Pictures

Computer Science hosts Hack the Bubble

Earlier this month the School hosted hack the Bubble, a 12-hour hackathon organized by STACS, the St Andrews Computing Society and sponsored by J.P. Morgan. Hackathons are great events for teams of students to build projects from scratch and compete for awesome prizes.

The main aim of this event was to show our first and second year students what a hackathon is in a more accessible 12-hour format instead of the traditional 24 or 48 hour ones. The event was a great success with 70 students participating and 15 teams presenting their projects at the end.

This event wouldn’t have been possible without the help of the School of Computer Science for providing the venue, and sponsors J.P. Morgan for the food and prizes.

Hack the Bubble October 2016

Hack the Bubble October 2016

Images and text courtesy of STACS.

Computer Science hosts J.P. Morgan

Earlier this month, J.P. Morgan visited the School of Computer Science, to highlight tech careers, internships and other student opportunities. Staff from the company and CS students are pictured viewing project challenges and solutions through their technology showcase, discussing future career openings and enjoying pizza.

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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.

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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.

Welcome to new 2016 PhD Students

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The School is very happy to welcome its new group of PhD students who have started in 2016. Shown outside the Jack Cole Building on 13 October 2016 are:

(Back row, left to right) Fahrurrozi Rahman; Xue Guo; Teng Yu; Yanbei Chen; Guilherme Soares Carneiro; Yasir Alguwaifli; and Xu Zhu.

(Front row, left to right) Mun See Chang; Zahida Almuallem; Esme Benssassi; Sidi Zhan; and the Director of Postgraduate Research, Miguel Nacenta.

Absent from the photo are Dawand Sulaiman and Saad Attieh.

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.

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

CodeFirstGirls Fall 2015

CodeFirst:Girls Fall 2015

CodeFirst:Girls 2015

CodeFirst:Girls 2015

Codefirst:Girls 2014

CodeFirst:Girls 2014

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

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.

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Welcome to new PhD students

We are delighted to introduce three female PhD students funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council.

Xue Guo (JC1.06)
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“I am Xue Guo, a returning student from Beijing. My PhD research into Complex Networks is supervised by Prof. Simon Dobson. Last seven years, I hopped over five places: four undergraduate years in BUPT and UCSD, one master year in St Andrews, and two gap years – one in Phoenix TV as a technology journalist, and one in Skyscanner as a software engineer. A three-to-four-year research in one town seems quite a LONG journey for me, but I am sure it will NOT be a LONGLY one in this warm academic community of School of Computer Science. My current research interest is modelling real world phenomena using complex networks, esp. smart city design. Born in Beijing, a city with a population of over 20 million, I have experienced most urban problems that a metropolis can suffer from. I would like to design a research tool for the city designers to generate solutions to traffic congestion and give advice on city infrastructure distribution. I am looking forward to learning from you and exploring more applications of complex networks. In my free time, I enjoy fencing, snowboarding, calligraphy and music.”

Yanbei Chen (JC1.19)
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“From 2011 to 2014, I was studying in Zhejiang University in China, with a speciality in Automation. In 2014, I started my master program in KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, with a major in System, Control and Robotics. In the summer of 2015, I enrolled in Tohoku University Engineering Summer Program in Japan. In the first half of 2016, I conducted my master thesis in the field of machine learning, deep learning and multimodal learning under the supervision of Dr. Atsuto Maki in Computer Vision and Active Perception Lab in KTH.Currently, with the scholarship from China Scholarship Council and University of St Andrews, I will start my PhD study under the supervision of Dr. Juan Ye. My research interests lie in the fields of activity recognition, machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. From now on, my research will focus on activity recognition based on sensor data from smartphone. In my leisure time, I enjoy music, travel, reading, and jogging.”

Sidi Zhan (JC1.11)
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“Hi, I am Sidi Zhan! I completed my BEng in Computer Science at Beijing Foreign Studies University, focusing on recommending doctors to patients in online healthcare QA community. I am now working as a PhD student in Computer Science under the supervision of Dr. Tristan Henderson and Dr. Juan Ye. My proposed research is to enhance peers mutual help and promote their social support in online healthcare community by using recommender to match-make the patient users. My research project will include collecting and analyzing users’ profiles and records data, so policies on user privacy protection will also be examined. I enjoy studying and living in St Andrews, the beautiful coastal city, very much. I am so willing to combine my hobbies with the life here by experiencing local culture, like jogging along the East Sands, singing in a chorus and going Ceilidh dances.”