Another successful Coffee Morning organised by Ishbel Duncan has raised in excess of £170. Today is the UK’s annual biggest coffee morning in aid of MacMillan Cancer care. Staff and students are pictured sampling the home baking on offer and participating in the Raffle. There are still some cakes on offer in the coffee area. Donate generously.
Ian Sommerville has been appointed Emeritus Professor in the School of Computer Science. Ian retired earlier this year following an illustrious career. From the Emeritus Tribute presented to Academic Council,
Ian Sommerville is one of the leading academic Software Engineers in the world, and very possibly the leading educator in the field. In his own words, “Software engineering is an engineering discipline that is concerned with all aspects of software production.” His career has been dedicated to solving problems within Software Engineering, and teaching others this exciting modern discipline. While being a Professor of Computer Science, Ian always describes himself proudly as an engineer rather than a computer scientist.
Graduates Robert Macinnis, Allan Boyd and Angus Macdonald, the executive team behind AetherWorks, and distributed data storage solution AetherStore featured in The Register last week.
AetherWorks sponsored the St Andrews programming competition earlier this year. Further testament to the quality of our graduates, Lewis Headden and Isabel Peters have joined the successful start-up. We wish them all continued success as they near product delivery.
Highlighting the School’s penchant for the sweet and fizzy, earlier this week Long Thai returned from vacation with Vietnamese sweets including: bánh cốm (green sticky rice cake), sesame candy, peanut candy and chè lam.
Tom Kelsey introduced a Game of Thrones Cake. The StACS garden continues to offer fresh vegetables and BARR’s fizzy pop survived longer than a day.
As we start a new semester, we take time to reflect on those moving on to new ventures and wish colleague and friend, Per Ola Kristensson every success in his new post in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge.
During his time in the School he had many successes and viewed St Andrews as an “incredibly stimulating and vivid research environment.”
Describing the School and SACHI as “friendly and supportive” he underlined the school’s commitment to ensuring teaching and research is of “the highest calibre.”
Describing the students he worked with as “fantastic” and a pleasure to supervise, he explained that some of their dissertations had lead to scientific publications.
His final reflection:
Looking back, these years I have spent in St Andrews have helped me develop as a researcher and a teacher and I will remember my years here fondly.
We wish him continued success and look forward to seeing him in the very near future. You can read more about his research on the SACHI blog.
We are delighted to welcome Jonathan Hughes as an honorary research fellow to SACHI and the School of Computer Science. Jonathan is Founder & CEO of Butterfly Catcher and was formerly a founder employee of Realtime Worlds Inc., helping to create the BAFTA-winning videogame franchise ‘Crackdown’ for Microsoft Game Studios. As Principal Designer there he was also responsible for the design direction of ‘MyWorld’, a hugely ambitious entertainment platform which secured $50m funding from NEA and WPP, with executive design oversight of the UK and Asia-Pacific projects. After running the software development agency Zedaxis for several years, with clients such as Skyscanner and the NHS, he founded Butterfly Catcher in 2012, focusing on data visualisation for industry, and in particular finance.
Commenting on his honorary fellowship Jonathan said “I’m delighted to be appointed to this role. Aaron’s team at SACHI have a tremendous reputation and they are undertaking world-leading research which is highly applicable to industry. Being given the opportunity to be involved is very exciting indeed.”
Jonathan has a Masters (Dual Hons) in Psychology & Philosophy from the University of St Andrews, where he specialised in visual perception so this is a return home of sorts! Professor Aaron Quigley said of this fellowship, “we are delighted to have Jonathan join us and we are looking forward to many fruitful collaborations. With his 15 years of industrial experience across a wide range of industry sectors, Jonathan brings a new dynamic to SACHI which we are looking forward to.” Jonathan will contribute to St Andrews HCI research (SACHI) with respect to seminars, involvement in informal supervision, exploration of joint research projects, advice on information visualisation and the finance sector along with working with staff and students on research projects. We also expect Jonathan to provide advice on Palimpsest along with developing new projects and ideas with collaborators within SACHI (both within St Andrews and across Scotland).
The PhD Reading Party of 2014 took place in the serene Burn House, outside Edzell bordering on the Cairngorms.
The PhD students had the opportunity to talk about their research, hear talks from staff as well as socialise with all other participants outside the academic work environment.
The lovely Scottish weather permitted everyone to explore the grounds, river and star gaze amongst other activities. Looks like everyone had great fun.
Twas the week before orientation, when all through the labs not a student was stirring.
Tranquility in Computer Science
We are looking forward to welcoming our new students next week, and seeing the labs bustling with creativity once again. Find out all you need to know about Orientation 2014 on the School homepage.
Congratulations to Dr Graeme Stevenson, who passed his PhD viva earlier today. He is pictured below with supervisor Professor Simon Dobson and Internal Examiner Dr Graham Kirby. Professor Julie McCann from Imperial College, acted as External Examiner.
Congratulatory Cheers
