School of Computer Science Blog » News

Connect 4 anyone?

lisa — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:01:39 +0000

The subhonours lab was busy with the Connect 4 challenge this morning. Students taking CS1006 Programming Projects worked in pairs in a round-robin format, in which every duo plays every other once. Congratulations to Hamish and Mariya who won today’s challenge and received Amazon Vouchers as a reward.

Lectureship in Computer Science

alb — Mon, 07 May 2012 09:01:24 +0000

The School of Computer Science are seeking applications for a Lecturer in Computer Science

We seek lectureship applications from researchers who have a strong research background and excellent publication record in any area of functional programming, complementing and enhancing the existing research team, which has a strong focus on parallel programming models and implementation, resource-aware functional programming, dependent type systems, refactoring, static analysis, and performance modelling, and deep connections with the Haskell community. The candidate should be able to form links with and work collaboratively with other research groups in the school, and contribute to teaching and course design across functional programming and theoretical computer science, especially logic and semantics.

Information on how to apply.

New visualisation technique by STACS lecturer featured in the New Scientist

miguel — Thu, 03 May 2012 08:50:50 +0000

FatFonts, a visualisation technique invented by Miguel Nacenta, lecturer at the School is featured in this week’s issue of the New Scientist. You can learn more about the technique here and read the preview of the article here.

Brazilian “Science without Borders” studentships

lisa — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:53:38 +0000

The Brazilian Government has decided to support a programme of scholarships to promote the consolidation and expansion of science, technology and innovation in Brazil through ‘Science without Borders’. Science and technology scholarships will be made available to support tuition fees, travel and living costs.

Background information and programme details can be located at Brazil Science Without Borders and includes a list of project areas relating to Computer Science.

St Andrews CS is 7th in Complete University Guide

tristan — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:48:40 +0000

The School of Computer Science remains 7th in the UK (and top in Scotland) in the 2013 Complete University Guide. The University as a whole came 6th.

Senior Honours Project Madness

lisa — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 12:57:25 +0000

The dedicated and talented final year Computer Science students presented their projects yesterday. Short presentations were followed by demonstrations and a poster session.
We wish them every success as they approach graduation.

Best Poster: Isobel Hale
Multiple Intrusion Detection System Testing Suite (MISTY)

Best Project Madness Presentation: Thomas Nicholson
Cross-Modal Interactive World Builder

AWARE featured researcher of the week

sd — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:12:18 +0000

Graeme Stevenson, who’s finishing his PhD funded by the Sapere EU project, is this week’s featured researcher from the EU’s Awareness initiative. Awareness brings together the project consortia for a number of EU projects in self-awareness, autonomic computing and pervasive systems.

Honourable mentions for two ACM research papers

perola — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:46:30 +0000

Per Ola Kristensson has two recent papers published in top ACM conferences that have received honourable mentions:

Kristensson, P.O. and Vertanen, K. 2012. The potential of dwell-free eye-typing for fast assistive gaze communication. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Symposium on Eye-Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2012). ACM Press: 241-244.
Coyle, D., Moore, J., Kristensson, P.O., Fletcher, P. and Blackwell, A. 2012. I did that! Measuring users’ experience of agency in their own actions. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012). ACM Press: forthcoming.

Best student poster award at IWSOS

sd — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:40:49 +0000

Congratulations to Lei Fang, one of our SICSA postgrads, on winning the best student poster award at the recent International Workshop on Self-Organising Systems (IWSOS) in Delft NL. The poster (PDF), entitled “Towards self-management in WSNs by exploiting a spatio-temporal model”, presents early work on using statistical methods to find and exploit correlations between the observations made by nodes in a wireless sensor network. The aim is to use these correlations to detect errors, improve calibration and reduce data traffic.

One from the archives: The Jack Cole Building

lisa — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 10:46:26 +0000

The Jack Cole building was officialy opened by the then First Minister Jack McConnell on the 18th March 2005. The building was named after the founder of Computer Science at St Andrews. Read more about the opening in the university news archives.

