The School hosted a farewell reception for Judi Robertson last month. Judi worked in the School for 8 years, and made a great contribution to making the School such a friendly and supportive place to work and study. She is pictured below, receiving flowers and leaving gifts, and drinking a glass of fizz. We wish her well in her new job in Edinburgh.
Congratulations to Bilal Hussain, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured below with supervisor Professor Ian Miguel, Internal examiner Professor Simon Dobson and external examiner Dr Peter Gregory, from Teesside University.
We are delighted to congratulate the student representatives for 2016/7, elected by their peers. Reps play a very important part in the life of the school by providing a healthy communication channel between staff and the students they represent, and also by chairing and running the Staff-Student Consultative Committee, amongst many other roles.
The reps are shown outside the Jack Cole Building in November 2016, and are (from left to right)
Many thanks to the reps for arranging this photo (taken by Alex Bain who can be seen in the reflection), which should help staff and students put faces to the names.
Thanks to everyone who volunteered to be a student rep.
Congratulations to Hui-Shyong Yeo, Professor Aaron Quigley and colleagues, who won best poster at UIST2016.
Their paper Sidetap and Slingshot Gestures on Unmodified Smartwatches, is available through the ACM digital library.
SACHI research project RadarCat (Radar Categorization for Input & Interaction), highlighted earlier this year in the University news, the Courier and Gizmodo and in a Google I/O ATAP 2016 session, will be presented at UIST2016 this week.
RadarCat is a small, versatile radar-based system for material and object classification which enables new forms of everyday proximate interaction with digital devices. SACHI’s contribution to Project Soli featured in a previous blog post SACHI contribute to Google’s Project Soli, in May. Read more about RadarCat for object recognition on the SACHI blog.
Google’s Project Soli workshop in March 2016
Earlier this month the School hosted hack the Bubble, a 12-hour hackathon organized by STACS, the St Andrews Computing Society and sponsored by J.P. Morgan. Hackathons are great events for teams of students to build projects from scratch and compete for awesome prizes.
The main aim of this event was to show our first and second year students what a hackathon is in a more accessible 12-hour format instead of the traditional 24 or 48 hour ones. The event was a great success with 70 students participating and 15 teams presenting their projects at the end.
This event wouldn’t have been possible without the help of the School of Computer Science for providing the venue, and sponsors J.P. Morgan for the food and prizes.
Hack the Bubble October 2016
Images and text courtesy of STACS.
Congratulations to Oche Ejembi who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured below with supervisor Professor Saleem Bhatti, internal examiner Dr Tom Kelsey and external examiner Dr Marwan Fayed from Stirling University.
Earlier this month, J.P. Morgan visited the School of Computer Science, to highlight tech careers, internships and other student opportunities. Staff from the company and CS students are pictured viewing project challenges and solutions through their technology showcase, discussing future career openings and enjoying pizza.
Congratulations to Kamran Razavi, one of our MSc in Dependable Software Systems (Erasmus Mundus) students, who won the recent Bloomberg CodeCon. CodeCon is a UK wide programming contest organised by Bloomberg and is hosted locally across multiple locations in the UK, one of which was located in the department of Physics at the University of St Andrews.
Kamran emerged first from 20 other contestants at the University of St Andrews and was ranked 19th among 217 other contestants UK-wide, coming from universities such as Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. He was awarded with a championship trophy, Bluetooth speakers, travel accessories and a ticket to London for the main contest, where the top three contestants from each local site will compete against each other.
The competition is highlighted through the University emails and after registering students can prepare themselves by solving previous problems.The competition itself, lasted 2 hours with 8 questions in total, which were algorithmic in nature, and required knowledge of data structures.
Kamran was able to solve 7 questions but was only able to submit 6, due to technical problems with the contest host website. The contest could have been taken in 15 programming languages including Java, C++, C, Python etc. Kamran used Java on this occasion and thanked Bloomberg, The School of Computer Science and The University for providing opportunities such as CodeCon. We wish him every success for the final contest.
