Congratulations to Ildiko Pete, who successfully defended her thesis today. She is pictured below with supervisor Dr Dharini Balasubramaniam, Internal examiner Dr Adam Barker and external examiner Professor Pete Sawyer, from Lancaster University.
News
Announcement of the 33rd British Colloquium for Theoretical Computer Science
The 33rd BCTCS will be hosted by the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, from the 26th to the 28th of April 2017. The purpose of BCTCS is to provide a forum in which researchers in theoretical computer science can meet, present research findings, and discuss developments in the field. It also aims to provide an environment in which PhD students can gain experience in presenting their work, and benefit from contact with established researchers.
The scope of the colloquium includes all aspects of theoretical computer science, including algorithms, complexity, cryptography, formal methods, game theory, machine learning, languages, logics and quantum computation. Both computer scientists and mathematicians are welcome to attend, as are participants from outside of the UK.
This year the colloquium will feature the following invited speakers
LMS Keynote Lecture in Discrete Mathematics
Professor László Babai, University of Chicago
Confirmed Speakers
Perdita Stevens, University of Edinburgh
Conor McBride, University of Strathclyde
Felix Fischer, University of Glasgow
Edwin Brady, University of St Andrews
Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary University of London
Registration is *now open*, and you can find more information at https://bctcs2017.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/
PhD students are especially encouraged to offer a talk.
As an additional event, there will be a Scottish Combinatorics Meeting at the School of Mathematics in St Andrews on the 24th and 25th of April. If you would like to take part in the meeting, please contact the organisers directly.
The organisers hope to welcome you to St Andrews in April.
EPSRC Grant Success: A Constraint Modelling Pipeline
Congratulations to colleagues Professor Ian Miguel, Dr Chris Jefferson, Dr Tom Kelsey, Professor Ian Gent and Dr Peter Nightingale, who have secured an impressive EPSRC grant A constraint Modelling Pipeline, with NHS and SME project partners. The three and a half year grant, officially announced yesterday, aims to advance the state of the art in solving complex combinatorial search problems ubiquitous in many settings, such as planning, scheduling or design. Specifically, the aim is to produce a powerful, general automated modelling and solving system unique in targeting a range of powerful solving formalisms from a single abstract problem specification. The research will impact across the public and private sectors, and academia.
Read more about the grant application through EPSRC reference:EP/P015638/1
Graduation November 2016
Congratulations to the Masters Class of 2016, and PhD students Dr Vinodh Sampath and Dr Oche Ejembi, who graduated last month. Each year, students are invited to a reception in Computer Science to celebrate their achievement and reflect on their time in the School, with staff and guests.
Our graduates have moved on to a wide variety of interesting and challenging employment and further study opportunities, and we wish them all well with their future careers.
Alexander Konovalov: Certified Software and Data Carpentry Instructor
Congratulations to Alexander Konovalov who has just completed the instructor training course and subsequent assignments and is now certified to teach Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry workshops.
Software Carpentry is a volunteer organisation whose goal is to make scientists more productive, and their work more reliable, by teaching them basic computing skills. Its sibling organisation is DataCarpentry, which focuses on data analysis skills rather than programming skills. Their volunteer instructors run hundreds of events for thousands of scientists. Alexander has been teaching at several workshops, and is very enthusiastic about organising more!
Seminar: Alice Toniolo on Computational Argumentation
Alice Toniolo, a new lecturer in Computer Science at St Andrews, will be giving a seminar to the Artificial Intelligence Research Group on Thursday 1st December 2016, 2pm, in JC 1.33a. All are welcome.
Computational argumentation: an overview of current reasoning and dialogue models and their applications
Abstract: Argumentation is the process of arriving at a decision for a controversial standpoint. Computational models of argumentation aim to imitate the human decision-making process by modelling reason for or against certain decisions and extract justifiable options. This talk will draw from philosophical studies to present the core concepts of argumentation theory in AI through a range of abstract, logical and dialogical models. I will focus on the potential of argumentation-based models employed by software agents to support reasoning and dialogue in the presence of incomplete, inconsistent and uncertain information. An application of argumentation-based reasoning is presented in the context of intelligence analysis. The agent-based tool discussed, called CISpaces (Collaborative Intelligence Spaces), employs argumentation to help analysts make sense of information in collaboration and provenance to establish the credibility of hypotheses.
Event details
- When: 1st December 2016 14:00 - 15:00
- Where: Cole 1.33a
- Format: Seminar
CodeFirst:Girls Final presentations Fall 2016
Congratulations to our St Andrews Computer Science Code First Girls, for completing the Fall 2016 course, and staging their final projects. Students are pictured presenting some of their diverse and ambitious projects to staff, CFG tutors and fellow students. Presentations were followed by some home baking.
Judges awarded overall winner to Marya Simeonova and Chirsty McFadyen for Student Association’s Environment Subcommittee. Runners-up were Hannah Done, Anna Guckian and Eilidh Robb for GradTrip and Alix Réveilhac, Bridget Holmes and Sherry Zhang for The Grind.
Well done to all. Read more about CFG in our previous post Computer Science supports CodeFirst:Girls
Children in Need 2016
Well done to Sophie and Caitlyn, who raised £215 pounds for Children In Need today. They are pictured setting up shop and selling their delicious homemade cakes and biscuits. Thanks to staff and students for helping them raise a fabulous total. Options included Pretzels, Rainbow Cupcakes (lactose free), Oreo Cupcakes, Brownies (gluten free), Chocolate cake (vegan) and Gingerbread Pudsey Bears.
Review their previous 2012, 2013 and 2015 cakes and fundraising through our past blog posts. A great effort all round, we look forward to seeing you again next year.
Arkwright Awards for budding young engineers
On Friday 11 November 2016, Professor Saleem Bhatti was the principal guest of the Arkwright Scholarship Trust, as principal speaker and presenter at Arkwright’s award ceremony at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. The Arkwright Trust is a well-established, independent UK-wide charity which identifies and nurtures high-potential A-level and Scottish Advanced Higher students who have a desire to be future leaders in engineering disciplines, including computing, software, communications and product design. This year, the award ceremony was sponsored by GCHQ, with the theme of “Cyber Security and Communications”.
Edinburgh . Arkwright Scholarships Awards.
Copyright © 2016 Andrew Wiard,
www.andrew-wiard.com,
www.reportphotos.com
Edinburgh . Arkwright Scholarships Awards.
Copyright © 2016 Andrew Wiard,
www.andrew-wiard.com,
www.reportphotos.com
Images used with permission from the Arkwright Scholarship Trust
Distinguished Lecture Series 2016: Prof. Julie McCann
Earlier this month Professor Julie McCann from Imperial College London, delivered the next set of distinguished lectures for 2016, in Lower and Upper College Hall. The three topical, well attended and interesting lectures centred around Distributed Systems and Sensing and discussed how sensor networks are being used today, how other sciences will impact the research area, how such systems are programmed and finished by introducing ongoing challenges in terms of scalability, resilience and security.
Professor McCann is pictured below at various stages of the distinguished lecture series, and with Director of Research, Professor Simon Dobson and Dean of Science, Professor Alan Dearle.
Videos from the DLS can be accessed on Vimeo –
Lecture 1: https://vimeo.com/192134381
Lecture 2: https://vimeo.com/192135351
Lecture 3: https://vimeo.com/192137007
Images courtesy of Saleem Bhatti