Computer Science Student Representatives 2017

Congratulations to our student representatives for 2017/8, elected by their peers last month. Our Reps are integral to the proactive communication channel between staff and the students and also chair and run the Staff-Student Consultative Committee (SSCC) held each semester within the School.


The reps are pictured outside the Jack Cole Building, after this semester’s SSCC meeting and are (from left to right)

  • Lewis Mazzei (1st year, minutes)
  • Beatrice Olivera (1st year, minutes)
  • Jamie Bell (2nd year, careers)
  • ​Gergely Flamich (School President)
  • Arnold Haidu (MSc, library)
  • Stacey Izmaylova (3rd year, social)
  • Xu Zhu (PhD, Postgrad)
  • Keno Schwalb (4th year)
  • Paul McKay (Evening)

Image courtesy of Ula Rustamova

Computer Science Orientation and Welcome 2017

After advising and induction events, staff and students are pictured enjoying a welcome reception and orientation activities, coordinated by Uta Hinrichs. The annual orientation gaming session proved as popular as ever and offered retro classic digital games and traditional board games. The gaming session was closely followed by a well attended welcome reception for the consumption of Twiglets and Irn Bru.

Computer Science Student Reps 2016

reps

We are delighted to congratulate the student representatives for 2016/7, elected by their peers. Reps play a very important part in the life of the school by providing a healthy communication channel between staff and the students they represent, and also by chairing and running the Staff-Student Consultative Committee, amongst many other roles.

The reps are shown outside the Jack Cole Building in November 2016, and are (from left to right)

  • Juris Bogusevs (1st year)
  • Seamus Bonner (1st year, library)
  • Keno Schwalb (3rd year, careers)
  • Christa-Awa Kollen (welfare)
  • Vika Anisimova (4th year)
  • Anastasiia Izmailova (2nd year, social)
  • Masha Nedjalkova (masters, careers, minutes)
  • Fearn Bishop (postgraduate research)
  • Robin Nabel (school president)

Many thanks to the reps for arranging this photo (taken by Alex Bain who can be seen in the reflection), which should help staff and students put faces to the names.

Thanks to everyone who volunteered to be a student rep.

 

 

Watch some video, win a Netflix or Amazon voucher

experiment_screenshot2

Tell us what you think of our videos and you could win a £20 Netflix or Amazon voucher!

You will be asked to watch and assess the video quality of four 1-minute online video clips, as well as complete a short questionnaire related to your regular video usage and your energy-saving awareness and preferences. Your participation should take around 20 to 30 minutes.

Optionally, you will be entered into a prize draw for a £20 Netflix or Amazon voucher.

You must be 18 years or over.

Please contact Oche Ejembi <ooe@st-andrews.ac.uk>

UTREC approval code: CS12016

Contact Details

Researcher: Oche Ejembi
email: ooe@st-andrews.ac.uk

Supervisor: Prof. Saleem Bhatti
email: saleem@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Silvia Nepšinská: Google STEP Internship

Congratulations to first year student Silvia Nepšinská, who has successfully secured a STEP Internship with Google in Zurich. Her success after one semester in computer science is exceptional, given the highly sought after places and competitive process.

Silvia first heard about Google STEP internships from a friend and applied to get real-life programming experience with a company renowned for its creative and varied office environment. She explained her motivation for applying and shared some of her thoughts on the process.

“Thanks to friends who already had internships, and also to the academic skills project talks last semester, I knew what to expect, how the interviews will probably look like. I participated in an algorithmic competition during high school, so I was familiar with the type of questions they would ask, but I have never had a programming interview before, never had to talk while coding, so that was completely new to me. I was really glad when Shyam offered to do a mock interview for me so I could try it.

I had 2 interviews, the first went quite well, but I didn’t know what to think about the second, because the interviewer didn’t talk very much, especially when I got stuck at one point, she mostly waited for me to resolve everything, so I had no idea what she was thinking, which was little scary. But apparently it went well, and they called me just few days later to tell me that I passed the interviews.

But that still wasn’t the end, because in next stage, teams select the successful interview candidates for their projects. It is still possible to get through interviews and not get an internship, because no suitable team/project was found. Last week I received a call from a team in Zurich. We discussed the potential project I would be doing with them and I could ask them whatever I wanted about it, or about the Zurich office in general.

The academic skills project Internship talks were great, because they gave me the information about the process. Also, we had a talk by St Andrews alumni James Smith from Google, and afterwards I signed up for their notifications mailing list. A Google University Programs employee located me from the list, and she talked to me about specifics of STEP internship and future interviews. She was also in contact with my recruiter, so I felt like I had two recruiters, which was really nice.”

The School is keen to highlight student achievement and showcase the talent, originality and creativity fostered here in computer science. Thanks to Silvia for sharing her experience and in doing so, encouraging other students to seek out future internships. We have supported a number of student led, or internship focused events in the last year including the Academic Skills Project, Lost in Translation: Academia to Industry and This is a Google Talk.

Academic Skills Project: Securing Internships and Job Placements

Academic Skills Project: Securing Internships and Job Placements

School Seminars: Building the News Search Engine – Bloomberg

Building the news search engine, by Ramkumar Aiyengar, Bloomberg
Abstract:
This talk provides an insight into the challenges involved in providing near real-time news search to Bloomberg customers. Our News team is in the process of migrating to using Solr/Lucene as its search and alerting backend. This talk starts with a picture of what’s involved in building such a backend, then delves into what makes up a search engine, and then discusses the challenges of scaling up for low-latency and high-load.
Bio:
Ramkumar leads the News Search backend team at the Bloomberg R&D office in London. He joined Bloomberg from his university in India and has been with the News R&D team for 7 years now. For the last couple of years, his team has focussed on rewriting almost the entire search/alert backend, used by almost every Bloomberg user to get near-real time access to news with sub-second latencies. A geek at heart, he considers himself a Linux evangelist, an open source enthusiast, and one of those weird creatures who believes that Emacs is an operating system and had once got his music player and playlists to be controlled through a library written in Lisp.

Event details

  • When: 3rd March 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series, School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk