News

Software Freedom Day

Software Freedom Day is an annual event held by communities who are passionate about free and open-source software (FOSS).
The event programme includes a talk by Dr Markus Tauber from the School, titled Expectations, Requirements and Survival when
Starting with Linux.

Markus has provided a short overview of his talk for those interested in attending:
“The talk is about some work I did with friends from an Austrian CS
society as a spare time activity about 2 years ago. We
semi-scientifically looked into the relation of what experts expect
Linux newbies to do when starting with Linux and what newbies expect or
what they are happy to do. The talk is for both, newbies who want to get
some guidelines and for experts to give them an idea about the
expectations of newbies.”

Software Freedom Day will be held on Saturday 17th September from 10am until 5pm in Abertay’s Hannah Maclure Centre. The event is hosted by Abertay’s Open Society in partnership with TayLUG, Dundee’s local Linux user group.

Evening Degree Welcome Reception and Meet Your Tutor

The annual welcome reception for the new evening degree students took place last night in the Gateway brasserie. The familiar but extremely useful Meet Your Tutor session followed shortly afterwards. Tuesday evening sessions for IT begin next week.

Graduate Claire Gorgan was singled out for her achievements. Congratulations Claire.

Evening Degree Programme website

Arrival of Tony’s Cichlids

After much anticipation and excitement, the School welcomes 12 new African Cichlids for the start of a new semester.

Robocode Session

Students undertaking the pre-sessional language course before entering our taught Masters programme, had the opportunity to try out their programming skills this afternoon, in a fun and enjoyable context using Java to write programmes that control robots.

Jan de Muijnck-Hughes and Lars Kotthoff led the session in the John Honey Building.

Virtual reconstruction of the Acropolis Basilica

The Basilica reconstruction was a collaborative project between the School of Classics and the School Computer Science. Research Blog

A reconstruction of St Andrews Cathedral has also taken place.
The reconstruction was a research topic for successful computer science and information technology MSc. dissertations in the summer of 2010 and 2011.
Technical support was available in regular laboratory sessions; in addition students had input from experts in the history and architecture of the cathedral and direct access to the physical site.
A key innovative aspect of this project was to situate the reconstruction within the immersive 3D virtual world OpenSim. This allows visitors to explore the reconstruction through the proxy of an avatar.

MSc Poster Presentations 2011

The MSc poster presentations and project demonstrations took place this afternoon. We wish all of our MSc students good luck as they finish their dissertations and move closer to graduation!

Event details

  • When: 31st August 2011 14:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Honey 110 - MSc Lab

Mirco’s Last Day

Mirco Musolesi leaves the School today to start his new post in Birmingham. Thank you for the cakes from a local Royal supplier. Good luck and we will hopefully see you in St Andrews in the future.

Lars Kotthoff wins Best Student Paper award

St Andrews PhD student Lars Kotthoff has won the Best Student Paper award at the Fourth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search. His paper, co-authored by Ian Gent and Ian Miguel, has the title “A Preliminary Evaluation of Machine Learning in Algorithm Selection for Search Problems” and compares the performance of different Machine Learning techniques on several Algorithm Selection problems from the literature.

More information, including the paper, can be found on Lars’ website here.