The School of Computer Science are seeking applications for a Teaching Fellow in Computer Science

Applications are invited for a Teaching Fellowship in the School of Computer Science. In the first instance, at least, this is a fixed-term position of three years with a start date May 2013. We require a Teaching Fellow to assist with the development and delivery of high quality, innovative teaching at undergraduate level. Applicants should have at least a BSc in Computer science, preferably a PhD, and previous lecturing and tutorial experience at undergraduate level. Preferably they should also be able to demonstrate ability to deliver a range of core Computer Science courses in classroom, laboratory and small-group tutorial environments; experience in the development of innovative material for learning and teaching; and/or experience of contributing to pedagogical studies in the sciences. The post may be particularly appropriate for someone with recent experience in the secondary education sector.

Information on how to apply.

We are looking for a Research Fellow to work on this grant! See the job advert (deadline 28 Feb): Research Fellow in Computer Science

Ian Miguel, Adam Barker, and Martin Dominik (of the School of Physics & Astronomy) have been awarded £630K, 3-year grant from the EPSRC for “Working Together: Constraint Programming and Cloud Computing”. Cloud Computing and Constraint Programming are two active, important research streams, both of which will realise significant and sustained benefits from working in concert. Constraint programming is a proven technology for solving complex combinatorial problems. However, the inherent difficulty of these problems means that performance can be variable, often requiring tuning by an expert to obtain best results. One approach to obtaining more robust performance is to employ a portfolio of solvers with complementary strengths. The scalable resource offered by the cloud is perfectly suited to the deployment of such portfolios and presents the opportunity to employ large solver portfolios to tackle challenge problems of exceptional difficulty. Conversely, a major concern in cloud computing is how to deploy an application on the available infrastructure so as to maximise performance and minimise operating costs. Added complexity arises when dealing with Big Data scenarios where it is important to run computation as closely (in terms of network distance) as possible to the data, in order to minimise network latency and maximise the performance of an application. This is a difficult combinatorial problem with a large set of variables including: public cloud provider, cloud configuration, geographical region, pricing etc. to which constraint programming is ideally suited.

Our two primary research streams in ICT will interact and work together with a third in astronomy to deliver a solution to a major challenge application: scheduling telescope observations to measure the abundance of planets throughout the Milky Way. If successful, the benefit to astronomy is clear, but our two primary streams will also benefit greatly from a major evaluation of their ability to work together to solve a large, complex problem.