Come along to the Graduation reception on Wednesday morning at 10.30am until 12.30pm in the Jack Cole coffee area- hope to see you all there. Fizz and cream cakes will be provided!
Dr Gordon Baxter has recently been appointed as the chair of the Scottish regional sub-group of the BCS Interaction Group. The BCS Interaction Group celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, and is the longest established and largest national group in Europe devoted to human-computer interaction. The Interaction group is served by regionally based sub-groups with representatives from a broad range of academic and industrial centres of HCI interest. These sub-groups meet informally every few weeks to progress work, and all participants are committed to promoting the education and practice of HCI and to supporting HCI people in industry and academia.
Congratulations to Ildiko Pete who won the People’s Choice Prize for her presentation at the 2014 London Hopper Colloquium. Ildiko entered the Research Spotlight competition prior to the event, and was chosen as a finalist. The event was held at the BCS headquarters on 22 May 2014.
The Colloquium is an annual event for women in Computer Science, which provides an opportunity for participants to present their work, network with other researchers and gain insights into careers in industry.
We’re delighted that the University will be awarding the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, to Professor Dana Scott at the graduation ceremony on Wednesday 25th June.
What does it mean to describe a computation? For Turing, it meant designing an ideal machine whose small set of simple operations could perform calculations: the operational view of computing that allows machines to perform tasks previously thought to require humans. Set against this is a view that is independent of mechanisation, where the calculations, rather than the machines that perform them, take centre stage. When we take this view, we are making use of ideas that owe their modern existence to the work of Dana Scott.
Working at Oxford in the 1970s, Scott developed the mathematical structures now known as Scott domains that provide a way of precisely describing how recursive functions make progress towards their final result. This led directly to an approach for describing the meanings of programs and programming languages — the Scott-Strachey approach to denotational semantics — and indirectly both to approaches to proving programs correct, and to the development of the lazy functional programming languages that today form a major strand of computer science research.
Dana Scott is a Turing Award recipient (jointly with Michael Rabin), a winner of the International Bolzano Prize, and a supervisor of over 50 PhD students. His contributions to the foundations of computer science have been immense, and we’re very excited to be having his company alongside our graduating class.
A new book, Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems has just been published by Springer. Written by Frank Ritter (Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State), Gordon Baxter (Systems Engineering Group, Computer Science, University of St Andrews) and Elizabeth Churchill (Director of HCI at eBay Research Labs), Foundations for DUCS was developed for people studying and practising human factors/HCI and software engineering.
Foundations for DUCS encapsulates the extensive experience of its co-authors in designing, developing and conducting research into interactive systems in domains as diverse as aviation, consumer Internet, health care, eCommerce, industrial process control, and enterprise systems. The book covers the fundamental information that system designers need in order to understand their users’ capabilities and limitations, the tasks those users will perform, and the context in which they perform them. It also considers the practical implications of this information for system design. Applying the lessons from Foundations for DUCS will help readers to design interactive systems that are more usable, more useful, and more effective.
Springer launched Foundations for DUCS at the end of April 2014 in Toronto at CHI, the pre-eminent conference in Human-Computer Interaction.
Dr Baxter said:
“It was a real challenge to produce a practical resource that would be useful to students of human factors/HCI and software engineering, as well as appealing to both academics and practitioners. The testimonials we’ve received from leading lights in all areas of our target audience suggest that we’ve met that challenge, with Ian Sommerville (author of Software Engineering) recommending it ‘to all engineers’, highly respected Human Factors expert Peter Hancock saying that ‘Even if only a proportion of designers and users read this book we will be so much better off.’ and IBM Distinguished Fellow and Chief Architect, Richard Hopkins noting that the book ‘has given me access to a variety of new techniques and an extended vocabulary that I look forward to introducing my design teams to.’”
The book is currently available via SpringerLink: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-1-4471-5134-0 and from book stores.
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. This year, two papers from SACHI received a best paper and an honourable mention award. Across the program, members of SACHI had 9 papers and other works at this years CHI 2014 conference.
Michael Mauder (a PhD student in Computer Science), Simone Conte (an undergraduate student in CS), Miguel Nacenta (an academic in CS) and Dhanraj Vishwanath (an academic in Psychology here in St Andrews) were awarded an honourable mention for their full paper on Depth Perception with Gaze-contingent Depth of Field.
Jakub Dostal (a PhD student in Computer Science) along with many colleagues from Microsoft Research in Cambridge were awarded a best paper for their full paper on RetroDepth: 3D Silhouette Sensing for High-Precision Input On and Above Physical Surfaces. This work stems from a SICSA industrial internship award Jakub held to work with MSR during the summer of 2013.
AVI 2014 is the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces and through more than two decades, the Conference has contributed to the progress of Human-Computer Interaction, offering a forum to present and disseminate new technological results, new paradigms and new visions for interaction and interfaces.
Per Ola Kristensson and Aaron Quigley (academics in Computer Science) along with colleagues from the University of Castilla-La Mancha Albacete, Spain have been awarded a best paper award for their full paper on AwToolkit: Attention-Aware User Interface Widgets. This work stems from a collaboration formed from the research visit of Juan to SACHI during the summer of 2013 and subsequent joint research.
Members of SACHI are presenting 3 papers and a poster at this years AVI 2014 conference.
Four years of hard work, and a sunny day in May sound like prerequisites for our SH BBQ. Some laughter, lots to eat, photographic evidence and the odd game of Chess provide a well deserved opportunity to unwind before the focus shifts to exams, thoughts of graduation, or the next step. We wish them well in their exams.
Some will remain with us for another year and continue their studies on our MSci (hons) Computer Science or MSc Portfolio. We congratulate them on their exceptional choice and look forward to seeing them again in September.
Senior Honours Class of 2014
Our talented final year Computer Science students presented their projects last week. A demonstration and poster session allowed them to discuss the output from a semester of hard work with their peer group and staff.
We wish them every success as they approach graduation, and look forward to celebrating their successful CS journey, next Thursday at the SH BBQ.
Images courtesy of Conrad de Kerckhove.
The annual CS1006 challenge took place this morning in the subhonours lab. Students had been designing AIs to play Backgammon, this year. The first year module was delivered by John Thomson. Previous years have focused on Hex, Othello and Connect 4.
Congratulations to David Mulkerrin, winner of the CS1006 competition, winning a £50 Amazon voucher.
Also congratulations to:
2nd- Neofytos Dimitriou and Nick Tikhonov
3rd- Callum Fare and Conor Barr
It’s always a fun session to end Semester 2, and a great opportunity to showcase the ingenuity and creativity of our first year students.