Read more about Jack Cole and view pictures of the reception held after the opening.

Unveiling the Plaque

Virtual Worlds at Sensation

lisa — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 10:15:12 +0000

Weekend at Sensation

It’s been a busy weekend for the virtual worlds group. The reconstructed St Andrews Cathedral and other ongoing projects, were on display at Sensation in Dundee as part of the “Create and Inspire” initiative.

Friday involved organised school visits and Saturday and Sunday proved busy with members of the public entering the reconstruction to speak to Robert the Bruce and take a guided tour.

The visitors book recorded some great comments, extracts from this will be posted shortly, on the Virtual Worlds Blog.

Ethics in online social network research

tristan — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:29:17 +0000

Tristan Henderson has been awarded £4,700 from the EPSRC’s FRRIICT (Framework for Responsible Research & Innovation in ICT) project to investigate ethical issues in online social network research. The grant will fund a summer research internship which will build a framework for investigating ethical concerns using real online social network data.

New MSci (Hons) in Computer Science (5 years)

lisa — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:21:12 +0000

MSci (Hons) in Computer Science (5 years)

The MSci (Honours) in Computer Science is an exciting new integrated masters degree that is being introduced for 2013 entry. It takes place over five years, with an option for direct entry into the second year. Qualified students can therefore graduate with a Masters degree in four years.

The first three years of the MSci are shared with the BSc programmes. In the final two years, you can choose among modules at 4000 and 5000 (Masters) level, enabling both breadth and depth across the discipline.

The final year is spent in 5000 level modules as well as an advanced project. This may take the form of a project within the School, an industrial placement or a research internship, enabling MSci students to build skills that are useful for both academic and industrial careers.

Further information is available through the School Website.

hci2012 People & Computers XXVI

lisa — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:21:09 +0000

HCI 2012 will be held between the 12th and the 14th of September 2012 in Birmingham. The Programme Committee includes Aaron and Per Ola as short paper chairs and Miguel in Interactive Demos.

Information available online at hci2012 submissions.

Decision Support Tools for Cloud Migration in the Enterprise

lisa — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:45:46 +0000

This month’s IEEE Computing Now features the paper “Decision Support Tools for Cloud Migration in the Enterprise” written by Ali Khajeh-Hosseini, Ian Sommerville, Jurgen Bogaerts, and Pradeep Teregowda.

UKCISA grant

ishbel — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:14:53 +0000

Ishbel, Alan & Janie Brooks of ELT have been awarded £8000 from UKCISA (Council for International Student Affairs) to build a virtual St Andrews to aid international student orientation.

Crowdsourcing research featured in the New Scientist

perola — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:21:42 +0000

The latest issue of the New Scientist magazine writes about Per Ola Kristensson‘s work on using crowdsourcing and online web sources to create better statistical language models for AAC devices: Crowdsourcing improves predictive texting. The research paper was published in the Association for Computational Linguistics’ 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. It is published using the open access model and can be read here. The language models are publicly released and can be found here.

Special software to trawl thousands of historic archives to uncover Empire trade boom

alb — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:01:12 +0000

Professor Aaron Quigley’s research on exploratory visualisation allows historians to trace the flow of a wide range of natural resources around the globe. By working with world experts in text mining within the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance and domain experts in York University, Canada, we can bridge the research divide and answer historical questions on trading

Full news article

Professor Muffy Calder (Glasgow University) has been appointed Chief Scientific Adviser for Scotland.

joy — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:18:13 +0000

As Muffy Thomas, she was awarded her PhD, in Computational Logic, in this School in 1988. Details are at http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2012/02/scientific-adviser14022012

PhD Research featured in Poster Session

ipg — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:16:03 +0000

Last week we had a very successful poster session for PhD students to feature their research in the School of Computer Science. As previously blogged, three prizes were awarded by Professor Emeritus and former head of School, Ron Morrison.

