Congratulations to Michael Pitcher, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured with Dr Ruth Bowness, Internal examiner Prof Tom Kelsey, external examiner Professor Marc Lipman from University College London and Supervisor Prof Simon Dobson. Michael’s thesis was co-supervised by Prof Stephen Gillespie from the School of Medicine.
Research carried out by Charlie Blake and Ian Gent to compute the approximate odds of winning any version of solitaire featured in New Scientist last week (print edition November 23rd ). Ian emphasised the calibre of research carried out by our undergraduate students and his early interaction with card games.
“This research has been hugely satisfying to me because my mother taught me games like King Albert as a child and I loved to play them with her. Now I know for the first time the chance of winning that game is about 68.5%.
It is wonderful to see work which started as an undergraduate student project feature in the New Scientist. This obviously reflects Charlie’s fantastic programming that he did. But it also shows the research-level quality work that undergraduate students can do as part of their studies in St Andrews.”
Link to the full paper on arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.12314
Online article published in Technology Nov 17th: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2223643-we-finally-know-the-odds-of-winning-a-game-of-solitaire/
The School received the following letter of appreciation from UKJA for a recent donation of computers and IT equipment.
Dear Sir,
I am writing on behalf of The United Kingdom Jarra Association (UKJA) to thank the prestigious School of Computer Science of The University of St Andrews for their recent donation of Computers to our Association. We hereby thank Dr Stuart Nacroos, the entire Systems team and Sheriffo Ceesay (a native of Jarra and current Computer Science PhD Student at your reputable institution) for facilitating this donation. The team also devoted their time to assist in moving the items securely for collection last Saturday – we are very grateful.The UKJA was formed by Gambians resident in the UK in August 2015 and attained full charitable status in May 2017 with number 1173058. Our aim is to support development initiatives of Jarra in rural Gambia – Jarra comprises Jarra West, Jarra Central and Jarra East where we hail from. We aim to do this through the promotion of education, health and Poverty alleviation.
In the area of education, our focus is on STEM related subjects. The association believes that every child deserves a better learning environment to assist them reach their maximum potential and fulfil their dreams irrespective of their background. The association, cognisant of the above challenges conceived the “Educate Jarra” programme. At the core of this intervention is Science, Technology, English and Mathematics with physics, Chemistry, Biology.
Two years ago, the charity, in partnership with Islamic Cooperation for Development (ICO) based in Jeddah Saudi Arabia established our first Science and Computer Laboratory in Soma also in Jarra. In 2019, we expanded our intervention to Bureng where the construction of a new science and computer laboratory is now complete. The donated equipment will directly be used to equip Bureng.
Your intervention arrived at a time when we are vigorously raising the required funds to furnish the facility. Use the link below for further information about our ongoing fundraising: https://www.gofundme.com/f/better-educational-facilities-for-kids-in-jarra?utm_source= whatsApp&utm_medium=chat&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet. We will also donate some of the computers to the region’s Senior Secondary School and other secondary schools that have access to electricity. We acknowledge the importance of computers and technology in the modern world and our goal is to nurture and prepare the younger generation to be challengers of the future by producing Scientists, Doctors and engineers through the education programme.
In the area of health, the UKJA currently supports the Soma Referral Hospital’s maternity unit. In partnership with FAR – an oil company working in The Gambia – in 2018 we embarked on a project to improve conditions of service at the maternity unit of the hospital. Through this we have been able to expand capacity of the labour ward and provided equipment including those for the operating theatre. Some of the computers received will be donated to this hospital as a step to digitalise the hospital and help improve patient management system. The importance of electronic health information system in the era of technology cannot be overemphasised. Record keeping in The Gambia has always been approached in the traditional. These computers will change that trend in Soma.
With this brief, you will be convinced that your donation will be put to good through the UKJA. Therefore, as a charitable institution, we are always looking for possible collaboration in the aforementioned areas with the aim to help improve our communities. We look forward to continuously working with your reputable institution in the best interest of our community.
Please be assured of our highest consideration.
Sulayman A. Bah
Secretary GeneralUnited Kingdom Jarra Association (UKJA) is a registered Charity in England and Wales. Registered number 1173058
The School of Computer Science will host a graduation reception on Tuesday 3rd December in the Jack Cole building, between 12.00 and 14.00. Graduating students and their guests are invited to the School to celebrate with a glass of bubbly and a cream cake. Computer Science degrees will be conferred in a morning ceremony in the Younger Hall. Family and friends who can’t make it on the day can watch a live broadcast of graduation. Graduation receptions have been held in the school from 2010.
Following on from a successful visit last year, J.P. Morgan returned to the School of Computer Science today, to promote tech careers, internships and other student opportunities.
Staff from the company and students are pictured viewing project challenges and solutions highlighted in their technology showcase whilst discussing future career openings and enjoying the complimentary pizza.
