News

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

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.

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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