Company of Connect Yorkshire EIR Adam Beaumont, Leeds-based telecommunications firm, aql, has cemented its relationship with a college by sponsoring a new digital lab and pledging a £100,000 investment.
The aql Innovation Academy was opened at Leeds City College’s Printworks Campus by aql’s CEO and digital entrepreneur, Professor Adam Beaumont.
The company has been working with the college – a member of Luminate Education Group – over the past two years to run “hackathons”, which have allowed IT students to safely tackle problems on isolated networks that mirror real-world systems.
The college’s new room, which has been kitted out with computers, servers and sensors, has been set up to make this process smooth and – using AI – partially automated, to maximise the number of students who can use it.
Beaumont, who is a former college governor, said: “This all came about from a conversation I had in a pub with the previous CEO of Luminate 15 years ago, about how we could work closer with the college and grow the talent in the city to work with our business.
“This is the crystallisation of that idea. It’s been an evolution and a learning curve for us too; with the amount of work needed to do a hackathon we quickly started thinking ‘how can we automate this?’
“So we developed the tech to do that and started rolling it out; hackathons, though still resource intensive, are now scalable things.”
He also used the occasion to confirm that aql will be providing £100,000 worth of equipment and engineering to build a next-generation 5G innovation lab network at the college over the coming year.
Printworks Campus principal Lee Pryor said: “This fantastic room is a great resource for our students within the digital and IT department.
“I remember first getting an e-mail from Colin asking us to contact aql about a hackathon and my first question was ‘what is a hackathon’! So I thought ‘we’d better get onto that’.
“From me, and on behalf of our students, a massive ‘thank you’; I’ve seen a lot of labs like this and this one is the best I’ve seen so far, it’s great aql are sponsoring it.”
Deputy head of apprenticeships and commercial, Cheryl Macfarlane, recalled how the college’s first team-up with aql, a full-day hackathon at White Rose Park in 2023, got the partnership underway.
That event saw students and business professionals collaborating to come up with coding solutions using aql’s Core IoT (Internet of Things) platform.
She said: “Forty five students and three members of staff were involved. Our students got a lot out of it and came back wanting more.”
The college’s executive principal and group deputy CEO, Bill Jones, added the new lab, plus the news of future investment, were great examples of what long-term partnerships can achieve.
He said: “Our partnerships remain central to everything we do, and our consolidated relationship with aql is something we’d like to replicate across our colleges and group.
“The aql Innovation Academy provides a cutting-edge digital space for students to learn and create, and sometimes these things take a lot of lead-up time.
“This lab demonstrates that sometimes you need to keep working at it, and now we’ve got this fantastic resource.”
Article via thebusinessdesk.com
