Constraint Modelling Winners

Medal given to prize winning team
At the annual conference on Constraint Programming, CP 2013, Ian Gent and Ian Miguel were members of the winning team in the “First International Lightning Model and Solve” competition. Many thanks to the organisers of the event and especially to Allen van Gelder of UCSC for having the idea of entering a manual team and for inviting us to join in.

This was a quick event – just two hours – and the team’s strategy was to solve problems by hand, using pen and paper. This was reflected in their team name, “Mano”.

Ian Gent has written a much longer blog post about the experience, why the team won, and why it is not bad news for constraint programming.

Postgraduate Pizza Fest

Welcome to our new postgraduate taught and research students, some of whom are pictured enjoying a social event before teaching commences on Monday.

Yes, there has been a lot of Pizza consumed in the School this week!

Computer Science Orientation Week 2013

After a welcome talk by Head of School Steve Linton, orientation 2013 is underway in the School. Monday and Tuesday offered various overviews, module talks and academic briefings. Anyone who missed these events will find related material on the School Homepage.

School President James Anderson represented the School at Academic Fayre. Student activity was observed in the honours lab and that’s before the official start of semester. We are particularly pleased to welcome the first intake of Gateway students.

A Gaming afternoon for first year students proved popular on Wednesday with Halo, Fifa and Lego Star Wars in operation. An undergraduate pizza fest followed later in the afternoon with an excellent turn out demonstrating the friendly supportive nature of our returning cohort. It’s great to see them back for another year of hard work.

The student experience is paramount here in the school, so we take this opportunity to thank our recent graduates for the NSS 2013 results, where they rated individual subjects for student satisfaction. St Andrews was number one in the UK for Computer Science. We aim to keep it that way.

PhD Reading Party 2013

The 2013 PhD Reading Party was held last month at the Burn House, just outside Edzell in the North East of Scotland.

It was an opportunity for research students to give a talk in a relaxed atmosphere, about their research interests. It also allowed for some socialising while wandering through the nearby woods and rivers.

Each student gave a 5 minute talk with time for questions and discussions. Additionally, to encourage them to make the presentation of their research industry-friendly, a pitching competition was set up. The top three were: Shantanu Pal, Dean Phoomikiattisak and Shyam Reyal. The whole academic part of the trip was rounded off by a talk by Tom Kelsey on ‘Academic Careers’.

In the free time some went off to explore the nearby forest and salmon rich river while others decided to play football or volleyball, enjoy the quiet surroundings or build the highest Jenga tower at the Burn, so far.

Text and Images courtesy of Ruth Hoffmann, Jamie Carson and Shyam Reyal.

Toblerone Treaty

In express agreement with Computer Science Law, a new supply of Toblerone arrives just in time for semester one, courtesy of Ruth Hoffmann.

Images courtesy of Al Dearle

MSc Poster Demo Session 2013

After a summer of hard work, our MSc students submitted their final dissertations last week. Earlier today they had an opportunity to present their posters and demonstrate their project artefacts.

MSc students complete with poster.

With prizes for the top 3 posters and cakes for all, the session was very busy and provided the perfect occasion to reflect upon their own dissertation journey and appreciate the projects completed by their peers. Congratulations to Ilya Lvov, Oleg Iliev and Olalekan Baruwa who received the coveted amazon vouchers for best poster.

Main image from left to right: Ilya Lvov, Oleg Iliev and Olalekan Baruwa complete with Amazon Vouchers

Poster Titles

Ilya Lvov, Data Journalism: Tools and Practices
Oleg Iliev, Exploration of QoS and QoE using radar charts
Olalekan Baruwa, IVF-predict and MyOvaries: An exploration, implementation and deployment of Bio-Medical Mobile Software Applications.

We wish them every success as they approach graduation and look forward to seeing them again in November!

New BYOD Protocol Revealed

Bring your own device (BYOD) coffee time sessions increase in popularity as staff and students are pictured getting to grips with some of the new Nexus 7 tablets.

On a more practical note they’ll be used on the Video Games and HCI Practice modules in semester one.

School of Computer Science: Living the Brand

Staff and students model the latest CS merchandise created by David Letham and Masih Hajiarabderkani at our compulsory Friday BBQ. Stop Press! After weeks of anticipation, the new mugs have finally arrived.

Ambitious, entrepreneurial, innovative, employable and highflying…

Words we use to describe our alumni, who work in New York, Switzerland, London and Edinburgh amongst other places.

Whether working for established companies such as Adobe and Google or in their own business start-ups such as AetherWorks LLC. and PlanForCloud (formerly ShopForCloud) our graduates continue to flourish. And rumour has it more of our talented CS graduates will be joining some of them shortly. The suspense! They are all exemplars of why St Andrews is the only Scottish university to feature in the 2013 High Fliers, a report about the graduate market in 2013.

Clockwise from top left:

Rob, Angus and Greg from AetherWorks LLC., who took time out to capture a photo of themselves outside their offices in New York.

Ali at graduation, sporting a colour-co-ordinated Google Glass (who knew!). Listen to Ali discuss his career at the SICSA PhD conference careers panel.

We caught up with Adam, Andrew and James earlier this year when they represented Google at the Tech Talk by Google engineers.

Neil (complete with sunglasses) visited the school last week, on an unusually sunny day, with colleagues from Adobe.

Thanks to:
AetherWorks LLC.: Robert MacInnis, Angus MacDonald, Allan Boyd and Greg Bigwood.
PlanForCloud: Ali Khajeh-Hosseini and Alistair Scott.
Adobe: Neil Moore.
Google: James Smith, Adam Copp and Andrew McCarthy.
Editorial Support: Anne Campbell

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.