Allstate NI partnership with Ulster University drives technological innovation

The Allstate NI and Ulster University partnership has continued to flourish, with planning now underway for a second joint ‘Learnathon’.

The partnership spans from Allstate NI’s representation on Ulster’s industrial advisory boards, to involvement in reviewing curricula for undergrad and postgrad courses, student scholarships and prizes, running student hackathons, providing industry guest lectures and in turn, University academics presenting in Allstate.

Allstate has also been invited to develop a vision for the new CARL initiative (Cognitive Analytics Research Lab), to be based on the Magee Campus. This vision was developed through design thinking workshops with a small number of industry partners, including Allstate NI. November 2019 saw the opening of a new-state-of-the-art Allstate NI computing lab, also at the Magee campus.

Meanwhile, a recent research collaborative effort with Professor Damien Coyle, Dr Magda Bucholc and their PhD student Salman Ahmed used advanced multi-modal analytics approach to help predict major incidents in Allstate’s infrastructure at the earliest opportunity, allowing them to put preventative measures in place.

Jonathan Wallace, Professor of Innovation within the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment and Chair of the Faculty’s Computing Employer Advisory Board (CEAB), said the Computing Schools at Ulster University recognised the strategic importance of developing professional, educational and collaborative research links.

He added: “As well as the computing lab sponsored by Allstate NI, we launched a research partnership linking academics and PhD students from both Computing Schools with Allstate’s AI Centre of Excellence team to explore how AI and ML techniques developed at Ulster can be applied to the next generation of Allstate products and services, indeed planning for a second joint ‘Learnathon’/Mini-Conference to showcase how Ulster’s leading edge research can potentially address the short mid and long-term strategic goals of Allstate NI is currently underway.”