Pictures

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.

Comp Sci alumni

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.

The MSc Experience at Computer Science

After a year of hard work our MSc students 2011/12 finished their dissertations in August. Graduation on Friday gave them time to reflect on their MSc experience. Here’s what they said.

Still Images from the Graduation Video Room

Students representing the many MSc courses within Computer Science, stopped by the video room yesterday, to provide a short snippet of their MSc experience. Excellent work everyone. Videos will follow in due course. A bit of reflection and much hilarity ensued but here is a clue as to the personalities involved.

St Andrews Day Graduation 2012

Congratulations to the Masters Class of 2012, and our PhD students, who graduated yesterday. Students were invited to a reception in the school to celebrate their achievement with staff, friends and family. Our graduates have moved on to a wide variety of interesting and challenging employment and further study opportunities, and we wish them all well with their future careers.

Bake Sale for Children in Need

It’s Children In Need this Friday.

Well done to Sophie Gent, who raised £133 for children in need in October. The delicious cakes were the result of 3 days hard baking in the Gent household. They proved to be very popular and were certainly a welcome addition during coffee time in the school.



Find out more about fundraising for Children in Need at the BBC website

Postgraduate Computer Science BBQ

After a busy week of welcome talks and induction, orientation week drew to a close with the postgraduate BBQ.

MSc and PhD students had an opportunity to meet each other, discuss their diverse backgrounds, previous studies, eat burgers, twiglets and consume the local delicacy Irn Bru.

Images Courtesy of Anne Campbell