Author: Stuart Norcross

Professor Ian Sommerville receives teaching awards

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

Storage Server Protype

Our storage server prototype build is now complete and we have moved on to configuration, tuning and testing. After some delays in sourcing components the build is now complete and everything appears to be working. The server will run BSD with ZFS. The chassis holds 24 3.5″ HDDs in hot-swap bays. These are connected to an Adaptec raid controller via a 4U SAS II expander back-plane. The RAID configuration consists of 4 RAID6 volumes over which a set of ZFS filesystems will be striped. This will give us a raw storage capacity of 16TB. A SSD is used for ZFS optimisation.

Our tuning techniques and performance results will appear here soon. If everything goes to plan we will be using 4 servers configured in this way to host user home directories and research data for the School.

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

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

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!

St Andrews student wins undergraduate of the year award

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.

From Recommendation to Reputation: Information Discovery Gets Personal

Speaker: Barry Smyth
Affiliation: University College Dublin
Biography: Prof. Barry Smyth holds the Digital Chair of Computer Science in University College Dublin.He is the Director of CLARITY

These lectures will focus on how personalization techniques and recommender systems are being used in response to the information overload problem that face web users everyday. Personalization research brings together ideas from artificial intelligence, user profiling, information retrieval and user-interface design to provide users with more proactive and intelligent information services that are capable of predicting the needs of individuals and adapting to their implicit preferences. We will review core ideas from recommender systems research, drawing on the many practical examples that have underpinned modern web success stories, from e-commerce to mobile applications. In addition we will explore how the next generation of web search is likely to be influenced by recommender systems techniques that can facilitate a more social and collaborative approach to web search, which complements the purely algorithmic focus of contemporary search engines.

Programme:
Physics: Lecture Theatre B: 11.00-12.00noon
Purdie: Lecture Theatre A:14.0-17.00

Downloads:

Event details

  • When: 22nd June 2011
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Lecture

Towards Pervasive Personal Data

Dr Graham Kirby, Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews.

This talk will outline an embryonic project to develop a software infrastructure supporting pervasive data, in which file data will flow automatically to the places that it is needed. Equilibrium will be achieved when the data reaches all the necessary places. When the equilibrium is perturbed, due to either the data or the necessary places changing, the infrastructure will react to restore the equilibrium by initiating new data flows.

The infrastructure will approximate the ideal of all of a user’s files being available at all locations all of the time. The user will be able to exert high-level influence on how this approximation is achieved, by specifying the desired equilibrium declaratively. The user will also be able to define policy that influences the priorities attached to restoring various non-equilibrium aspects of the system.

Event details

  • When: 5th May 2011 14:30 - 15:30
  • Where: Phys Theatre B
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Colloquium