A new annual competition set up to identify outstanding and innovative work, created using the British Library’s digital collections and content, has recognised Palimpsest. The 2015 British Library Labs Awards honoured projects within three key categories: Research, Creative/Artistic and Entrepreneurship. Palimpsest: Telling Edinburgh’s Stories with Maps, was runner up in the Research category.
Congratulations to Uta, David and Aaron on the continued success of Palimpsest.
Congratulations to our St Andrews Computer Science Code First Girls, for completing the Fall 2015 course and staging their final projects. Students are pictured presenting their diverse and ambitious projects to staff and students in the School. Presentations were followed by a cheese and wine reception. Prizes were awarded for overall winner to Kahina Le Louvier for MuZik4Kids and runner up to Lucy Sharp and Lucy Wallis for Amelia Florence. Well done to all. Read more about CodeFirst:Girls in our previous post Computer Science supports CodeFirst:Girls 2015.
Well done to Sophie, Caitlyn and Sarah who raised £265 pounds for Children In Need last week. They are pictured setting up shop, selling their delicious homemade cakes and a exercising a spot of merchandise quality control. Staff and students helped them raise a fabulous total.
Review their previous 2012 and 2013 cakes and fundraising through our blog posts. A great effort all round, we look forward to seeing you again next time.
Congratulations to Ditchaphong Phoomikiattisak, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured below with supervisor Professor Saleem Bhatti, Internal examiner Professor Simon Dobson, and External examiner Dr Mahesh Marina from the University of Edinburgh.
Congratulation to our STACS community, on running another successful hack day earlier this month in conjunction with Major League Hackers The event hosted in the School looked like great fun and provides a great learning, building and socialising opportunity. Night bus tracker, CS story!, Crash alert, Game of phones, Notilife, Sports report and Bubble tree are just some of the resulting applications.
The students captured some great photos and a short video stream on their twitter account. The takeaway message appears to be that “hacking is a serious business”, but also great fun when it involves STACS. We look forward to hearing about the next event.
Images courtesy of Viktoriya Anisimova and STACS.
The School hosted a local programming contest in conjunction with UKIEPC on Saturday. Students and staff are pictured tackling problem sets throughout the day. Results and contest standings can be viewed on the UKIEPC Scoreboard. Aetherstore who sponsored the 2014 event, once again offered their backing, we thank them for their continued support.
Images courtesy of Graham Kirby.
Students from all years of study took advantage of the annual Technology Career Fayre, held last Friday at Agnes Blackadder Hall. The event was followed by a networking opportunity within the School of Computer Science. Representatives from Tech companies Adobe, Skyscanner, Toshiba, Avaloq, Amazon and Bloomberg met with students throughout the busy afternoon session. Participants were photographed during the Q&A, look closely and you could spot some alumni…
Images courtesy of Alex Bain.
The School of Computer Science welcomed back three alumni to give keynote talks at our lost in translation event earlier this week. The well-attended and informative event organised by Professor Aaron Quigley, afforded current PhD students and early researchers in computer science an exclusive opportunity to hear from previous students about their transition from academia to industry.
Talks chaired by Dr Ognjen Arandelovic, highlighted the challenges and opportunities faced during their PhD journey but without doubt strengthened the concept of transferable skills provided by postgraduate study and research activities. Presentations incorporated research skills, internships, analytical ability, teamwork, the value of teaching and tutoring responsibilities, designing the CS merchandise, communication skills, the flexibility of research areas and the importance of social activities.
Breakout sessions permitted small group discussions with each of our alumni, where they conveyed different experiences of research activities in the school, and their on-going experience of working within industry and within a recent start up. We are extremely proud of our alumni and thank them for their continued contribution to scheduled events, and for being fantastic ambassadors for Computer Science at St Andrews. You can read Neil’s “moving from academia to industry” blog post for his personal journey and reflection.
Alumni Keynote Speakers:
James Smith, Google, London.
Angus Macdonald, Aetherworks, New York.
Neil Moore, Adobe, Edinburgh.
Invited Guest:
Polly Purvis, CEO of ScotlandIS.
The event was funded by SICSA, The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance.
The school recently celebrated the retirement of Teaching Fellow, Judith Malcolm who retired last month.
During nearly 20 years of teaching within in the School, she worked on many undergraduate and postgraduate modules, participated in a number of teaching initiatives and coordinated both the Evening Degree and Communication and Teaching in Science.
During her leaving presentation she conveyed how much she will miss the school community, students and staff and will remember her years here very fondly. Having requested a list of recommended books and films from staff and students, to occupy some of her spare time we can be assured our influence will endure.
Judith has not completely escaped the world of Computer Science, and will continue to contribute to our successful evening degree modules.
The School of Computer Science is proud to be supporting the 2015 Code First Girls programme, currently in its third 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:
CodeFirst:Girls Fall 2015
The feedback received about these classes has been overwhelmingly positive, and includes the following testimonial from one of its current students:
“I have found the skills I am currently learning in these sessions invaluable both to my personal development and future employability. The course provides me with an exciting challenge, and at the end of every task successfully completed I feel empowered as an individual: women shouldn’t feel like outsiders looking in on an all-boys club when it comes to technology, and I’m very proud to be able to partake of a movement which seeks to level that playing field.”
St Andrews has consistently run as one of CF:G’s most active and successful courses; we’re running our beginners course (which covers basic front-end web development in HTML and CSS) for the third time now and are looking to run it again next semester alongside our first 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 2015
CodeFirst:Girls 2014
Text and images courtesy of Mary Dodd, Mary Chan, Shyam Reyal, Adeola Fabola and Vinodh Sampath.