J.P. Morgan is a popular destination for St Andrews graduates demonstrated by Alumni (Sjoukje Ijlstra, Conner Somerville and Mathew Kaminski) who are part of the team representing the company at the successful event.Great to see them back in the School.
MSc student Saad Memon participated in the CERN School of Computing 2019 and the ACM Europe Summer School 2019 in HPC Architectures for AI and Dedicated Applications.
CERN School of Computing (CSC 2019) involved a series of lectures and practical exercises over a two-week period. The Summer School is open to postgraduate students and research workers at CERN or at external institutes. Participants are generally attracted by the advanced topics that are taught. A limited number of places are available and all applications go through a selection process. Further details can be found on their school website.
The ACM summer school is open to outstanding MSc students and senior undergraduate students, this year successful participants spent a week in Barcelona, attending formal lectures during the mornings and practical sessions in the afternoons. Prof. Silvio Micali, Turing Award laureate and MIT Professor, gave a Turing lecture on “ALGORAND. The distributed Ledger for the Borderless Economy”.
Group picture of ACM Particpants
Saad receiving certificate from Fabrizio Gagliardi, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
Saad completed his MSc in Dependable Software Systems here in the School.
Congratulations to Ilia Lvov, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured with (from left to right): supervisor Dr Alex Voss, internal examiner Prof Tom Kelsey and Prof David De Roure from Oxford University.
Each year in July, the (broadly-defined) computer networking community converges at Cosener’s House for the MSN workshop. The workshop is an informal gathering where attendees – students in particular – are encouraged to present on-going work and/or crazy ideas. From among the presentations, the Brendan Murphy Award is given to the best student presentation, generally for work that has yet to be scrutinized or peer-reviewed.
Congratulations to Donald Robertson who, this year, has brought that honour to St Andrews as co-recipient of the award (alongside Naomi Arnold from QMUL).
http://coseners.net/history/brendan-murphy-prize/
(In the interest of transparency, Marwan Fayed was on the judging panel but recused himself during discussion of Donald’s presentation.)
The Melville Trust for the Care and Cure of Cancer have funded a PGR Studentship relative to the project entitled ‘Detecting high-risk smokers in Primary Care Electronic Health Records: An automatic classification, data extraction and predictive modelling approach’.
The supervisors are Prof. Frank Sullivan of the School of Medicine and Prof. Tom Kelsey of the School of Computer Science, with work commencing in September 2019. The award is for £83,875.
CodeFirst:Girls is an organisation which runs free coding courses for young women, with partner universities and companies across the UK. The University of St Andrews, School of Computer Science has been a keen supporter of CodeFirst:Girls for the past 5 years. We run their community courses in our premises with our students and staff volunteering as instructors, course ambassadors and presentation judges. Since partnering with CodeFirst:Girls in 2014, we have taught over 700 young women to code within St Andrews alone, contributing to the organisation’s vision of training 20,000 young women across the UK by the year 2020. The coding courses are very popular among the female students of St Andrews and receive a staggering 140 applications on average per semester.
This year, we further strengthened this collaboration between St Andrews and CodeFirst:Girls by recognising the training programmes on the students’ academic transcripts. St Andrews students who successfully complete a CodeFirst:Girls training programme (either the beginners HTML course, or advanced Python course) by fulfilling the attendance and assessment requirements, can have this listed in their academic transcript under “Prizes and Achievements”, thereby obtaining official recognition for the invaluable coding skills they gained through this training.
This idea was innovated by St Andrews student and CodeFirst:Girls course ambassador Nicola Sobieraj (MSc Research Methods in Psychology 2019); Bonnie Hacking (Enterprise Adviser, Careers Centre); and Shyam Reyal (Associate Lecturer in Computer Science).
In her own words, Nicola mentioned that “It was a privilege being an ambassador and to propose this idea to acknowledge the courses on the academic transcript. I have truly enjoyed being involved in the process and collaborating with inspiring people from CF:G and St Andrews. I’d love to see this idea in universities across the country and would definitely support this process”. Bonnie added “I’m delighted we are now able to recognise our student’s achievements through CodeFirst:Girls officially. I’ve been judging the presentations of their projects for several years and am always impressed by what they achieve.”
Ewa Magiera, Head of Communities of CodeFirst:Girls, expressed her contentment with this collaboration as “a milestone in our cooperation with St Andrews, a great way for students to receive recognition for their efforts, and an important step forward in our cooperation with academic institutions which host our courses”.
This definitely marks an important milestone for both St Andrews and CodeFirst:Girls – for St Andrews students’ to have this skill development programme added to the degree transcripts – and for CodeFirst:Girls, to be validated by Scotland’s oldest and highest ranked university for Computer Science. We believe this will immensely boost the student’s CV and portfolio, as their achievements and skills are validated and recognized by the university, thus increasing their employability.
Further information and key milestones in the St Andrews and CodeFirst:Girls collaboration journey can be found here.
