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

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

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

Honours welcome reception 2015

MacMillan Coffee Morning

Thanks to all those who baked, donated and ate. We raised £142 for MacMillan Cancer Support.

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.

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 for 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.

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.

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

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.

Welcome to Dr Ognjen Arandjelović

We’re delighted to welcome Dr Ognjen (Oggie) Arandjelović to the School as a new lecturer.

A highly commended project

Congratulations to our recent graduate Aleksejs Sazonovs, who’s won a Highly Commended place at this year’s Undergraduate Awards.

The Undergraduate Awards are an international and cross-disciplinary prize that aims to recognise highly creative individuals at undergraduate level. Typically this is demonstrated through excellent project work, and Aleks’ project on “A metapopulation model for predicting the success of genetic control measures for malaria” was ranked in the top 10% of submissions in the computer science category.

Aleks’ project used techniques from network science to explore what happens when mosquitoes modified to be unable to carry the malaria parasite are introduced into a wild population. Experiments like these are an essential precursor to any actual field trials. Together with supervisors from the School of Computer Science (Prof Simon Dobson) and School of Biology (Prof Oscar Gaggiotti), Aleks simulated malarial outbreaks involving different mosquito populations. He used a real geography for his experiments, taking the road network of Sierra Leone from the Open Street Map project and using this to build models of human and mosquito distributions and movement. “It’s been exciting to combine real network data with large-scale simulations,” said Prof Dobson. “It also opens-up several ideas for how to make models like this easier to build and interact with, so they could be used by experimental scientists directly and not just by computer scientists.”

The commendation comes with an invitation to all the highly commended individuals to the awards dinner in Dublin later this month, where the overall winners of the different categories will be announced.

Official Opening: Interaction Lab

Dean of Science, Professor Al Dearle officially opened the new Interaction Lab earlier today. The lab is situated within the John Honey building within the School of Computer Science and houses the research talents of both SACHI and Open Virtual Worlds.

The Dean of Science, Professor Aaron Quigley Chair of HCI, current staff and students, alumni and Emeritus Professor, Ron Morrison were photographed enjoying the opening celebrations.

Great Scottish Swim Success for CS team

The School participated in the Great Scottish Swim on Saturday, the CS team comprising Percy Perez, David Symons, Julie Dunsire, Alex Voss and Ruth Letham were swimming for Médecins Sans Frontières. All team members completed the swim in under an hour. Before and after pictures were captured by Katja who travelled along to support the team.

Congratulations to all. Their target is £1k and they’re 97% there. You can still donate via https://www.justgiving.com/uoscompsci/.

Computer Science Blog