Pictures

Senior Honours: Poster Presentation and Demo Session 2016

Our talented industrious senior honours students presented their posters and final year software artifacts to staff and students last week. The best poster accolade and coveted amazon voucher was presented to Thomas Morrell for his poster – Emotion Recognition from Gait Using Smartphone Accelerometer Data, supervised by Erica .

As Illustrated in the many pictures, the poster session is a perfect opportunity to share research ideas with their peer group. We wish them success with forthcoming exams and look forward to seeing them at June graduation.

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Images courtesy of Lisa Dow and Saleem Bhatti

Junior Honours: Software Team Projects 2016

Our hard working and creative Junior Honours students finalised their team projects last week, and showcased the results of their year long endeavors at a project demo afternoon. This year’s JH projects involved implementing a system for online collaborative editing. Staff and students are pictured discussing the projects and testing out the various text, graphics and sound editing systems.

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Distinguished Lecture Series 2016: Dr Maria Klawe

Dr Maria Klawe, the first woman president of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California delivered the first set of Distinguished Lectures for 2016, in the Byre Theatre. Given the decline in female participation in the tech industry, the three highly relevant, moving, well attended and thought-provoking lectures centred around Computer Science for All. The three lectures focused on Computing Education for School Children, Diversity in Undergraduate Education and Computing Research and People with Disabilities. Maria also delivered a lecture for The Andrew Carnegie Lecture Series: Getting More Woman into Technology Careers to a wider audience prior to the DLS.

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Slides from the Distinguished Lecture Series
Lecture1: Computing Education for all in K-12 Education
Lecture2: Diversity in Undergraduate Education
Lecture3: Computing Research and People with Disabilities

Images courtesy of Saleem Bhatti

CodeFirst:Girls final presentations 2016

Congratulations to our St Andrews Computer Science Code First Girls, for completing the 2016 course and staging their final projects. Earlier this week they presented their distinct and impressive projects to staff and students here in the School. Prizes were awarded for overall winner to Naomi McReynolds, for No Clucks Given and runner up to Fidan Gasimova, Katya Clark and Malina McLenna, for The North Point Cafe.

The judges were thoroughly impressed by the enthusiastic presentations and the quality of answers to both technical and non-technical questions. Last year’s winner Kahina Le Louvier also gave a demonstration of her project from the advanced course. Presentations were followed by a cheese and wine reception. Read more about CodeFirst:Girls in our previous post Computer Science supports CodeFirst:Girls.

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Computer Science hosts StacsHack and Google HashCode

The School hosted another hugely successful StacsHack last month. We congratulate the St Andrews Computing Society (Stacs) for running a fantastic event. Earlier in February they also coordinated and participated in Google HashCode, a team-based programming competition aimed at solving real-life engineering problems selected by Google.

Google Hash Code February 2016

Google Hash Code February 2016

Hackathons allow students with a range of talents and aptitudes to form groups and create innovative projects in 24hrs. It’s clear from the many photos that great fun was had at both events.

Gorgeous graphs, mood hub, SpeechFrenzy, Social face, Fresh: freshers app, Myo Athletics, pinboard and FarmScript are just some of the projects demos presented during StacsHack. Why not join them for StacsHack3 in 2017.

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StacsHack2 February 2016

StacsHack2 February 2016

StacsHack2 February 2016

StacsHack2 February 2016

Thanks to Stacs for continuing to represent the School of Computer Science in such an upbeat and inclusive way.

Sponsors: GitHub, J.P.Morgan,Bloomberg, Codeplay and Startups hackcampus and Codio.

Hardware Lab Partners: Arduino, nest, intel, leap motion, muse, oculus, particle, pebble, and Myo.

StacsHack Photos by Ryo Yanagida, courtesy of Major League Hacking.

Google Hash Code Photos courtesy of Computer Science.

Worldwide Cancer Research: Charity Bake Sale

In 10 weeks time Alex Bain will be running the London Marathon for worldwide cancer research. As part of the fundraising he is having a charity bake sale in the school common area in the Jack Cole building today.

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He has raised in excess of £325 so far. Help reward his training and support his fundraising, whilst sampling some of the delicious baking alternatively you can make a donation on justgiving.

