG editor is not required and too complex). The file would be translated into scripts (Python or other) to control the Unity (or other) game engine. It should be possible to control the animation with a pointer device or keyboard. This project requires knowledge in Unity and a scripting language for it. Theoretical and/or practical knowledge in domain specific languages and parser generation would be helpful (e.g. tools like ANTLR).
Supervisor: Dr Thomas Wennekers
Monocular depth estimation and stereo visualisation
This project aims at building a system that creates a 3D-image from a monocular one. This would proceed in two steps: 1) estimating depth from a monocular image and 2) creating a pair of stereo images for the left and right eye form the original image and estimated depth information. Technically this would make use of deep-learning based on publicly available stereo image data sets. The first step is known to work (see e.g. Hua et al. 2020, Holopix50: A large-scale in-the-wild stereo image dataset). The second step would probably use an auto-encoder deep neural network and is somewhat experimental (if it doesn't work it would not fail the project if there are enough other achievements, e.g. a successful step 1). The system may be implemented on a work-station, hand-held device or VR headset. The project requires good knowledge and a deep understanding of deep learning.
Living Room
Supervisor: Dr Thomas Wennekers
Speeding up Real World Software Applications on modern Multi-Core Processors and/or Nvidia GPUs (multiple projects)
Supervisor: Dr Vasilios Kelefouras
Social-Service Robot
Supervisor: Dr Hooman samani
This year’s Semester Abroad Scheme will cost £2,000 in tuition fees.
The fee will be refunded to any students who enroll on one of our master programmes within our School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics starting in September 2022.
Semester Abroad Scheme, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Plymouth, Room 008, Smeaton Building, Drake Circus, Plymouth, PL4 8AA