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.
News
Royal Television Society Bursary: Henry Hargreaves
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.”
RadarCat presented at UIST2016
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
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
Images and text courtesy of STACS.
Acacia – The Smart Image Compressor
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.
PhD Viva success: Oche Ejembi
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tristan Henderson appointed to Editorial Board of ACM Books
Dr Tristan Henderson has been appointed to the Editorial Board of ACM Books, to serve as the Area Editor for Networking and Communications. ACM Books is a new publishing initiative from the ACM, focusing on “graduate-level textbooks, deep research monographs that provide an overview of established and emerging fields, practitioner-level professional books, and books devoted to the history and social impact of computing.” More information about the specific subject areas covered can be found at http://books.acm.org/subjects.
As Area Editor Tristan is responsible for soliciting and developing book proposals, and reviewing and arranging the external review of new proposals and manuscripts. If anyone is interested in writing a book in anything to do from routing to mobile networks to Internet science or to economics or legal aspects of the Internet and beyond, then please get in touch.
Welcome to new 2016 PhD Students
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.