Welcome to new Staff and Students

We are delighted to introduce the latest members of staff and research students to the school.

Dr Bo Chen:

Dr. Chen is an Associate Professor in the School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC, http://www.uestc.edu.cn). He is oriented by Dr. Adam Barker now as a BoVisiting Scholar till February, 2017. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2008 from UESTC. His major research areas include: 1) Rough Set and Soft Computing 2) Data-intensive Computing Software Infrastructure 3) Data Science and Inter-disciplinary Applications. Dr. Chen has substantial industrial backgrounds. Before join UESTC, he served as software engineer and senior consultant for middleware vendors Tongtech and BEA. He PI and Co-PI-ed some Chinese national granted projects for service oriented software platform in modern service fulfilling and international e-trading. He serves as an expert panel member of China Ministry of Science and Technology, for China State Sci- Tech Support Program and Torch Program. He is also a deputy sectary and expert panel member of Innovation Technology Alliance for Electronic Trade Industry (http://www.etrades.cn), led by China Ministry of Commerce. For more information, please check out his UESTC faculty webpage http://www.is.uestc.edu.cn/teachers.do?id=1061.

Dr Roushanak Rahmat:

roshiRoushanak is a Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews working on WORKANDHOME project with Dr Adam Barker.

Her research interests include mobile app design, cloud computing, image/signal processing and medical image analysis.

 

 

Dawand Sulaiman:

Dawand I earned my master’s degree in Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews (Academic Year: 2011/12) and received a medal for the best dissertation in the programme. Prior to that, I gained my BSc degree in Applied Computing in Ming Chuan University in Taiwan. For the last three years, I was in my hometown and worked as an instructor in the University of Kurdistan Hêwler and taught several modules including: Problem Solving Techniques, Data Structures and Algorithms, Object Oriented Programming, and Web Technologies. Meanwhile, I developed and distributed more than 30 mobile apps for both iOS and Android platforms.

I have started my PhD under the supervision of Adam Barker in January 2016. I will be working alongside an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Computer Science and Geography in the WORKANDHOME project, which investigates how home-based businesses are shaping society and space.

Guilherme Carneiro:

My name is Guilherme Carneiro, I am from Brazil. I hold a BSc in Computer Science with a specialization in SoGuilhermeftware Engineering. I have some experience in industry where I spent few years working at IBM with production databases of American customers. In 2013, I returned to academia to receive training in research with a Master in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Paris-Sud University in France. Before coming to St. Andrews, I worked for 6 months as a Research intern at INRIA (the French National Institute for computer science and applied mathematics).

I am starting my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Aaron Quigley and Dr. Miguel Nacenta in SACHI. My research topic is focused on collaborative information visualization to facilitate group decision making in real-time. My PhD is currently funded by CNPq and the Brazilian government through the Science Without Borders program.

I love traveling and visiting new places. I like any sports in general. I also have training in self-defense with a black belt in kung-fu.

Yasir Alguwaifli:

YasirUntil now I have been working as a lecturer in computer science, mainly teaching web-related modules. Before joining the academic field, I was a student mainly working in web-related as full-stack developer but sometimes dipping my toes in other areas such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and formal-verification.

I have now started my PhD with Professor Kevin Hammond’s team. When I’m not spending my nights looking at code, I usually enjoy playing mmorpgs or watching gaming streams!

 

School of Computer Science: Distinguished Lecture Series

The School of Computer Science in the University of St Andrews is pleased to announce the next set of Distinguished Lectures (DLS) leading up to the 50th anniversary of the series in 2019.

The next DLS will be delivered by Maria Klawe the president of Harvey Mudd College and former president of the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) on Thursday March 31st, location to be confirmed.

The well attended Distinguished Lecture Series were initiated by Professor Jack Cole in 1969 with a view to exposing students and other interested parties to leading edge topics in Computer Science.

Professor Jack Cole

Professor Jack Cole

All alumni of the school are invited to return and join us in St Andrews for the DLS, and In time we will extend further invitations to the larger 50th Anniversary events in 2019.

Previous Distinguished Lectures held in Lower College Hall and The Byre Theatre

Previous Distinguished Lectures held in Lower College Hall and The Byre Theatre