Thanks to all who attended the Board Games afternoon on Wednesday.

There was a great turnout and it was good to see everyone enjoying themselves before teaching begins next week!

Colleagues gathered recently to wish a happy retirement to Professor Al Dearle at the end of August.

Having received both a BSc and a PhD from St Andrews, Al has spent most of his career here, interrupted by sojourns in Adelaide and Stirling. His research has cut across several themes, beginning with persistent programming (still arguably a better approach to data management than what we use currently), moving onto middleware and languages for ubiquitous computing and sensors, and most recently focused on algorithms for similarity search.

He was our third Head of School, following on from Ron Morrison.

He’s always been relentlessly focused on both student experience and staff excellence, and oversaw the expansion of the School away from our traditional core in back-end systems and programming languages into the front-end of sensor networks and HCI. As part of this he emailed one potential new hire, “We have a professorship on offer: if you can’t find the advert on the web yourself, you’re probably not the calibre of person we’re looking for”.

He then moved to College Gate as Dean of Science, during which time he introduced the GAP policy (codifying what we already did) and pushing the institution to adopt more digital teaching (which we definitely didn’t already do) by buying Teams and Panopto. It’d be easy to hold this against him, but it almost certainly saved us later when the pandemic struck and we had all the digital infrastructure we needed already in place and understood. And then he successfully returned to the School and to his research, which is a transition that very few people manage successfully.

We’re not expecting to see much less of Al now he’s retired: he’ll still be around to assess and criticise us. That’s something the School management would not have any other way. He has been (and will continue to be) central to shaping the School into what it is, with the most collegial atmosphere and the best balance of teaching and research of anywhere you could choose to work.

Happy retirement Al!