The School hosted a farewell reception for Judi Robertson last month. Judi worked in the School for 8 years, and made a great contribution to making the School such a friendly and supportive place to work and study. She is pictured below, receiving flowers and leaving gifts, and drinking a glass of fizz. We wish her well in her new job in Edinburgh.
Congratulations to Bilal Hussain, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured below with supervisor Professor Ian Miguel, Internal examiner Professor Simon Dobson and external examiner Dr Peter Gregory, from Teesside University.
We are delighted to congratulate the student representatives for 2016/7, elected by their peers. Reps play a very important part in the life of the school by providing a healthy communication channel between staff and the students they represent, and also by chairing and running the Staff-Student Consultative Committee, amongst many other roles.
The reps are shown outside the Jack Cole Building in November 2016, and are (from left to right)
Many thanks to the reps for arranging this photo (taken by Alex Bain who can be seen in the reflection), which should help staff and students put faces to the names.
Thanks to everyone who volunteered to be a student rep.
A Research Associate position in analysis and verification of novel cache algorithms is available at the School of Computer Science within the University of St Andrews. The position is a fixed-term position for 18 months, starting January 2017 or as soon as possible thereafter. The project involves understanding and developing the theoretical basis for such algorithms, formalising them using formal techniques of theorem proving and/or model checking, and developing formal analysis and correctness proofs for such algorithms.
This is part of the EPSRC-funded “C3:Scalable & Verified Shared Memory via Consistency-Directed Cache Coherence” (EP/M027317/1) project, a collaborative project with architecture researchers at the University of Edinburgh and at Intel Corporation Ltd, investigating high-performance cache coherence protocols. Our goal is to propose and verify a family of protocols that are aware of high-level programming models, including in particular those with so-called relaxed memory consistency models.
The particular direction at St Andrews under the direction of Dr Sarkar is to develop verification methods that will scale to the research cache coherence protocols being co-developed within the project. This is a new application area for formal methods, with performance and correctness both equally important. Thus, a background in one or more of Formal Methods, Compilers and Static Analysis, and Verification Tools is expected. Software development and/or formal proof development experience is invaluable.
For an informal discussion about the post you are welcome to contact Dr Susmit Sarkar.
Applications are particularly welcomed from women and other groups that are under-represented in Research posts at the University.
Congratulations to Hui-Shyong Yeo, Professor Aaron Quigley and colleagues, who won best poster at UIST2016.
Their paper Sidetap and Slingshot Gestures on Unmodified Smartwatches, is available through the ACM digital library.
Congratulations to Henry, one of our second year students, who secured a Royal Television Society bursary. The bursary scheme is supported by a cross industry panel with senior representatives from Arqiva, BBC, BT, Channel 4, Fujitsu, Ericsson, Institute of Engineering Technology, ITV, Sky and Youview.
The new venture for the Royal Television Society, is intended to start to address a skills gap and attract some talented young people on top computer science or engineering courses to consider the option of a career in the broadcast industry. Further details of the scheme can be found here: https://rts.org.uk/education-training/technology-bursaries
Bursary recipients attend a two-week summer tour of the industry, spending a day in each of the 10 companies backing the scheme. A financial award per year for the three years of the bursary, membership of the Royal Television Society and mentoring or placements in their final year of study.
As an R.T.S Bursary recipient, Henry explained that he has not only benefited financially; helping towards my course at St Andrews but it has introduced him to career opportunities within the TV industry.
“I have gained a useful insight by participating in a range of activities organised by the RTS. These have really opened my eyes to how Computer Science plays a vital role in broadcasting, which I was previously, unaware of.”
SACHI research project RadarCat (Radar Categorization for Input & Interaction), highlighted earlier this year in the University news, the Courier and Gizmodo and in a Google I/O ATAP 2016 session, will be presented at UIST2016 this week.
RadarCat is a small, versatile radar-based system for material and object classification which enables new forms of everyday proximate interaction with digital devices. SACHI’s contribution to Project Soli featured in a previous blog post SACHI contribute to Google’s Project Soli, in May. Read more about RadarCat for object recognition on the SACHI blog.
Google’s Project Soli workshop in March 2016
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
Images and text courtesy of STACS.
Today we are releasing Acacia – a machine learning enabled image compressor developed here in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. Acacia is the work of Oleksandr Murashko and Dr. John Thomson.
Acacia (Advanced Content-Adaptive Compressor of ImAges) is an image compression tool targeting at those who want the best compression under constrained energy or processing time scenarios – for instance a mobile device or a cloud image server. It allows users to target specific image quality or file size metrics when compressing an image with JPEG or WebP, with only minimal additional compression time. It does this by using machine learning to predict how an individual image will be compressed, and adjusts the aggressiveness of compression accordingly.
Acacia allows users to target compression to their file size or quality needs, significantly increasing the effectiveness of compression by adjusting to each individual image. It is available with a graphical interface, and with a CLI for batch processing.
Acacia is free and open source, runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS, and is available on Github as source, or as a Windows binary.
This software accompanies our paper, Predicting and Optimizing Image Compression, published in ACM Multimedia this week. The paper is available for free from John Thomson’s web site.
Congratulations to Oche Ejembi who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured below with supervisor Professor Saleem Bhatti, internal examiner Dr Tom Kelsey and external examiner Dr Marwan Fayed from Stirling University.
