News

$2.2 million funding for former CS students

Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini, along with former CS students Ali Khajeh-Hosseini and Alistair Scott saw an untapped market to help engineers lower their cloud computing costs, creating Infracost as a result. Infracost provides developers with cloud cost estimates based on changes they make to their code infrastructure.

Hassan, the CEO, who attended The Robert Gordon University and The University of Edinburgh, and is a serial entrepreneur, with two of his companies he cofounded with his brother Ali (ShopForCloud and AbarCloud) being acquired. Ali, also attended The Robert Gordon University and The University of Edinburgh like his brother, and went on to obtain his Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews, with his doctoral thesis focusing on cloud computing (Thesis: Supporting System Deployment Decisions in Public Clouds). His decade of expertise in the field played a critical role in the success and acquisitions of ShopForCloud and AbarCloud. Rounding out the team is Alistair, who attended the University of St. Andrews for his computer science degree. He was also a cofounder at AbarCloud and a senior software engineer at RightScale. These three together have impressive domain expertise and a successful entrepreneurial track record in cloud computing makes it likely that will make a massive impact with Infracost in the tech industry at-large.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickdaso/2021/09/23/infracost-raises-22m-from-sequoia-to-help-engineers-lower-their-cloud-computing-costs/

 

ACL 2021 Test of Time Award

Dr. Jean Carletta has been awarded the 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics 25-year Test-of-Time paper award for Assessing Agreement on Classification Tasks: The Kappa Statistic, Computational Linguistics 22 (1), 1996. In this paper she intervened to correct a common but misleading statistical practice. As a result, her field began to require assessments of how variability in subjective analyses could bias the claims made for their results. Although her work was based on existing content analysis best practice in the humanities, the clarity of her expression led to the paper being used widely in teaching research methods to medical students as far afield as Beijing.
Jean is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science. She is engaged in a wide portfolio of work that takes a systems level approach to improving the impact Scotland’s academic community has on national cyber security and resilience.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/announcement-2021-acl-test-time-paper-award-0

Learning to Describe: A New Approach to Computer Vision Based Ancient Coin Analysis

The work on deep learning based understanding of ancient coins by Jessica Cooper, who is a Research Assistant and a part-time PhD student supervised by Oggie Arandjelovic and David Harrison has been chosen as a featured, “title story” article by the Journal Sci where it was published in a Special Issue Machine Learning and Vision for Cultural Heritage.

Zoë Nengite awarded Principal’s Medal

Congratulations to Zoë Nengite who has been awarded The Principal’s Medal in recognition of outstanding academic achievement and exceptional activities within the University and the wider St Andrews community. The Medal is awarded to students who have both excellent academic accomplishments and those who have inspired and supported their peers and who have often undertaken extensive advocacy work, which has improved life for many of their fellow students.

Zoë sent us a reflection on time spent studying in the School and a photo celebrating with Mum.

“I’m really sad that my time at St Andrews has come to an end. I will especially miss the School of Computer Science. We are such a close community of students and staff alike. I will even miss the Jack Cole labs, despite spending many hours with my head in my hands stuck on a problem gripping my mug of coffee. I always knew that help wasn’t too hard to find.

“Some of my best memories are from my time at St Andrews. Most of them spent with my closest friends who also studied Computer Science. Coming from London, I was apprehensive about St Andrews, but it quickly became a place I called home. I think even years from now, it will always be somewhere I call home.”

The award was announced during the virtual conferral of degrees in July. Zoë hopes to attend a rescheduled Class of 2020 Ceremony in the future where we look forward to celebrating with her in person.

Royal Television Society Bursary Scheme 2020

*STV has committed to provide a further ten students with RTS/STV bursary in the 2020/21 academic year.*

Considering a career in the broadcasting industry? Our students have successfuly secured Royal Television Society technology bursaries in 2019 and in previous years. The venture is intended to address a skills gap and attract some talented young people from top computer science or engineering courses to consider a career in television. Further details of the scheme can be found here: https://rts.org.uk/education-and-training-pages/bursaries

The RTS Bursary Scheme submission window opened on the 1st of February 2020 and will close on the 30th of June 2020.

Bursary recipients attend a summer tour of the industry, a financial award per year towards their studies, membership of the Royal Television Society and mentoring opportunities within their final year of study. Recipients are selected by a panel of industry professionals following an open call to UK students applying for courses at accredited colleges and universities.