News

Funded PhD Research Studentships

The School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews 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 6 funded studentships, including industrial sponsored studentships, available for students interested in working towards a PhD. The studentships offer costs of fees and an annual tax-free maintenance stipend of about £13,863 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 December 15th 2014 and we will make decisions on studentship allocation by February 27th 2015. Informal enquiries can be directed to pg-admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk or to potential supervisors.

The Design and Implementation of Feldspar

By: Josef Svenningsson, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

Feldspar is a domain specific language with the goal of raising the
level of abstraction for performance sensitive, low-level code.
Feldspar is a functional language embedded in Haskell, which offers a
high-level style of programming. The key to generating generating
efficient code from such descriptions is to use a high-level
optimisation technique called vector fusion. Feldspar achieves
vector fusion for free by employing a particular way of embedding the
language in Haskell by combining deep and shallow embeddings.

Bio: Josef Svenningsson is an Assistant Professor in the Functional
Programming group at Chalmers University of Technology. He has a broad
range of interest and has published papers on wide variety of topics,
including: program analysis, constraint solving, security, programming
language design, testing and high-performance computing.

Event details

  • When: 21st October 2014 14:00 - 20th October 2014 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

J.P. Morgan Code for Good 2014

J.P. Morgan Code for Good 2014: Applications Now Open

 

We are inviting talented technologists like you to join Code for Good 2014 in London, where you will compete in teams to code for a good cause over two days and one night.  You will be challenged to use your vision, imagination and expertise as you creatively use technology to address a real challenge for a leading nonprofit organization.
At the J.P. Morgan Code for Good events, you will learn from the sharpest minds in the industry as you are joined by fellow technologists from across the U.K., as well as our own technology experts.

 

APPLY HERE >

 

Event date: November 14-15, 2014

Application deadline: October 24, 2014

 

Prizes will be awarded to winning teams at the conclusion of the event. And remember, these competitions are the perfect opportunity for you to demonstrate your abilities to J.P. Morgan recruiters and technologists, who are actively involved with each event. Read more about previous winners and their work here.

 

techcareers.jpmorgan.com

Talk: Internship Experiences 2014

Many St Andrews CS students do internships in the summer, but we very rarely get the opportunity to learn about them.

If you are interested in what some outstanding fourth year students did this summer, including tips and hints on how to do this yourself, you cannot miss this!

Hear them talk at 2:00pm on Tuesday.

 

Details:

Andrew McCallum worked at Inclusiq on “E-learning games for diversity”

Emily Dick worked at Accenture as a “business and system analysis to help a large government client move from a paper to an online process”

Aleksejs Sazonovs worked at Microsoft Research Cambridge (Systems and Networking group) “using insights gathered from the data, to develop an effective storage and content retrieval policy for OneDrive”

Robert Dixon worked at McLaren Racing using neural networks on a tool to help the race strategy team.

 

The speaker interns at a subsequent meal with the Head of School. From left to right, Steve Linton (HOS), Aleksejs Sazonovs, Robert Dixon, and Andrew McCallum (Emily Dick could not attend the meal).

The speaker interns at a subsequent meal with the Head of School. From left to right, Steve Linton (HOS), Aleksejs Sazonovs, Robert Dixon, and Andrew McCallum (Emily Dick could not attend the meal).

Event details

  • When: 7th October 2014 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Simone Conte: Lockheed Martin Software Engineer of 2014

Yesterday evening, in front of a crowd of about 750 people (as part of ScotSoft, the largest yearly Software and IT meeting in Scotland), one of our School graduates received the Lockheed Martin Software Engineering Award, for an outstanding project demonstrating excellent software engineering skills.

Simone Conte receiving award from Scotland IS chair of the Board - Robert Campbell

Simone Conte receiving award from Scotland IS chair of the Board – Robert Campbell

Simone was awarded this prestigious award for his Senior Honours project, which involved the design, construction and implementation of a haptic device for people with visual disabilities. The project was chosen among the final undergraduate projects of all Scottish Computer Science departments, and has been awarded for the last 25 years by Scotland IS. The selection panel includes senior software engineers and CEOs of top companies in Scotland and beyond, including Amazon, SmarterGrid, Microsoft, RBS, Chevron, Scottish Life, Skyscanner and, of course, Lockheed Martin.

An early version of the HaptiQ

An early version of the HaptiQ

The prize consists of a trophy and a check. Other awardees from the night include Blair Archibald from the University of Glasgow, Andrews White from Strathclyde and Heather Ellis from Dundee.

Accelerating Datacenter Services with Reconfigurable Logic

by Aaron Smith, Microsoft Research

Datacenter workloads demand high computational capabilities, flexibility, power efficiency, and low cost. It is challenging to improve all of these factors simultaneously. To advance datacenter capabilities beyond what commodity server designs can provide, we have designed and built a composable, reconfigurable fabric at Microsoft to accelerate portions of large-scale software services. In this talk I will describe a medium-scale deployment of this fabric on a bed of 1,632 servers, and discuss its efficacy in accelerating the Bing web search engine along with future plans to improve the programmability of the fabric.

Bio: Aaron Smith is a member of the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research. He is broadly interested in optimizing compilers, computer architecture and reconfigurable computing. Over the past 15 years he has led multiple industrial and research compiler projects at Metrowerks/Freescale Semiconductor, The University of Texas at Austin and Microsoft. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UT-Austin in 2009 and is currently serving as co-General Chair of CGO 2015.

Event details

  • When: 2nd October 2014 12:00 - 13:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Computer Science supports Macmillan

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.

macmillan

Ian Sommerville – Emeritus Professor

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.

AetherStore Software Defined Storage

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.

Computer Science: Food diversity

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.

diversity

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.