Many of the posters featured at this session, including all the prizewinners, are now available for everyone to look at.

Competition entrants included:

Jan de Muijnck-Hughes Leveraging Predicate Based Encryption Systems
James W. Smith Energy Efficiency in Cloud Computing
CJ Davies Virtual Time Windows − Cross Reality for Cultural Heritage
John McCaffery Open Virtual Worlds as a Platform for 3D Application
Ruth Hoffmann Token Passing Networks and Permutation Pattern Classes
Indika Perera 3D Multi User Learning Environments: Management Policy Considerations
Ward Jaradat A Scalable Architecture for Decentralised Execution of Data-Intensive Workflows
Jin Huang Architectural Concerns for Distributed, Self‐adaptive Systems
Ozgur Akgün Refining Portfolios of Constraint Models with CONJURE
Masih Hajiarabderkani Adaptive Dissemination of Maintenance Information in Peer-to-Peer Systems
Jakub Dostal Viewing Distance and Attention Detection in Multi-Display Environments (MDEs)
Arunas Prokopas Constraint Solver Synthesizer
Chonlatee Khorakhun Enabling “Internet of Things”
Luke Hutton Temporal decay of social networking privacy policies
Bruce Simpson A new approach to multihoming in the IPv6 Internet

Many thanks to all the students for their hard work in creating such interesting posters, and to Ron for his very careful prizegiving.

PhD Poster Session 2012

lisa — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:52:39 +0000

The PhD poster session took place today in the Jack Cole coffee area.

Ron Morrison awarded Amazon vouchers to the three best posters. Congratulations to Lakshitha, Yi and Ali.

3rd place to System Deployment Costs in Public Clouds – Ali Khajeh-Hosseini

2nd place to Building Energy Awareness into ICT Systems (complete with magnifying glass) – Yi Yu

1st place to Monitoring Architectural Conformance through Runtime Event Interpretation – Lakshitha De Silva

Many of the posters featured at this session, including all the prizewinners, are now available for everyone to look at.

Competition entrants included:

Jan de Muijnck-Hughes Leveraging Predicate Based Encryption Systems
James W. Smith Energy Efficiency in Cloud Computing
CJ Davies Virtual Time Windows − Cross Reality for Cultural Heritage
John McCaffery Open Virtual Worlds as a Platform for 3D Application
Ruth Hoffmann Token Passing Networks and Permutation Pattern Classes
Indika Perera 3D Multi User Learning Environments: Management Policy Considerations
Ward Jaradat A Scalable Architecture for Decentralised Execution of Data-Intensive Workflows
Jin Huang Architectural Concerns for Distributed, Self‐adaptive Systems
Ozgur Akgün Refining Portfolios of Constraint Models with CONJURE
Masih Hajiarabderkani Adaptive Dissemination of Maintenance Information in Peer-to-Peer Systems
Jakub Dostal Viewing Distance and Attention Detection in Multi-Display Environments (MDEs)
Arunas Prokopas Constraint Solver Synthesizer
Chonlatee Khorakhun Enabling “Internet of Things”
Luke Hutton Temporal decay of social networking privacy policies
Bruce Simpson A new approach to multihoming in the IPv6 Internet

Research Fellow Vacancy

alb — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:28:16 +0000

The SACHI research group are seeking applications for a research fellow

Information on how to apply.

Twitter Innocent in English riots

lisa — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:07:47 +0000

Alex Voss was part of the team investigating the role of social media during the English Riots. The study was highlighted in the University news today, and the Guardian this morning.

Update

The results of the study will also be presented at the Reading the Riots conference, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/dec/14/reading-the-riots-conference-live-blog which also features a range of other speakers including Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition, Theresa May, the home secretary and Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary.

The study was led by Professor Rob Procter, of the University of Manchester, and funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee).

Hats off and congratulations to…

lisa — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:14:53 +0000

Tom, who is now an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Greg and Vladimir on their recent PhD success.

