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April in Computer Science: Poster Presentations and World Domination

The Senior Honours students presented their posters and final year software artifacts to staff and students last week. The best poster accolade and associated amazon voucher was presented to Callum Hyland for his poster – Android: Smoking Cessation, behavioural pattern prediction through spatial and temporal modelling. We wish them well with exam revision and look forward to seeing them at June graduation.

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The Junior Honours students finalised their team projects last Friday and competed for world domination. This year the project involved implementing a multi-player peer-to-peer world domination game, with AI. We await news of which team dominated the CS world for a time on Friday.

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Images courtesy of Lisa Dow and Simone Conte

Computer Science Distinguished Lectures 2015

Earlier this month Prof. Mothy Roscoe from ETH Zürich delivered the first set of distinguished lectures for 2015 in the Byre Theatre. The three highly accessible, well attended and engaging lectures centred around the question “What’s happening to computer hardware, and what does it mean for systems software?”

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Images courtesy of Saleem Bhatti

LitLong launches from AHRC funded project

The Palimpsest project involving the University of St Andrews’ SACHI group collaborating with the University of Edinburgh’s English literature and text-mining group launched LitLong Edinburgh on 30th march 2015.

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LitLong_appLit Long: Edinburgh features a range of maps and accessible visualisations, which enable users to interact with Edinburgh’s literature in a variety of ways, exploring the spatial relations of the literary city at particular times in its history, in the works of particular authors, or across different eras, genres and writers. Lit Long: Edinburgh makes a major contribution to our knowledge of the Edinburgh literary cityscape, with potential to shape the experience and understanding of critics and editors, residents and visitors, readers and writers.

Give the web visualisation a try here.

SACHI’s Dr Uta Hinrichs created the web visualisation, Dr David Harris-Birtill created the mobile app and Professor Aaron Quigley was the St Andrews lead and co-investigator on the Palimpsest project funded by the AHRC.

This work is featured on the Guardians website and mentioned in Edinburgh University’s news.

Mario Kart Around the World

The School recently hosted “Mario Kart Around the World” for students from Newport Primary.

All versions of Mario Kart with the exception of arcade versions were available for the youngsters to play. Our visitors had access to a range of consoles and games ranging from Vectrex to Leap Motion and a great opportunity to see modern equipment and how it looked in the “olden days“.

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Staff were pictured testing out the equipment ( by way of playing Mario Kart) post event. Peter Nightingale (top left) is pictured playing the Vectrex Home Arcade System. Jon Lewis (bottom left) was seen tackling Elite on the Sinclair Spectrum.

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The successful event was organised by Ruth Letham with help from Ian Gent, Jon Lewis, Peter Nightingale, Chris Jefferson, Ian Miguel, Gonzalo Mendez and Shyam Reyal.

Images Courtesy of Ian Miguel and Ian Gent.

Torchlit Procession

The Torchlit Procession and Rectorial Drag are historic university traditions, in February the soon-to-be-installed Rector Catherine Stihler addressed all students in St Mary’s Quad. The Torchlit Procession later in the evening left from Sallies Lawn where students collected and lit their torches. The walk continued down to the pier offering some fabulous photographic opportunities.

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Stunning images from the procession were captured by MSc students Xu Zhu and Fearn Bishop.

School Hosts StacsHack 2015

The School hosted a hugely successful StacsHack last month. We congratulate Stacs St Andrews Computing Society for organising and running a fantastic event. 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 by all. View some of the winning projects at the challenge post submission gallery.

Thanks to Gala Malbasic, Nick Tikhonov, Ieva Vasiļjeva and Vika Anisimova for representing the School of Computer Science in such a positive way and for all their hard work and enthusiasm.

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Sponsors: Palantir, J.P. Morgan, Braintree_Dev, Bloomberg and Thalmiclabs.

MLH Hardware Lab partners: Oculus VR, Pebble, Thalmic Labs, Sparkfun, Estimote, Leap Motion and Spark.

Images courtesy of Gala Malbasic and Major League Hacking.
More images from the event can be viewed on the StacsHack Facebook Page.

Notable Woman in Computing Card Deck

Available on a coffee table (Jack Cole) near you: Notable Women in Computing playing card deck featuring 54 notable women in computer science. Play your favourite card game and learn more about the history and future of women in computer science. Read more about the KickStarter and Wiki Project.

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