News

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:

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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

SACHI Conference: Changing Perspectives at CHI 2013

CHI is the premier international conference on human computer interaction, and this year’s event is looking to be the most exciting yet for the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction (SACHI) research group in the School of Computer Science.

Seven members of SACHI will attend CHI in Paris this April to present three full papers, one note, one work in progress paper and five workshop papers. In addition members of SACHI are involved in organising two workshops and one special interest group meeting. Two academics in SACHI are Associate Chairs for respective sub-committees and two PhD students will be serving as student volunteers at the 2013 conference. A very busy time for all!

For more complete details on these papers, notes etc. please see http://sachi.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/2013/02/sachi-changing-perspectives-at-chi-2013/

Please note that the school of Computer Sciience is going to be introducing a new Masters in HCI from September this year.

Event details

  • When: 27th April 2013 - 2nd May 2013
  • Format: Conference

Teaching Fellow in Computer Science

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.

New EPSRC Grant – Working Together: Constraint Programming and Cloud Computing

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.