Alan, Colin and Ishbel on their successful FILTA bid for Blended Learning with Open Virtual Environments (BeLove).

November Graduation 2011

lisa — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:37:02 +0000

Congratulations to the Masters Class of 2011, and our PhD students, who graduated today. Students were invited to a reception in the school to celebrate their achievement with staff, friends and family. Our graduates have moved on to a wide variety of interesting and challenging employment opportunities, and we wish them all well with their future careers.

Funded Research Studentships

alb — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:38:15 +0000

The School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews has funding for students to undertake PhD research in any of the general research areas in the school:

http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/research

We are looking for highly motivated research students with an interest in these exciting research areas. Our only requirements are that the proposed research would be good, we have staff to supervise it, and that you would be good at doing it. We have up to 6 funded studentships available for students interested in working towards a PhD. The studentships offer costs of fees and an annual tax-free maintenance stipend of about £13,590 per year for 3.5 years. Exceptionally well qualified and able students may be awarded an enhanced stipend of an additional £2,000 per year. Students should normally have or expect at least an upper-2nd class Honours degree or Masters degree in Computer Science or a related discipline.

For further information on how to apply, see our postgraduate web pages. The closing date for applications is March 1st 2012 and we will make decisions on studentship allocation by May 1st 2012. (Applications after March 1st may be considered, at our discretion.) Informal enquiries can be directed to pg-admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk or to potential supervisors.

St Andrews CS students win DevXS

tristan — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 21:54:36 +0000

Congratulations to Computer Science undergraduates Elliot Davies and Sam Elliott who, along with Andrei Mustata from the University of Glasgow, won the DevXS “hackathon” at the University of Lincoln. Their team used datasets from the Guardian to develop a university guide.

Elliot Davies pitching their project

Palindromic moment

lisa — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:56:17 +0000

How did you mark the palindromic moment? Did it involve chocolate fingers and giant chocolate buttons?

Events across the UK also marked Armistice Day with a two-minute silence.

Open Minds Lecture Series 2011

lisa — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:58:54 +0000

Throughout St Andrews Week the University opens its doors, and invites members of the public, students and staff to attend lectures.

Ian Gent’s CS1005 lectures, Computer Science and Video Games, will feature in the event. A timetable of events and location details can be found on the University website.

Computer Science as Stand-up Comedy

ipg — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:36:36 +0000

Chris Jefferson, postdoctoral researcher in the School of Computer Science, did a short stretch as a stand-up comedian for Bright Club Dundee. His act talked about humour, dating and gaming, all from a computer scientist’s perspective. The piece is now on youtube.

Erasmus Mundus MSc in Dependable Software Systems (DESEM)

lisa — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:38:02 +0000

The National University of Ireland Maynooth; The University of St Andrews; and Université Henri Poincaré Nancy are offering a new two-year double Masters Programme: Erasmus Mundus MSc in Dependable Software Systems (DESEM). A programme description and Information on how to apply is available at NUI Maynooth.

Update Further information is also available in the Erasmus Mundus MSc in Dependable Software Systems Brochure.

Dharini Balasubramaniam is the Programme Director at the University of St Andrews, School of Computer Science. Email: dharini@st-andrews.ac.uk

Workshop on Computational Logic in honour of Roy Dyckhoff

valia — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:53:26 +0000

The University of St Andrews is hosting a 2-day workshop on Computational Logic in honour of Roy Dyckhoff, who has retired this year. The workshop will be held in Parliament Hall at the University of St Andrews on November 18-19, 2011, and is very generously sponsored by the SICSA Modelling and Abstraction Theme. Topics include Proof Theory, Natural Deduction, Verification, Combinatory Logic and Semantics. More details, including the programme can be found at: http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~lengrand/Events/Dyckhoff/index.php?page=programme Attendance at the workshop is free to SICSA researchers, but we do ask you to register through the web site so that we can arrange catering.

Baby Fish Fry

lisa — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:48:50 +0000

Why has there been so much activity and excitement around the fish tank this week?

