Pictures

Tales from the Real World

School President James Anderson and Careers Adviser Ben Carter invited recent graduates Matt Hailey, Ali Scott, Craig Garrigan and Steve Lowson back to the School yesterday to share their experience of working in the real world since graduating, with our final year students.

They have been successful in securing positions at highly regarded companies including Sky Scanner, PlanForCloud, NCR and NCC Group. Talks described career paths, roles and responsibilities, professional development and current employment opportunities.

Find out more about using your Computer Science degree and read student case studies on the careers website. Thanks to all for a great afternoon. Yes, cakes were consumed.

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Clockwise from top left:
Steve, Ali and Craig prepare to give their talk.
Matt and Ali reminisce in the coffee area.
James, Craig, Stephen, Ben, Ali and Matt joined our final year students for cake and questions.

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.

 

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.

orientation

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.

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pizzatime

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.
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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’.

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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.

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.

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

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!