News

Frotscher Medal Runner-Up

Juliana Bowles, the School Disability Coordinator, was runner-up for the new Frotscher Helping Hands Medal for Excellence in Supporting Students. This recognises her selfless commitment to providing support to students at St Andrews.

In the current academic year, we have been very happy to welcome our first totally blind student, Saad Attieh. Juliana has coordinated and largely provided our support for Saad’s studies in Computer Science. She made contact with his teachers in Edinburgh, learned about Braille (including the different ways of representing mathematics in Braille) and in depth design and preparation of teaching materials for accessibility. She has researched, selected and commissioned a range of equipment for preparing accessible diagrams and handouts. She has checked over lecture slides, coursework and exams, nagged other lecturers, including professors, to get their slides ready in time, and attended many lectures to check that the lecturers’ delivery is appropriate.

We hope to be welcoming another partially sighted student in 2013-14.

The photo shows Juliana with the Proctor, Professor Lorna Milne, at the award ceremony in the MUSA galleries (with a slightly alarming painting as backdrop).

Juliana Bowles with the Proctor at the Frotscher Medal Award Ceremony

Juliana Bowles with the Proctor at the Frotscher Medal Award Ceremony

Junior Honours Team Project

The Honours Lab proved rather lively this afternoon as the JH team projects draw to a close. The students have been exploring OpenSimulator with a view to creating a 3D Interactive St Andrews. Demonstrations highlighted a variety of research areas ranging from social media scraping to NPCs conversing about historical St Andrews. Good effort everyone! Enjoy the Cakes.

Graduates Return to Computer Science

Three of our alumni Andrew McCarthy, Adam Copp and James Smith, dropped by to say hello last week. They were visiting the University to represent Google at the Tech Talk by Google engineers held in the University Gateway Building.

Many will remember Adam, now a software engineer working at Google in London, as the IT and Computer Science Undergraduate of the Year in 2011. The award, sponsored by BT, was launched to find Britain’s most promising IT student securing him a summer placement at BT’s Research and Development site and a week at a BT European office.

It’s always fantastic to see our alumni and we wish them continued success at Google.

Comp Sci alumni

Alumni from left: Andrew, James and Adam

2012 Bill Buxton Best Canadian HCI Dissertation Award

UtaThe recipient of the 2012 award for the best doctoral dissertation completed at a Canadian university in the field of Human-Computer Interaction is Dr. Uta Hinrichs. Uta is a postdoc in the SACHI Group with us here.

 

 

 

 

socCanadian Human Computer Communications Society

Société canadienne du dialogue humain-machine

Uta Hinrichs

2012 Bill Buxton Best Canadian HCI Dissertation Award

MIT Technology Review – Jakub Dostal

MIT Technology Review has written a comprehensive article about Jakub Dostal’s Diff Displays that track visual changes on unattended displays. Jakub presented the work two weeks ago at the 18th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces in Santa Monica, California, USA. The Diff Displays project is part of Jakub’s PhD thesis on proximity-aware user interfaces. His PhD is supervised by Prof. Aaron Quigley and Dr Per Ola Kristensson.

Internships at Adobe

Adobe are offering two internships this summer. Interns will work with the Partner and Solutions Enablement Team in Edinburgh for 3 months over the summer (June-August though exact dates are flexible). The team in Edinburgh contributes fundamental shared technologies for the Adobe Creative Suite. This includes Adobe-internal technologies shared between products like CEP and cloud technologies, as well as technologies for external customers and developers like the Illustrator and InDesign SDKs, Adobe Exchange and Creative Cloud Connection.

Interns will work on an independent project with supervision from Adobe engineers. In the last few years interns have worked on projects like:

– Eclipse based tooling for generating user interfaces for InDesign extensions
– Working on toolkits for cloud computing
– Creating a debugging editor for HTML5+Javascript extensions building on Adobe Brackets
– Creating an SDK for make it really easy for Adobe developers to create new graphical Lua applications
– Develop a server based on the Jabber IM protocol and an AIR client, to allow team members to post status updates and broadcast messages
– Create a WADL editor – a Ruby On Rails app which generated SDK documentation based on WADL API specifications.

Several interns have shipped code to Adobe customers. Many have stayed on to work with Adobe permanently.

See:

http://www.adobe.com/uk/careers/locations.html#edinburgh
http://blogs.adobe.com/cssdk/
https://www.adobeexchange.com/
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/creative-cloud-connection/
http://brackets.io

Apply by sending a cv and covering letter to admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk

Closing date for applications 26th April 2013

PhD Studentships – Sponsored by Time Warner Cable and Adobe

The School of Computer Science has secured support from two major companies, Time Warner Cable and Adobe, and is able to offer two fully funded PhD studentships in exciting areas of research with important applications. Both studentships are fully funded for EU applicants (covering fees, and a stipend of at least £13.5K p/a) for up to 42 months, the expected duration of the PhD. Non EU applicants may apply but may be liable for an additional approximately £11K p/a in fees.

Applicants should normally have (or expect to obtain this academic year) a 2:1 or (preferably) first class Honours Bachelors degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related topic, or a MSc (distinction preferred) in one of these subjects.

The two research topics available are:

Continue reading

PPSP in Computer Science

PPSP in Computer Science – What’s been happening in the School of Computer Science? Posters, Prizes, Scholarships and Plants of course.

Posters & Prizes
PhD students Anne-Marie, Ditchaphong and Ildiko are pictured shortly after receiving 1st, 2nd and 3rd place respectively in the annual poster session. They received Amazon vouchers as a reward.

Poster Titles and Supervisors

Anne-Marie Mann – Turning a pen into a HAT (handwriting assisting technology) Investigating the effectiveness of a digital pen to improve handwriting skills. Supervisor Aaron Quigley.

Ditchaphong Phoomikiattisak – An alternative Approach to IP Mobility. Supervisor Saleem Bhatti.

Ildiko Pete – An Incremental Software Development Framework for Maintaining Artefact Consistency. Supervised by Dharini Balasubramaniam.

Scholarships
Representatives from Adobe were in the school to award two new scholarships for Computer Science students at St Andrews. Applicants were asked to write an essay on the subject “What excites you about Computer Science?” Nathan Blades and Carson Leonard, both first year CS students, were this years recipients.

Plants
David and Ruth break new ground, planting an apple tree, in the Comp Sci garden. Security is currently two gnomes who should be approached with caution.

PhD Interviews at St Andrews in CS

We have had an outstanding pool of applicants for our 600th Anniversary Scholarships to do a PhD in Computer Science.  This means that in the coming weeks we will be conducting many interviews with potential PhD students.  If you are one of those, or if you are just interested in what our interviews are like, I thought it would be a good idea to tell you what our PhD interviews are like.   I’m going to assume that “you” is somebody being interviewed for a PhD place, just to make writing the rest of this post easier.

What Our PhD Intervews Are

I’ve been doing the job of academic responsible for PhD admissions for about 3 years, and in that time I think we’ve admitted one student without an interview. Continue reading