Baby Cichlids have been spotted hiding amongst the rocks. Let’s hope they grow large enough, not be eaten, when they make a bid for freedom.

Photographing the camera shy proved rather tricky. Masih finally succeeded this morning.

One from the archives: Plans for new computer science building

lisa — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:22:28 +0000

November 2002, and the University unveiled plans in the university news, for a new computer science building. Stages of the build were photographed for posterity.

Electronic Voting System

lisa — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 09:21:35 +0000

An electronic voting system, developed by Ross and Stuart, was used to conduct the election for the new Rector. Full results are available in the University News.

Personalisation In Mobile Applications

lisa — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:36:50 +0000

Fehmi and Tristan’s paper, Context-based Personalised Settings for Mobile Location Sharing, featured in the PeMA 2011: Personalization in Mobile Applications Workshop.

The 5th ACM International Conference on Recommender Systems, took place in Chicago, Illinois from the 23rd until the 27th October.

Continued Success For MSc Students

lisa — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:19:08 +0000

Work carried out by Mary Steele, Titilayo Adegbamiye (both supervised by Gordon) and Shangyi Jiang (supervised by Ishbel), in fulfilment of their MSc, has continued success.

Mary’s dissertation focus, promoting public awareness of the links between lifestyle and cancer A controlled study of the usability of health information leaflets, has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Medical Informatics.

Titilayo’s disssertation focus, evaluating the Usability of Home Blood Pressure Monitors, featured in Workshop Proceedings at INTERACT 2011. Final proceedings are now available.

Charlie’s (Shangyi Jiang) focus on virtual worlds contributed to Ishbel’s Paper, A taxonomy of virtual worlds usage in education, recently accepted by the British Journal of Educational Technology.

Undergraduate Visiting Day

lisa — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:00:49 +0000

Another successful and well-attended Wednesday visiting day took place yesterday. Prospective undergraduates had the opportunity to meet staff, current students, eat cake and view the School facilities.

The familiar but extremely useful events are organised by Tristan, Adam and Saleem with help from volunteer students.

Isabel, Jesal, Anastasia and Thomas were the student volunteers undertaking yesterday’s tour and answering general questions.

Thursday Afternoon In Computer Science

lisa — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 08:46:28 +0000

Life in the Comp Sci Labs

The MSc lab in the John Honey building was busy with IT students holding initial group work meetings, for their next assignment. The advanced network students were networking, in a virtual sense, using WI-FI island.

Yemliha and Umer looked occupied in the HCI lab. A number of 3rd and 4th year students were busy with Project work in The Honours lab. Alas Davie and Jim were busy elsewhere.

Attendance in the 1st and 2nd year sub-honours lab, in the Jack Cole building, could be indicative of an imminent deadline. Modelling of various persuasions appeared to be the focus.

2011 Frontiers in Education Conference

lisa — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 09:48:38 +0000

Colin and Alan’s paper, The Third Dimension in Open Learning will feature in the T2E Technical Session Engineering Frontiers of Instructional Technologies, today.

The Frontiers in Education Conference taking place in South Dakota has become the premiere conference for innovative curricula made possible by three sponsoring professional societies. ASEE Educational Research and Methods Division, IEEE Education Society and IEEE Computer Society.

Beacon Series 2011-2012

lisa — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:51:58 +0000

A series of talks by Post-doctoral researchers from a number of academic schools across the University begin on the 20th October. The first lecture by Edwin Brady from Computer Science, will be introduced by Al. Chris Jefferson will be giving a talk in early March.

The talks will take place on Thursday evenings from 6 pm to 7 pm, starting on 20th October in Lecture Theatre C in Physics.

More information about the Beacon Series and the Open Association can be located on their website.

Avaloq create 500 Jobs In Edinburgh

lisa — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:05:19 +0000

Avaloq, headquartered in Zurich, is set to employ at least 75 Scottish graduates. Their decision to set up a software development centre in Edinburgh was anounced in the BBC news today. Edinburgh came top due to the wealth of potential graduate talent and the quality of excellent degrees in software engineering available in Scotland.

