Staff and students model the latest CS merchandise created by David Letham and Masih Hajiarabderkani at our compulsory Friday BBQ. Stop Press! After weeks of anticipation, the new mugs have finally arrived.
News
Ambitious, entrepreneurial, innovative, employable and highflying…
Words we use to describe our alumni, who work in New York, Switzerland, London and Edinburgh amongst other places.
Whether working for established companies such as Adobe and Google or in their own business start-ups such as AetherWorks LLC. and PlanForCloud (formerly ShopForCloud) our graduates continue to flourish. And rumour has it more of our talented CS graduates will be joining some of them shortly. The suspense! They are all exemplars of why St Andrews is the only Scottish university to feature in the 2013 High Fliers, a report about the graduate market in 2013.
Clockwise from top left:
Rob, Angus and Greg from AetherWorks LLC., who took time out to capture a photo of themselves outside their offices in New York.
Ali at graduation, sporting a colour-co-ordinated Google Glass (who knew!). Listen to Ali discuss his career at the SICSA PhD conference careers panel.
We caught up with Adam, Andrew and James earlier this year when they represented Google at the Tech Talk by Google engineers.
Neil (complete with sunglasses) visited the school last week, on an unusually sunny day, with colleagues from Adobe.
Thanks to:
AetherWorks LLC.: Robert MacInnis, Angus MacDonald, Allan Boyd and Greg Bigwood.
PlanForCloud: Ali Khajeh-Hosseini and Alistair Scott.
Adobe: Neil Moore.
Google: James Smith, Adam Copp and Andrew McCarthy.
Editorial Support: Anne Campbell
The 11th International Conference on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP 2013)
The 11th International Conference on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP 2013) was held in the Gateway in St Andrews on July 15-17,2013. Presented were 17 peer-reviewed papers on natural language processing applications, language resources, and theoretical and implementational issues with relevance to finite-state methods. In addition, there were two keynote lectures, by Alexander Clark (King’s College London) and Bill Byrne (University of Cambridge), and three tutorials, by Ruth Hoffmann (University of St Andrews), Bevan Keeley Jones (University of Edinburgh) and Kousha Etessami (University of Edinburgh).
The conference was attended by 34 researchers and students from three continents. It also hosted a business meeting of SIGFSM (ACL Special Interest Group on Finite-State Methods). The social programme included a reception on July 14th, and a guided walk, a conference dinner in Lower College Hall and a concert in St Salvator’s Chapel on July 16th.
Accommodation in Agnes Blackadder Hall was arranged for non-local delegates, and lunches were served in the Gateway. Coffee breaks could be used for informal demos in the smaller seminar rooms of the Gateway.
Sponsored student places were available thanks to support from SICSA. Further support was received from VisitScotland and the University of St Andrews.
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- Alexander Clark
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- Bill Byrne
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- The conference chair introducing Kousha Etessami
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- Conference audience
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- SIGFSM business meeting
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- Lunch in the Gateway
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- Line-up
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- Guided walk
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- Conference dinner in Lower College Hall
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- Concert in St Salvator’s Chapel
The full programme, with links to the proceedings, can be found from the website: http://fsmnlp2013.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/
Images and text courtesy of Mark-Jan Nederhof (conference chair), Anssi Yli-Jyrä and Shyam Reyal.
Summer Days in Computer Science
Students and staff took advantage of the Scottish weather on Friday and held a BBQ to mark the anniversary of these events.
- The Great Fire of Rome
- Birth of Computer Scientist Mark Crispin
- The Opening of the StACS Garden
Organised by Jan de Muijnck-Hughes and David Letham. Cooked by Jan de Muijnck-Hughes and Masih Hajiarabderkani. Salad ingredients from the StACS Garden. Enjoyed by all (including Pippa the dog).
Services to the Cloud
On June 27th Gordon Baxter and Derek Wang gave a presentation about their work on the SFC funded project “Creating High Value Cloud Services” at the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce’s Business Growth Club.
Gordon talked about the lessons that have been learned so far from working closely with several Scottish SMEs who are adopting the cloud. Derek then gave a short demonstration of the web-based toolkit he has developed to analyse the potential costs and revenues associated with delivering a product or service through the cloud.
Find out more about the project on Services to the Cloud and The Cloudscape blog
MSc in Human Computer Interaction starting in September 2013
We have added more details on our new MSc in Human Computer Interaction which is starting in September 2013. This is an intensive one-year programme designed to provide a solid theoretical and practical foundation in HCI. It is designed to enable students from a variety of backgrounds to become HCI practitioners, in roles including UX designer, visual analysts, interaction designers and interaction architects. This MSc will also help prepare you for a PhD programme in HCI. In semester 1 students take Human Computer Interaction Principles and Human Computer Interaction Practice, followed by User-Centred Interaction Design and Evaluation Methods in Human Computer Interaction in semester 2. Other modules can be selected from the general MSc portfolio.
You can find more details here on the MSc in Human Computer Interaction.
PhD student awarded Google Scholarship
Many congratulations to Bilal Hussain, first year PhD student working with Dr Ian Miguel. Bilal has been awarded a Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities. We thank Google for their additional support for Bilal’s study and research. The main funding for Bilal’s PhD comes from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and we of course thank them too.
Senior Honours Project Success
A Multi-display exhibit that enables visitors to explore The Old Course and photographs of Lawrence Levy, and to quiz their golf knowledge was developed by Julian Petford. The display was developed during his Senior Honours Project which was supervised by Miguel Nacenta. Great job Julian. We look forward to hearing more about the event in due course.
The exhibition officially opens on Saturday, although visitors to The University Library can view the exhibit from today. Read more about the showcase on Echoes From The Vault, a blog from Special Collections, the University 600th news or view some of the images on display via the BBC website.
Students placed third in Hackin’ The City Hackathon
UCL Financial Industry Series
Hackin’ The City Hackathon
April 6 – 7 2013
Organised by the UCL Financial Industry Series (UCL FIndS) in partnership with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Financial Services Knowledge Transfer Network, SWIFT and Level39 Technology Accelerator at Canary Wharf, the Hackin’ The City Hackathon brought together 55 students from a dozen of top universities in the UK to pit their skills in a round-the-clock hackathon to design and develop an application over 24 hours.
Six students from the university’s Computer Science department (Waqas Arshid, Gordon Coupar, Robert Dixon, Valentin Tunev, Alex Waller and Ben Lovell) were invited to attend the event in London. Five entered as ‘Team StACS’ and Ben as an individual participant with the intent of forming a team.
The aim of their project was to enable the creation and validation of safe buildings that have optimal escape routes in the event of disasters. Through the use of pathfinding algorithms, building floor plans can be analysed and statistics presented. Subsequently through these adjustments, improvements can be made in order to aid safety in the event of an emergency.
On Sunday morning, 12 teams presented their value proposition, technology solution and ran a live demo of their projects. Judges after long deliberation came up with six finalists. By 1530 on Sunday after 25 minutes of intense debate, senior judges The St Andrews team was awarded 3rd place and team members each received Amazon vouchers.
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- In the finals
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- The presentation
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- We won a prize
Computer Science Research 2013 & Beyond
Q: What do the words in the tag cloud have in common?
A: They all relate to research happening in the School of Computer Science. Some are conference contributions coming to a conference near you soon, and some will appear as forthcoming journal articles.
The University research portal features publications and awards, and can be customised to explore research happening in the School of Computer Science.
Thinking of studying in the School or contemplating collaboration with a research group? Use the words above to search and peruse the research publications for some inspiration.