News

Academic Skills Project 2015/16

Adeola Fabola (one of our PhD students) is coordinating the Academic Skills Project (ASP) in the School of Computer Science for the 2015/2016 session. The ASP is a scheme managed by CAPOD, and run by postgraduates, designed to deliver discipline-specific skills and tailored workshops.

AcademicSkills

Yesterday afternoon the first informative and lively workshop, Securing Internships and Job Placements , attracted in excess of 100 students. After an introduction to the internship recruitment process, and tips on enhancing your required skills and CV, some of our Honours and PhD students shared their internship experiences. Workshop participants heard from Shyam Reyal, Peter Josling, Robin Nabel (Google), Simone Conte (Adobe), Ilia Shumailov (Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase), Maria Kustikova (Soliton Systems) and Nick Tikhonov (Amazon). The workshop session included a panel discussion and Informal networking session.

Details of future workshops are included in their poster.

Details of future workshops

The slides used during the first workshop are now available, you can also sign up for next week’s workshop and remember if you missed yesterday’s session, you can still benefit from the next events. Thanks to Ade, Shyam and all the panel members for running a great event for the CS student community.

Professor Ian Miguel’s Inaugural Lecture

Staff and students from the School of Computer Science attended Prof. Ian Miguel’s Inaugural Lecture in St Salvator’s Quadrangle yesterday evening. The well-received and highly accessible lecture titled “Constraint Satisfaction and the Crystal Maze”, was accompanied by a reception in Lower College Hall. Many will remember celebrating Ian’s installation as a new Professor at December graduation last year. Inaugural lectures provide newly appointed professors the opportunity to inform colleagues, the student community and the general public of their research interests and future plans.

Professor Ian Miguel's Inaugural Lecture

Professor Ian Miguel’s Inaugural Lecture

Aleksejs Sazonovs: Undergraduate Awards Success

Congratulations to our recent graduate Aleksejs Sazonovs who accomplished overall winner in the 2015 Undergraduate Awards for Computer Science yesterday. His Winning Paper: ‘A Metapopulation Model for Predicting the Success of Genetic Control Measures for Malaria’ supervised by Prof. Simon Dobson and Prof. Oscar Gaggiotti, was assessed by panels of international academics and will be published in The Undergraduate Awards Academic Journal. Overall winners are invited to the UA Global Summit, a four-day networking and brainstorming event which brings the world’s top students together for a series of inspirational lectures, workshops and discussions. We look forward to hearing more about the event from Aleksejs in November. Read more about the project in our highly commended post.

Aleksejs pictured at June Graduation

Aleksejs pictured at June Graduation

Computer Science 2015: Orientation and Welcome

After a busy week of induction and module talks, staff and students are pictured during orientation and welcome receptions. Undergraduate students were invited to a gaming session followed by pizza. It’s always rewarding to see so many students and staff welcoming our new 1st year students. Thanks to School president, Maria Kustikova for overseeing events.

Undergraduate gaming and pizza during orientation

Undergraduate gaming and pizza during orientation

Welcome receptions last Wednesday and Thursday evening for our MSc and Honours students, also proved popular and highlight the outstanding student community within the School.

MSc reception September 2015

MSc reception September 2015

Honours welcome reception 2015

Honours welcome reception 2015

Dr Roy Dyckhoff, Hon. Senior Lecturer: ‘Coherentisation of first-order logic’

The School of Computer Science is delighted to announce that honorable lecturer Dr Roy Dyckhoff is an invited speaker at the conference on Automated Reasoning with Analytic Tableaux and Related Methods, in Wrocław (Poland) from 20–24 September.

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Abstract: This talk explores the relationship between coherent (aka “geometric”) logic and first-order logic (FOL), with special reference to the coherence/geometricity required of accessibility conditions in Negri’s work on modal logic (and our joint work with her on intermediate logic). It has been known to some since the 1970s that every first-order theory has a coherent conservative extension, and weaker versions of this result have been used in association with the automation of coherent logic; but, it is hard to find the result in the literature. We discuss various proofs of the result, and present a coherentisation algorithm with the desirable property of being idempotent.

Please see: http://tableaux2015.ii.uni.wroc.pl/index.html for further details

Event details

  • When: 20th September 2015 10:00 - 24th September 2015 17:00
  • Format: Conference, Talk

Lockheed Martin Award

Congratulations to our recent graduate Sam Elliott, who has won the Lockheed Martin Award SIS-0518for  Best Engineered Project at the Young Software Engineer awards.

The Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards are given for the best undergraduate software projects drawn from across all students studying computer science and software engineering in Scotland.

SIS-0502

Sam’s project, “A Concurrency System for Idris and Erlang”, takes an important step towards addressing the problem of writing large scale software, coordinated across several concurrently running machines, possibly distributed throughout the world. Writing such software is notoriously difficult because not only  do programmers need to think about the progress of a an individual task, they also need to think about how data is communicated between each task.

 

sam_award

 

The project combines Idris, a new programming language developed at the University of St Andrews, with Erlang, a programming language specifically designed for building robust distributed systems, and contributes a new system for running concurrent programs, with guaranteed behaviour, in a robust, industrial strength concurrent environment.

 

Adam Barker – Google Visiting Faculty

visiting_faculty

Congratulations to Adam Barker who has been awarded a prestigious Visiting Researcher position at Google through the Google Visiting Faculty Program.

“The Google Visiting Faculty program aims to identify and support world-class, full-time faculty pursuing research in areas of mutual interest. Each year, through the Google Visiting Faculty Program, over 25 academics visit Google from universities all over the world. They work closely with our research and engineering teams, and have the opportunity to explore projects at industrial scale, work with state-of-the-art technology, and experience Google culture up close.”

Adam will be leaving for Google’s global headquarters in Mountain View and will be working with Dr John Wilkes and Dr Walfredo Cirne on Service Level Objectives (SLOs), with the aim of contributing towards Google’s internal cluster management systems.

Commenting on Adam’s award Professor Ian Sommerville said “Adam has done a great job in building links with industry and in linking his research to practical research challenges in cloud computing. His research work with Google will deepen his understanding of the problems of scale, reveal new research challenges and will inspire his teaching.”

On a related note, Adam currently has two open positions for a Research Assistant and a PhD scholarship (including International fees) in Data Science. Please get in touch directly with Adam if you are interested.