Month: June 2011

Professor Ian Sommerville receives teaching awards

Professor Ian Sommerville has been honoured for his work in software engineering education.

The distinguished researcher has received the 2011 SIGSOFT Influential Educator award from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the 2011 Outstanding Educator award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).

The awards recognise Professor Sommerville’s work in developing software engineering education and in helping establish The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance Graduate Academy in Scotland.

Prof Ian Sommerville

See the official University of St Andrews press release for more information

Arduino workshop

The School will hold an all day Arduino workshop on Sunday the 26th of June hosted by Dr David McKeown from UCD in Ireland. Thanks also to Ben Arent, an interaction designer based in Dublin for his help in supporting this.
The Arduino workshop preceeds the Summer School on Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism that will be held in the School from 27th June to 1st July.

Arduino and Kinect equipment

Arduino and Kinect equipment for the workshop and summer school


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Event details

  • When: 26th June 2011
  • Where: Cole Bldg
  • Format: Workshop

Summer School on Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism

The focus of this summer school is to introduce a new generation of researchers to the latest research advances in multimodal systems, in the context of applications, services and technologies for tourists (Digital Tourism). Where mobile and desktop applications can rely on eyes down interaction, the tourist aims to keep their eyes up and focussed on the painting, statue, mountain, ski run, castle, loch or other sight before them. In this school we focus on multimodal input and output interfaces, data fusion techniques and hybrid architectures, vision, speech and conversational interfaces, haptic interaction, mobile, tangible and virtual/augmented multimodal UIs, tools and system infrastructure issues for designing interfaces and their evaluation.
We have structured this summer school as a blend of theory and practice.

Further information on the summer school on the SACHI site.

Event details

  • When: 27th June 2011 - 1st July 2011
  • Where: Honey Bldg
  • Format: Summer School

Storage Server Protype

Our storage server prototype build is now complete and we have moved on to configuration, tuning and testing. After some delays in sourcing components the build is now complete and everything appears to be working. The server will run BSD with ZFS. The chassis holds 24 3.5″ HDDs in hot-swap bays. These are connected to an Adaptec raid controller via a 4U SAS II expander back-plane. The RAID configuration consists of 4 RAID6 volumes over which a set of ZFS filesystems will be striped. This will give us a raw storage capacity of 16TB. A SSD is used for ZFS optimisation.

Our tuning techniques and performance results will appear here soon. If everything goes to plan we will be using 4 servers configured in this way to host user home directories and research data for the School.

St Andrews Computer Science is first in Scotland in Good University Guide

St Andrews Computer Science rated 6th in the UK and 1st in Scotland in the 2012 Good University Guide.

The School of Computer Science is placed sixth in the UK and first in Scotland in the latest Times Good University Guide. The University as a whole also came sixth in the UK and first in Scotland.

URL for further information: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/gug/

Miller Prize for Joe Schaul

Computer Science student wins University prize for Science

One of our graduating students, Joe Schaul, has been awarded the University’s “Miller Prize”. The Prize is awarded to the best final-year undergraduate in the Science Faculty. As well has having an excellent academic record throughout his 4 years in the School, Joe also produced an exceptional undergraduate project. He developed a computer simulation framework for complex networks and applied it to two very different, real-world case studies: 1) the study of epidemics using a probabilistic model for various complex network topologies; and 2) the study of the effects of super-node crashes in Skype-like computer networks. The project was extremely challenging: it involved not only aspects related to the design, implementation and performance analysis of a scalable simulation tool for thousands of nodes, but it also required a very deep understanding of the problems related to the simulation of complex systems.

Well done, Joe!

The 2010/11 CS1006 Othello competition

On Wednesday 11th of May 2011 the first year module CS1006: Programming Projects finished with its traditional competition. The competition centres around a 2-player strategy game (Othello this year) for which the students have developed an Artificial Intelligence player as part of the last of the four projects on the module. These AI players are pitted against each other in order to determine the champion AI of the year.
Here are the competitors (plus a few hangers-on and referees):

CS1006 Othello Competitors

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