Pictures

The 11th International Conference on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP 2013)

The 11th International Conference on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP 2013) was held in the Gateway in St Andrews on July 15-17,2013. Presented were 17 peer-reviewed papers on natural language processing applications, language resources, and theoretical and implementational issues with relevance to finite-state methods. In addition, there were two keynote lectures, by Alexander Clark (King’s College London) and Bill Byrne (University of Cambridge), and three tutorials, by Ruth Hoffmann (University of St Andrews), Bevan Keeley Jones (University of Edinburgh) and Kousha Etessami (University of Edinburgh).

The conference was attended by 34 researchers and students from three continents. It also hosted a business meeting of SIGFSM (ACL Special Interest Group on Finite-State Methods). The social programme included a reception on July 14th, and a guided walk, a conference dinner in Lower College Hall and a concert in St Salvator’s Chapel on July 16th.

Accommodation in Agnes Blackadder Hall was arranged for non-local delegates, and lunches were served in the Gateway. Coffee breaks could be used for informal demos in the smaller seminar rooms of the Gateway.

Sponsored student places were available thanks to support from SICSA. Further support was received from VisitScotland and the University of St Andrews.

The full programme, with links to the proceedings, can be found from the website: http://fsmnlp2013.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/

Images and text courtesy of Mark-Jan Nederhof (conference chair), Anssi Yli-Jyrä and Shyam Reyal.

Summer Days in Computer Science

Students and staff took advantage of the Scottish weather on Friday and held a BBQ to mark the anniversary of these events.

  • The Great Fire of Rome
  • Birth of Computer Scientist Mark Crispin
  • The Opening of the StACS Garden

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Organised by Jan de Muijnck-Hughes and David Letham. Cooked by Jan de Muijnck-Hughes and Masih Hajiarabderkani. Salad ingredients from the StACS Garden. Enjoyed by all (including Pippa the dog).

Senior Honours Project Success

A Multi-display exhibit that enables visitors to explore The Old Course and photographs of Lawrence Levy, and to quiz their golf knowledge was developed by Julian Petford. The display was developed during his Senior Honours Project which was supervised by Miguel Nacenta. Great job Julian. We look forward to hearing more about the event in due course.

The exhibition officially opens on Saturday, although visitors to The University Library can view the exhibit from today. Read more about the showcase on Echoes From The Vault, a blog from Special Collections, the University 600th news or view some of the images on display via the BBC website.

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Cuboid Aquarium Repopulation

It’s a little busier in the fish tank this week. 20+ new fish have joined the established Cichlid and Catfish population.

CS1006 AI Competition

The annual CS1006 challenge took place yesterday in the subhonours lab. Students had been designing AIs to play John Nash’s game, Hex, this year.

Congratulations to the competition winners –

Team – “Vanilla Dynamite’s Nuclear Computer Posse”

Students – Chris Lamb, Maria McParland and Robin Nabel.

An abundance of healthy foodstuff and some rather unique team names reflect the ingenuity and creativity of our first year students.

It’s always a fun session to end semester 2.

Frotscher Medal Runner-Up

Juliana Bowles, the School Disability Coordinator, was runner-up for the new Frotscher Helping Hands Medal for Excellence in Supporting Students. This recognises her selfless commitment to providing support to students at St Andrews.

In the current academic year, we have been very happy to welcome our first totally blind student, Saad Attieh. Juliana has coordinated and largely provided our support for Saad’s studies in Computer Science. She made contact with his teachers in Edinburgh, learned about Braille (including the different ways of representing mathematics in Braille) and in depth design and preparation of teaching materials for accessibility. She has researched, selected and commissioned a range of equipment for preparing accessible diagrams and handouts. She has checked over lecture slides, coursework and exams, nagged other lecturers, including professors, to get their slides ready in time, and attended many lectures to check that the lecturers’ delivery is appropriate.

We hope to be welcoming another partially sighted student in 2013-14.

The photo shows Juliana with the Proctor, Professor Lorna Milne, at the award ceremony in the MUSA galleries (with a slightly alarming painting as backdrop).

Juliana Bowles with the Proctor at the Frotscher Medal Award Ceremony

Juliana Bowles with the Proctor at the Frotscher Medal Award Ceremony

Junior Honours Team Project

The Honours Lab proved rather lively this afternoon as the JH team projects draw to a close. The students have been exploring OpenSimulator with a view to creating a 3D Interactive St Andrews. Demonstrations highlighted a variety of research areas ranging from social media scraping to NPCs conversing about historical St Andrews. Good effort everyone! Enjoy the Cakes.

Graduates Return to Computer Science

Three of our alumni Andrew McCarthy, Adam Copp and James Smith, dropped by to say hello last week. They were visiting the University to represent Google at the Tech Talk by Google engineers held in the University Gateway Building.

Many will remember Adam, now a software engineer working at Google in London, as the IT and Computer Science Undergraduate of the Year in 2011. The award, sponsored by BT, was launched to find Britain’s most promising IT student securing him a summer placement at BT’s Research and Development site and a week at a BT European office.

It’s always fantastic to see our alumni and we wish them continued success at Google.

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Alumni from left: Andrew, James and Adam

CS3102 Data Communications & Networks

The CS3102 students have been working on a variety of OpenSim projects and produced some interesting and original interactive simulations.

Imaginative virtual environments were used to explain a variety of topics including cellular networks, wireless networks, cloud computing, network topologies and denial of service. We caught up with them last week as they finalised their practical work.

Great work everyone.