Kamran Razavi: Bloomberg CodeCon winner

Congratulations to Kamran Razavi, one of our MSc in Dependable Software Systems (Erasmus Mundus) students, who won the recent Bloomberg CodeCon. CodeCon is a UK wide programming contest organised by Bloomberg and is hosted locally across multiple locations in the UK, one of which was located in the department of Physics at the University of St Andrews.

Kamran emerged first from 20 other contestants at the University of St Andrews and was ranked 19th among 217 other contestants UK-wide, coming from universities such as Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. He was awarded with a championship trophy, Bluetooth speakers, travel accessories and a ticket to London for the main contest, where the top three contestants from each local site will compete against each other.

The competition is highlighted through the University emails and after registering students can prepare themselves by solving previous problems.The competition itself, lasted 2 hours with 8 questions in total, which were algorithmic in nature, and required knowledge of data structures.

Kamran was able to solve 7 questions but was only able to submit 6, due to technical problems with the contest host website. The contest could have been taken in 15 programming languages including Java, C++, C, Python etc. Kamran used Java on this occasion and thanked Bloomberg, The School of Computer Science and The University for providing opportunities such as CodeCon. We wish him every success for the final contest.

Google@Computer Science in St Andrews

The School hosted another successful Google event on Wednesday. Students heard first hand, from four of our talented alumni, and had an opportunity to chat with current students who have completed internships. The well-received and very well attended session also covered mock interviews and rewarded students with the customary pizza.

Aaron Quigley appointed as ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Conferences

Congratulations to Professor Aaron Quigley who has been appointed to the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee, to serve as the Vice President for Conferences. The ACM Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI) is the premier international society for professionals, academics and students who are interested in human-technology & human-computer interaction. SIGCHI sponsors or co-sponsors 24 conferences in addition to providing in-cooperation support for over 40 other conferences. This family of HCI conferences are held across the year and around the world.

As Vice-President for conferences, Aaron will be responsible for strategic planning for SIGCHI-sponsored conferences, overseeing all aspects of SIGCHI-sponsored conferences, chairing various boards and committees and working with other SIGCHI vice-presidents and the SIGCHI executive committee on policies affecting SIGCHI sponsored, co-sponsored, and in-cooperation conferences.

Computer Science supports CodeFirst:Girls 2016

The School of Computer Science is proud to be supporting the 2016 Code First Girls programme, currently in its fourth run. Code First: Girls was originally the coding education arm of Entrepreneur First, a not-for-profit organisation which supports graduates building their own tech startups, but is now an independent organization by itself. CF: G is a social enterprise that aims to address the issue of getting more women into tech and tech entrepreneurship. This is done through two main brackets of activity:

Building a community of tech-savvy young women. They currently run around 27 courses in a number of UK university locations from Southampton to St Andrews. They also run frequent career evenings at various tech companies (such as Twitter and Just Eat), as well as an annual conference and hackathons.
Working with tech companies themselves. This is mainly looking at recruitment strategies, linking up recruiters with their community and running in-house staff coding courses.

The School has consistently run as one of CF:G’s most active and successful courses; running the beginners course (which covers basic front-end web development in HTML and CSS) for the fourth time now alongside the second run of a more advanced course – building on the beginner’s curriculum with the introduction of Python to build more powerful back-end elements.

Within the tech industry, women are often at a disadvantage due to a lack of technical knowledge; Code First: Girls exists precisely to address this educational disparity, and this is why the School is keen to see students from all disciplines and years of study participate in these informative, friendly and interactive sessions.

CodeFirst:Girls Fall 2015

CodeFirst:Girls 2015

CodeFirst:Girls 2014

Text and images courtesy of Mary Dodd, Mary Chan, Shyam Reyal, Adeola Fabola and Vinodh Sampath.

PhD Viva Success: Michael Mauderer

Belated congratulations to Michael Mauderer, who successfully defended his thesis earlier this month. Micheal’s thesis, augmenting visual perception with gaze-contigent displays, was supervised by Dr Miguel Nacenta. Professor Aaron Quigley acted as internal examiner and Professor Hans Gellersen, from Lancaster University acted as external examiner.

Computer Science supports Macmillan

The School hosted another successful Coffee Morning organised by Dr Ishbel Duncan. This year, September 30th is the UK’s annual biggest coffee morning in aid of MacMillan Cancer care. Some of the home baking and donations are pictured below. So far we’ve raised just over £120. Very, well done to everyone who participated. David Letham was named Best Baker.

UPDATE: The final amount raised by computer science was £173.30.

David Harris-Birtill: Converge Challenge Winner 2016

Congratulations to Dr David Harris-Birtill, who was announced the winner of the Converge Challenge KickStart award at a ceremony in Edinburgh yesterday. The converge challenge competition rewards an early-stage idea or a new product. David won a cash injection prize of £3,000 to kick-start Beyond Medics – Automated Remote Pulse Oximetry, a camera based system that remotely measures patients’ vital signs.

Google @ St Andrews – 28th September

Come along and learn about Google and some of the engineering challenges they are tackling. The event will include talks from our very own CS alumni and mock interview opportunities, which are a great way to get feedback on your interview technique, from real Google Engineers. Pizza and drinks provided.

Date and Time: Wednesday 28th September
Venue: Jack Cole room 1.33ab

Event sign up link: goo.gl/1EtfGj

Schedule:
Engineering at Google – 4 – 5.30pm – Presentations from four St Andrews CS alumni working at Google. Q&A session – An opportunity to chat with alumni presenters, and Google interns who are current studying at St Andrews.

Mock interview sessions – 7 – 9pm – Interested people should sign up using the link above.

Alex Voss: Great Scottish Swim for Macmillan

On August 27th, Alex Voss will be participating in the Great Scottish Swim 2016. Alex is swimming in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support, a charity that supports people affected by cancer to ensure no one faces cancer alone.

Alex was part of the CS swim team who completed the challenge last year.

Visit his JustGiving page and reward his hard work and support a great charity.

PhD Viva Success: Vinodh Rajan Sampath

Congratulations to Vinodh Rajan Sampath, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured below with supervisor Dr Mark-Jan Nederhof, research student Juan Mendoza Santana and internal examiner Dr Tom Kelsey. Dr Peter Stokes from King’s College London, acted as external examiner.

Computer Science Blog