Challenges in Social Network Visualisation

lisa — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:57:51 +0000

Aaron Quigley the Chair of Human Computer Interaction in the School and Director of SACHI, the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group gave a seminar this morning in Edinburgh at the School of Informatics.

Devan Rehunathan has an App in the App Store

lisa — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:20:07 +0000

Exciting news from Devan,after completing his PhD in Computer Science at St Andrews, he joined the development team at Sports Team Space. More about the App at Football Sorted – Team Organisation from Bluefields.

ParaPhrase Project

lisa — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:43:52 +0000

The ParaPhrase Project, supported by the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for Research and Technological Development combining expertise from academia and industry featured in the University news today. The project commencing in October and set to last 3 years will be co-ordinated by the School of Computer Science.

Research Fellow Vacancy

alb — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:43:34 +0000

The school is seeking applications for a research fellow

Information on how to apply.

St Andrews Student wins prize in Scottish Software Engineer of the Year Awards

alb — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:25:01 +0000

St Andrews student Thomas Grimes won 3rd prize in the Scottish Software Engineer of the Year Award 2011. He received a trophy and a cheque for £1500.

Tom graduated from Computer Science from St Andrews in 2011 and currently studying in America towards a Masters in Computer Forensics.

Tom’s project involved creating screen replication software for the Macintosh lab although his final product also works on Windows and Linux.

Tom follows in the footsteps of other prize winners from St Andrews who in recent years have included Alistair Scott, Craig Paul, Angus MacDonald, Ben Catherall and Graeme Bell.

Photo: Tom Grimes receiving his award from comedian Kevin Bridges

Twitter: it’s good to talk

lisa — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 16:08:52 +0000

Social media can help people without speech communicate more naturally. Work carried out by Per Ola featured in the University News today.

Honours Reception

lisa — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 09:19:39 +0000

Junior and Senior Honours were provided with milk based food products, nibbles and fermented fruit juice during their reception.

Various attempts to look studious were captured for posterity.

Postgrad Cheese & Wine Reception

lisa — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:15:26 +0000

The annual event organised by the School to welcome all Postgrad students took place in the Jack Cole coffee area from 5pm. Lashings of wine or Shloer accompanied a wide range of Cheese and traditional nibbles. The product placement prize goes to Umer.

Undergrad BBQ

lisa — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:56:03 +0000

Another BBQ in the School is underway. An opportunity to welcome the new undergraduates and allow them to meet other Comp Sci students. A great turnout from 2nd yr, JH and SH.

Computer Science Gamefest

lisa — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:12:59 +0000

A small Gamefest in the sub honours lab on Wednesday proved successful and attracted some of our new undergraduate students.

Comp Sci staples Pizza and Irn Bru provided sustenance for the afternoon session of Mario Kart and Call of Duty.

MSc BBQ

lisa — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 08:40:52 +0000

The Scottish weather proved favourable for the MSc barbecue yesterday. An excellent turn out with over 50 MSc students sampling burgers, sausages and the local delicacy Irn Bru. Photographic evidence provided.

Staff BBQ

lisa — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:13:42 +0000

Despite the weather conditions, the end of summer BBQ went ahead, on Friday.

It provided the perfect opportunity to welcome new members of staff and newly arrived PhD students. Congratulations also to Greg on submitting his thesis, and farewell to Angus who will be starting work in New York soon.

Software Freedom Day

lisa — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 12:39:00 +0000

Software Freedom Day is an annual event held by communities who are passionate about free and open-source software (FOSS). The event programme includes a talk by Dr Markus Tauber from the School, titled Expectations, Requirements and Survival when Starting with Linux.

