News

Funded PhD Research Studentships

The School of Computer Science  has funding for students to undertake PhD research in any of the general research areas in the school:

http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/research

We are looking for highly motivated research students with an interest in these exciting research areas Our only requirements are that the proposed research would be good, we have staff to supervise it, and that you would be good at doing it. 

We have up to 8 funded studentships, including industrial sponsored studentships, available for students interested in working towards a PhD. The studentships offers costs of fees and an annual tax-free maintenance stipend of about £13,726 per year for 3.5 years. Exceptionally well qualified and able students may be awarded an enhanced stipend of an additional £2,000 per year. Students should normally have or expect at least an upper-2nd class Honours degree or Masters degree in Computer Science or a related discipline.

For further information on how to apply, see our postgraduate web pages (http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/prospective-pg). The closing date for applications is March 31st 2014 and we will make decisions on studentship allocation by May 31st 2014. (Applications after March 31st may be considered, at our discretion.) Informal enquiries can be directed to pg-admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk or to potential supervisors.

2013 in Computer Science: A Year in Pictures

A Christmas Hog Roast in Computer Science

A Christmas Hog Roast in Computer Science



School merchandise increases in popularity

School merchandise increases in popularity



Good summer weather pays dividends in the School Garden

Good summer weather pays dividends in the School Garden



A round up of research activities, including some of the the SATCHI team testing out visibility, affordance and feedback for steering mechanisms in Dundee :)

A round up of research activities, including some of the SACHI group testing out visibility, affordance and feedback for steering mechanisms in Dundee 🙂



An opportunity to celebrate with our students at Graduation

An opportunity to celebrate with our students at Graduation



Posters, prizes and competitions through out the year

Posters, prizes and competitions throughout the year



Catching up with recent graduates, established alumni and great ambassadors for the School

Catching up with recent graduates, established alumni and great ambassadors for the School

Dr Per Ola Kristensson: A visionary that will shape the future

Congratulations to our very own Per Ola Kristensson. Earlier this year he was named as one of the people most likely to change the world by the prestigious MIT Technology Review’s list of Innovators under 35.

Described as visionary he appears, today at number 11 in IMPACT 100, he is a lecturer in Human Computer Interaction here in the School of Computer Science, where he leads the Intelligent Interactive Systems Group.

IMPACT 100 PANEL VIEW:

People like Per Ola Kristensson are the shapers of the future where social interaction and new technology are concerned. Recognition at this level from an organisation like MIT is hugely impressive.

Honorary Professor John Stasko

Dean Dearle, Professor Quigley with Professor StaskoProfessor John Stasko and the Associate Chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech has been appointed as an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer Science. This appointment comes following a SICSA distinguished visiting fellowship John was awarded. This fellowship allowed John to participate in the SACHI/Big Data Lab summer school in Big Data Information Visulisation in St Andrews. This industry linked summer school has successful paved the way for a new generation of students to explore Data Science and Information Visualisation.
Professor Stasko at the Big Data Info Vis Summer School 2013
John is a newly elected fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to information visualization, visual analytics and human-computer interaction. Professor Quigley who has known John for the past 14 years and said, “I’m delighted John will join us a honorary Professor here in St Andrews. His world leading research and experience in Information Visualisation will be of great benefit to our staff, students and colleagues across the University. I first met John when I was a PhD student and organiser of a Software Visualisation conference we held in Sydney. Then, as now, his enthusiasm, breath of knowledge and desire to engage and work with others marks him out as a true intellectual thought leader. We hope to see John here regularly in the years ahead and we will be working with him on new projects.”

November Graduation 2013

Congratulations to the Masters Class of 2013, and PhD student Galhenage Perera, who graduated today. Students were invited to a reception in the school to celebrate their achievement with staff, friends and family. Our graduates have moved on to a wide variety of interesting and challenging employment and further study opportunities, and we wish them all well with their future careers.

graduation

Industrial Action Next Week

Dear Students,

As you probably know, all three main University trades unions have called for a second strike day on 3 December. Since it’s revision period, not much teaching is scheduled for that day. If you do have a revision tutorial, catch-up lecture or meeting with your supervisor scheduled, we would expect it to go ahead. Unless you hear definitely that it is not happening, please turn up on time as usual.

We can confirm that the Jack Cole and John Honey buildings will be open. Adequate safety cover, including first aiders and fire marshals will be in place.

Steve Linton, Head of School

Sapere project comes to a successful end

Over the past three years the School has been involved in the Sapere project, funded by the European Commission. Sapere has been looking at new ways to build large-scale pervasive systems, moving away from traditional client/server approaches to explore biochemically-inspired system models in which services and users can “bond” spontaneously as they encounter each other in the real world. Sapere was co-ordinated by the University of Modena Reggio Emilia and — as well as St Andrews — involved the University of Bologna, University of Geneva, and Johannes Kepler University of Linz. Sapere had its final review this week and was ranked as “excellent … the project has even exceeded expectations”.

The project achieved considerable visibility by being deployed at the Vienna City Marathon to provide services including runner tracking and guiding spectators to possible viewing opportunities. The deployment had several thousands users downloading and using a smartphone app throughout the event, as well as several large attention-sensing public displays that responded directly to people stopping to look at them.

The scientific highlights of Sapere include developing a formal model of spontaneous interactions; building a middleware platform based on these ideas; developing a catalogue of useful patterns that describe co-ordinated interactions at a high level; and creating several exciting new algorithms for context awareness and situation recognition. This last activity was led from St Andrews by Simon Dobson, Juan Ye, and Graeme Stevenson, and allowed us to recognise activities going on in “busy” spaces where multiple things are happening simultaneously — a problem that has been extremely resistant to solution until now.

Sapere shows that pervasive systems are now “ready for prime time,” and that even research that seems highly speculative and challenging can lead to results that affect people’s lives directly. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with our collaborators, and we’ll certainly be looking to take these ideas forward in new projects and directions.

Here’s a non-technical overview video introducing Sapere:

 

Success in J.P.Morgan Code for Good Competition 2013

A team of Computer Science students from the University of St Andrews came first in the J.P.Morgan Code for Good Competition 2013

The Coding Challenge was open to all students enrolled fulltime at a university located in the United Kingdom, who are under-graduates or post-graduates and are 18 years of age or over.  Teams of 4-6 students competed against each other on behalf of a charity assigned to them in order to provide a technological solution to a problem that the charity faces.

The winning team  (four from St Andrews, one from Southampton and one from Warwick) created a solution for Eneza Education, whose mission is to make 50 million kids across rural Africa smarter. In Kiswahili, “eneza” means “to reach” or “to spread,” and the group distributes education through SMS and text based quizzes, tutorials and questions. The team created an Android-based application for teachers and parents, which, when implemented, can quadruple the educational impact for students.   The St Andrews team members comprised the following

  • Alexander Wallar
  • Chi-Jui Wu
  • Ilia Shumailov
  • Valentin Tunev