News

Tales from the Real World

School President James Anderson and Careers Adviser Ben Carter invited recent graduates Matt Hailey, Ali Scott, Craig Garrigan and Steve Lowson back to the School yesterday to share their experience of working in the real world since graduating, with our final year students.

They have been successful in securing positions at highly regarded companies including Sky Scanner, PlanForCloud, NCR and NCC Group. Talks described career paths, roles and responsibilities, professional development and current employment opportunities.

Find out more about using your Computer Science degree and read student case studies on the careers website. Thanks to all for a great afternoon. Yes, cakes were consumed.

CollageImage

Clockwise from top left:
Steve, Ali and Craig prepare to give their talk.
Matt and Ali reminisce in the coffee area.
James, Craig, Stephen, Ben, Ali and Matt joined our final year students for cake and questions.

Industrial Action Today

Dear Students,
As you probably know, all three main University trades unions have called for a withdrawal of labour on 31 October. In the School of Computer Science, we expect that most teaching scheduled that day will take place, and would advise all students to turn up for their lectures as normal, or even better, to turn up a little early just in case.

In particular, 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.

Once we know what lectures, if any, have not been delivered, and whether the lecturers intend to cover the missed material themselves, we will make arrangements to fill any gaps. All lecture material should be placed on student resources as normal no later than the following day 1 Nov.

Steve Linton, Head of School

ITS & UIST 2013: “Influential and Ground Breaking”

These are words used by the Co-Chair of UIST 2013, Dr Shahram Izadi of Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK), to describe one of the prestigious conferences taking place in St Andrews this week.

“UIST is the leading conference on new user interface trends and technologies. Some of the most influential and ground breaking work on graphical user interfaces, multi-touch, augmented reality, 3D user interaction and sensing was published at this conference.

It is now in its 26th year, and the first time it has been hosted in the UK. We are very excited to be hosting a packed program at the University of St Andrews. The program includes great papers, demos, posters, a wet and wonderful student innovation competition, and a great keynote on flying robots.”

Ivan Poupyrev, principal research scientist at Disney Research in Pittsburgh, described hosting UIST in St Andrews as “an acknowledgment of some great research in human-computer interaction that is carried out by research groups in Scotland, including the University of St Andrews.”

Two major events taking place this week are the 8th ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS), and the 26th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), hosted by the Human Computer Interaction Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.

Read more about the events in the University News and local media.

Big Data Research Featured in MIT Technology Review

A survey article written by Jonathan Ward and Adam Barker has been featured in the MIT Technology Review.

Undefined By Data: A Survey of Big Data Definitions surveys the various definitions of big data offered by the world’s biggest and most influential high-tech organisations. The article then attempts to distill from all this noise a definition that everyone can agree on. The article was picked up by the MIT Technology Review and has fostered a lively discussion around a coherent definition; according to Topsy (social media analysis) the article has been retweeted over 400 times.

Creating High Value Cloud Services at ScotSoft Forum

On August 29th Gordon Baxter, Derek Wang and Ian Sommerville (St Andrews), along with Ian Allison (RGU) manned the stand for the SFC funded project “Creating High Value Cloud Services” at Scotland IS’s annual ScotSoft Forum. There were over 500 people at the event which was held in Edinburgh’s Sheraton Grand Hotel. The programme of talks that took place throughout the afternoon included presentations by Larry Cable (Salesforce) and a keynote by Vint Cerf (Google).

Find out more about the project on Services to the Cloud and The Cloudscape blog

Constraint Modelling Winners

Medal given to prize winning team
At the annual conference on Constraint Programming, CP 2013, Ian Gent and Ian Miguel were members of the winning team in the “First International Lightning Model and Solve” competition. Many thanks to the organisers of the event and especially to Allen van Gelder of UCSC for having the idea of entering a manual team and for inviting us to join in.

This was a quick event – just two hours – and the team’s strategy was to solve problems by hand, using pen and paper.  This was reflected in their team name, “Mano”.

Ian Gent has written a much longer blog post about the experience, why the team won, and why it is not bad news for constraint programming.