Markus has provided a short overview of his talk for those interested in attending: “The talk is about some work I did with friends from an Austrian CS society as a spare time activity about 2 years ago. We semi-scientifically looked into the relation of what experts expect Linux newbies to do when starting with Linux and what newbies expect or what they are happy to do. The talk is for both, newbies who want to get some guidelines and for experts to give them an idea about the expectations of newbies.”

Software Freedom Day will be held on Saturday 17th September from 10am until 5pm in Abertay’s Hannah Maclure Centre. The event is hosted by Abertay’s Open Society in partnership with TayLUG, Dundee’s local Linux user group.

Evening Degree Welcome Reception and Meet Your Tutor

lisa — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 08:30:44 +0000

The annual welcome reception for the new evening degree students took place last night in the Gateway brasserie. The familiar but extremely useful Meet Your Tutor session followed shortly afterwards. Tuesday evening sessions for IT begin next week.

Graduate Claire Gorgan was singled out for her achievements. Congratulations Claire.

Evening Degree Programme website

Arrival of Tony’s Cichlids

lisa — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:59:14 +0000

After much anticipation and excitement, the School welcomes 12 new African Cichlids for the start of a new semester.

Robocode Session

lisa — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:42:01 +0000

Students undertaking the pre-sessional language course before entering our taught Masters programme, had the opportunity to try out their programming skills this afternoon, in a fun and enjoyable context using Java to write programmes that control robots. Jan de Muijnck-Hughes and Lars Kotthoff led the session in the John Honey Building.

Virtual reconstruction of the Acropolis Basilica

lisa — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:04:34 +0000

The Basilica reconstruction was a collaborative project between the School of Classics and the School Computer Science. Research Blog

A reconstruction of St Andrews Cathedral has also taken place.
The reconstruction was a research topic for successful computer science and information technology MSc. dissertations in the summer of 2010 and 2011. Technical support was available in regular laboratory sessions; in addition students had input from experts in the history and architecture of the cathedral and direct access to the physical site.
A key innovative aspect of this project was to situate the reconstruction within the immersive 3D virtual world OpenSim. This allows visitors to explore the reconstruction through the proxy of an avatar.

Haribo – By David Letham

lisa — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:42:07 +0000

A small celebratory cake for Angus.

MSc Poster Presentations 2011

lisa — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:51:40 +0000

The MSc poster presentations and project demonstrations took place this afternoon. We wish all of our MSc students good luck as they finish their dissertations and move closer to graduation!

Mirco’s Last Day

lisa — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 11:38:39 +0000

Mirco Musolesi leaves the School today to start his new post in Birmingham. Thank you for the cakes from a local Royal supplier. Good luck and we will hopefully see you in St Andrews in the future.

St Andrews research featured in media reports

tom — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 15:58:10 +0000

Research by Tom Kelsey and colleagues from Glasgow and Edinburgh into normative models of hormone levels has been featured in the Daily Telegraph, the Scotsman, and the Express. Read the original paper here.

Lars Kotthoff wins Best Student Paper award

larsko — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 08:15:56 +0000

St Andrews PhD student Lars Kotthoff has won the Best Student Paper award at the Fourth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search. His paper, co-authored by Ian Gent and Ian Miguel, has the title “A Preliminary Evaluation of Machine Learning in Algorithm Selection for Search Problems” and compares the performance of different Machine Learning techniques on several Algorithm Selection problems from the literature. More information, including the paper, can be found on Lars’ website here.

St Andrews research featured on HPC in the cloud

larsko — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 14:51:27 +0000

Research by Ian Gent and Lars Kotthoff into the suitability of virtualised hardware for computational experiments is featured in a recent article of the HPC in the cloud site. The article contains a description of the research and an interview with Lars Kotthoff. Read more at HPC in the cloud.

