Students representing the many MSc courses within Computer Science, stopped by the video room yesterday, to provide a short snippet of their MSc experience. Excellent work everyone. Videos will follow in due course. A bit of reflection and much hilarity ensued but here is a clue as to the personalities involved.
News
St Andrews Day Graduation 2012
Congratulations to the Masters Class of 2012, and our PhD students, who graduated yesterday. 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.
Success in J.P.Morgan Code for Good Competition
A team of Computer Science students from the University of St Andrews came first in their category and runner up overall in the J.P.Morgan Code for Good Competition 2012
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. Students had to be on track for a 2:1. 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 team representing St Andrews was
- Aleksejs Sazonovs
- Anastasia Bugaenko
- Gareth Munro
- Kernius Kuolys
- Ole Sandbu
The Paterson Prize
Interested in writing science fiction then read on. The Paterson Prize was set up by one of our former employees Dr Norman Paterson for students in computer science who liked to write science fiction stories.
Closing date for entries is 31st March 2013
SICSA DEMOfest 2012
The Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance in association with ScotlandIS hosted their 5th annual DEMOfest, a technology showcase of Scottish Universities Informatics and Computer Science on the 6th November.
The school had three posters at the DEMOfest. Derek and Gordon were promoting their work on the SFC funded Horizon Project “Services to the Cloud”, Masih’s poster was “On The Propagation of Network State Knowledge In Structured Peer-to-Peer Networks”, which forms part of his PhD, and Chris was talking about the work he’s been doing with Alex Voss on “Analysing Social Media”.
In addition, for the first time, workshops were included as part of the DemoFest. Gordon organised the first of these on the topic of Cloud Computing. The lunchtime workshop was aimed at software developers who are considering moving their product to the cloud, and comprised three invited speakers and an open panel Q&A/discussion session.
It was attended by 37 people from industry and academia, and is the first in a series of dissemination workshops being organised as part of the Services to the Cloud project.
Best Student Paper Award for iSCAN
Congratulations to Per Ola and colleagues Ha Trinh, Annalu Waller, Keith Vertanen and Vicki L. Hanson. Their paper “iSCAN: a phoneme-based predictive communication aid for nonspeaking individuals” received the ACM SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award at the 14th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2012) earlier this year.
The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship 2013 – Europe, the Middle East and Africa
As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to furthering Anita’s vision, we are pleased to announce the 2013 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship: Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Doctor Anita Borg (1949 – 2003) devoted her life to revolutionizing the way we think about technology and dismantling the barriers that keep minorities and women from entering the computing and technology fields.
Who Should Apply?
*Be a female student enrolled in a Bachelor’s, Master’s or PhD program in 2013/2014.
*Be enrolled at a University in Europe, the Middle East or Africa.
*Study Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Informatics, or a closely related technical field.
*Maintain an excellent academic record.
The scholarship recipients will each receive a 7,000 EUR scholarship. All recipients will be invited to visit a Google office in Europe for a networking retreat.
For full details, please visit us at:
www.google.com/anitaborg/emea
Deadline to apply: February 1, 2013
Bake Sale for Children in Need
It’s Children In Need this Friday.
Well done to Sophie Gent, who raised £133 for children in need in October. The delicious cakes were the result of 3 days hard baking in the Gent household. They proved to be very popular and were certainly a welcome addition during coffee time in the school.
Find out more about fundraising for Children in Need at the BBC website
Adobe Prize Bursaries
The School of Computer Science is delighted to announce two Adobe prize bursaries available this year.
The bursaries are open to students currently in their first year at St Andrews with a degree intention of Computer Science or any joint honours combination involving Computer Science who are eligible for the full means-tested loan or grant from SAAS or the English, Welsh or Northern Irish equivalents. The value of the bursaries is £1000 per year for up to four years, subject to the students remaining eligible and maintaining an annual grade point average of at least 13.0.
If you wish to apply for one of these bursaries, please submit 500 words on the subject of “What excites me about Computer Science?” and email it to admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk. The deadline for submission is 1st November 2012.
These bursaries are the first in a number of new initiatives between Adobe systems and the School of Computer Science, including both teaching and research. We will be announcing several more over the next few months.
Virtual Worlds Research: NuiLib & Armadilo
Exciting update on two pieces of software from the Open Virtual Worlds research group.
The first is NuiLib
(available at NuiLib.org), a utility library for facilitating
development with NUI (Natural User Input) devices (such as the Microsoft
Kinect).
It puts an abstraction layer over the top of the NUI device to
hide the gory details of the original API and allows the developer to
focus on what they are trying to use the device for. It aims to ease
cross platform support, support for different devices, development and
experimentation with new NUI input parsing algorithms, integration of
new algirithms and code clarity.
The second is Armadillo.
This is a Virtual World client modified to support Kinect input. Users
can perform gestures to move their avatar through the world without having to interact with the computer itself. Helpful in museum or school installation
projects.
A video of Armadillo in action is available on the Open Virtual Worlds’ facebook timeline.
Kinect integration in Armadillo was achieved solely using NuiLib.
NuiLib has been featured on Microsoft’s Channel9 Coding for Fun blog
and by the DevelopKinect
community.
Talks are underway to include Armadillo in an
educational pilot program across 38 schools in Ireland and as part of a
Virtual World performance art project.
Both projects were developed by John McCaffery. You can find him in Room 0.09 (Jack Cole Building).
If you are starting on a Kinect project and want
to look at NuiLib or would like to superman your way through the Open
Virtual Worlds group’s reconstruction
of St Andrews Cathedral send him an email or pop in for a chat.