Author: ipg

PhD Interviews at St Andrews in CS

We have had an outstanding pool of applicants for our 600th Anniversary Scholarships to do a PhD in Computer Science.  This means that in the coming weeks we will be conducting many interviews with potential PhD students.  If you are one of those, or if you are just interested in what our interviews are like, I thought it would be a good idea to tell you what our PhD interviews are like.   I’m going to assume that “you” is somebody being interviewed for a PhD place, just to make writing the rest of this post easier.

What Our PhD Intervews Are

I’ve been doing the job of academic responsible for PhD admissions for about 3 years, and in that time I think we’ve admitted one student without an interview. Continue reading

University of St Andrews 600th Anniversary PhD Scholarships in Computer Science

As part of the University of St Andrews 600th Anniversary celebrations, we are able to offer six PhD Scholarships in Computer Science for 2013, including fees and a stipend.

Human version of the St Andrews University crest, organised in part by Yi Yu, one of our PhD students

This celebrates a great moment in the life of the University, and the Scholarships may be held in any research area of the School. 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.

You can see our
advert at jobs.ac.uk
and also our local page with further information on postgraduate study in Computer Science.
Informal enquiries can be directed to pg-admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk or to potential supervisors.
Formal application is through our normal applications process, mentioning that you wish to be considered for the 600th Anniversary Scholarships.
The closing date for applications is February 4th, 2013.

Seminar by Leo Liberti on “Symmetry in Mathematical Programming”, 19th Nov, 11am

Leo Liberti, the director of the Optimisation and Sustainable Development Chair at Ecole Polytechnique, will be giving a seminar on Monday 19th November, 2012, at 11am-12, in Jack Cole 1.33a.

Symmetry in Mathematical Programming

Abstract: When solving Mathematical Programming (MP) problems (be they linear or nonlinear, continuous or mixed-integer) using Branch-and-Bound (BB), the presence of symmetries of the solution set results in BB taking longer than strictly needed, due to the symmetries induced on the BB tree. I shall illustrate a class of “symmetry breaking” methods based on reformulating the symmetric MPs so that some of the symmetric optima become infeasible. I shall show how to automatically detect MP formulation symmetries by reducing MP to graphs, and how to automatically generate reformulated MPs with (hopefully) fewer symmetric optima. Although computational tests show that reformulations may not always succeed in making BB terminate faster, they can be applied very efficiently – so they can be considered an efficient “pre-solving step” to running BB.

Event details

  • When: 19th November 2012 11:00 - 12:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Four Geeks and an Entrepreneur

Al Dearle, Monty Widenius, Steve Linton, Ian Gent

Al Dearle, Monty Widenius, Steve Linton, Ian Gent (left to right), St Andrews, 15 October 2012

We were privileged today to hear three lectures from Monty Widenius, main author of the MySQL database system.   His main focus was on entrepreneurship and being an entrepreneur while giving away source code on an open source basis.

Three staff members from St Andrews are pictured with Monty before the first lecture, in St Salvator’s quad at the University of St Andrews.

Event details

  • When: 15th October 2012
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series

Distinguished Lecture Series: MySQL and Open Source Business, by Monty Widenius

Monty Widenius delivered the Semester 1 Distinguished Lecture Series on Monday 15th October 2012, from 10am to 3.30pm, in Upper College Hall.

Monty is CEO & CTO at Monty Program Ab, and is perhaps best known as founder of MySQL, the world’s most used open source.

Monty delivered three lectures on MySQL and Open Source Business.  He has kindly made the slides available – linked to from the titles.

The lectures were  introduced by the Dean of Science, Prof Al Dearle, and refreshments were provided at 11am.

These lectures were open to all.

The detailed programme is available as a pdf: Monty Widenius DLS Programme

Event details

  • When: 15th October 2012 10:00 - 15:30
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Seminar

PhD Research featured in Poster Session

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:

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