Dr Tom Kelsey launches iPhone app for IVF-Predict

lisa — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:58:03 +0000

Calculator that returns chances of a live birth for a planned IVF cycle. IVF-Predict Support. IVFpredict was developed by Professor Scott Nelson and Professor Debbie Lawlor and published in PLOS Medicine. In conjunction with Dr Tom Kelsey they have transformed this complex formula into a simple online and smartphone based calculator. http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/ivf-predict/id447793863?mt=8

Greg Bigwood receives the Brendan Murphy Memorial Young Researcher Prize

tristan — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 16:59:18 +0000

St Andrews Computer Science PhD student Greg Bigwood has won the Brendan Murphy Memorial Young Researcher Prize at the 2011 Multi-Service Networks meeting in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. Multi-Service Networks (MSN) is an annual meeting of network researchers that mainly revolves around talks from PhD students. The Brendan Murphy Prize is given for the best presentation and is in memory of Brendan Murphy, an outstanding researcher and mountaineer known to many in the communications and distributed systems research community, and a regular participant at MSN since its inception. Greg received the prize for his talk Incentives for Opportunistic Networks.

News & events

adam — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 09:10:03 +0000

The system for posting news and events has been replaced with a combination of the School blog and an RSS feed to the School web site. For more information, follow the links at the foot of the School home page.

Professor Ian Sommerville receives teaching awards

Stuart Norcross — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:52:50 +0000

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

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

Stuart Norcross — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 14:47:13 +0000

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

Stuart Norcross — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 14:40:08 +0000

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

ianm — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 06:40:40 +0000

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

Competitors

The students had the option of working alone or in pairs. This year, there were seven competing programs from:

Simone Conte & Ivars Zubkan
Matthew Dooler & Antti Korpimaki
Gordan Coupar
Alex Field & Neil Hutchison
August Almgren
David Wolstenhome
Gareth Munro

Competition Format

The competition was played in round-robin format (everyone plays everyone else) with 3 points awarded for a win, 1 for a draw and 0 for a loss. A coin toss decided who played black (black moves first).

Battle is Joined

The competition was very keenly fought, with lots of close games: some not so close: and even one draw:

The Final Game

In the end, however, it came down to a final game between Conte & Zubkans and Field & Hutchison. These two teams had swept all before them, beating all the other teams in the competition. The final game would decide the champion. It was tense, and it was close: But in the end Simone Conte and Ivars Zubkans (playing white) emerged as our champions. Well done to them and to all who took part!

St Andrews student wins undergraduate of the year award

Stuart Norcross — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:31:22 +0000

Adam Copp, a Junior honours Computer Science student won the TARGET jobs IT and Computer Science Undergraduate of the Year Award for 2011. The award was sponsored by BT and, through a series of online tests, application forms, interviews and assessment exercises, Adam emerged as winner. BT only targeted a relatively small number of universities and so he beat off competition from other excellent students from other excellent universities.

Adam collecting the award from Michael Portillo (who hosted the awards) and Andy Skingley, Director of IP, Media and Mobility Platforms at BT.

PhD Reading Party 2010

csblog — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:36:24 +0000

The 2010 PhD reading party trip took us to Lochearnhead on the banks of Loch Earn. Each of the twelve PhD students attending gave a talk on their current work, before taking off for a spot of mountain biking in nearby Comrie.

The Whole Group

Talks

Each student gave a 15 minute talk on their work, with time for questions and comments.

Savio Dimatteo

At the end of the student talks Tom and Ed, the two staff members on the trip, imparted some wisdom (that talk didn’t take 15 minutes!).

Cycling

Our mountain biking route took us along to Crieff, past the Famous Grouse distillery, and back again. As the map below shows some of us took low route back, while a few brave souls attempted a hill climb which tops out at around 150 feet. Tough work!

Cycling Route

This wouldn’t be a Computer Science trip without amazingly specific elevation data for our route, so here you go…

Elevation of Route

Some exciting videos from the cycling trip:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f5s1h0NoDE

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNLslD_Hor0

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8M1m_dLOTE

Pool

Of course, the reading party wasn’t all work (and cycling). On each day after the presentations had finished we took the chance to visit the local pub, which was handily located right next to the hotel!

Watch the Intensity