MSc Poster Demo Session 2017

After a year of hard work, and an intensive summer dissertation, our MSc students submitted their dissertations last week and presented their project posters and artefacts.

The eventful poster demonstration session provides a great opportunity for students to meet with second markers, reflect upon their MSc experience and appreciate the diverse projects completed by their peers. This year, students organised a School sponsored CS Ball, to celebrate their achievement.

We wish them all, every success with future plans, and look forward to seeing them again at December Graduation.

Images courtesy of Saleem Bhatti and Xu Zhu.

Postgraduate Dinner at Fairmont Hotel

Postgraduate student, Paul Dobra organised an end of semester celebratory dinner at the Fairmont Hotel in April. The social event marked the end of teaching and provided a chance to relax before the commencement of dissertation. Paul supplied comments and shared some photos from the occasion.

“There are rather few occasions not to be happy when you are surrounded by friends and family. Even better so when your friends are like your family, and in true computer science spirit the end of the second semester finished in a grand style: enjoying the scenic view of the North Sea from the balcony of the Fairmont Hotel and Restaurant, approximately 60 postgraduates celebrated their friendship and the successful completion of deadlines. Consisting of a lavish three-course meal and blessed with amazing weather, the event was a reminder of the true, everlasting bonds that can be forged outside university.”

Images and text courtesy of Paul Dobra

Computer Science: June Graduation 2017

Congratulations to our Senior Honours Class of 2017, MSci Honours students and our PhD students Dr Anne-Marie Mann, Dr Ildiko Pete, Dr Yuchen Zhao and Dr Michael Mauderer, who graduated on Wednesday. Students were invited to a reception in the School prior to the ceremony, to celebrate their achievement with staff, friends and family. We echo the sentiments expressed by our Head of School, Professor Steve Linton, during his Graduation address.

“For what you have achieved here, we are so proud of you. For what you will achieve, we wait eagerly and will always be proud. And wherever you are, we hope you will always regard St Andrews as a place you can call home.”

Our graduates will indeed move on to a wide variety of interesting and challenging employment and further study opportunities, and we wish them all well with their future careers.

Images courtesy of Annemarie Paton and Ryo Yanagida.

PhD viva success: Long Thai

Congratulations to Long Thai, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured with supervisor Dr Adam Barker, Internal examiner Dr John Thomson and external examiner Dr Rami Bahsoon, from the University of Birmingham. Long is joining Amazon as a Software Engineer.

Prizes for Haifa Al Nasseri

At the Cyber Academy’s International Conference on Big Data in Cyber Security on May 10 2017 at Edinburgh Napier’s Craiglockhart Campus, PhD student Haifa Al Nasseri won two 3rd prizes. One was for her research poster on Cloud Virtual Network Isolation Security and the other was for her team’s efforts in the Splunk Hackathon.

PhD viva success: Yuchen Zhao

Congratulations to Yuchen, who successfully defended his thesis yesterday. He is pictured with supervisors Dr Tristan Henderson and Dr Juan Ye, Internal examiner Professor Simon Dobson and external examiner Dr Mirco Musolesi, from UCL.

Workshop on Considering Technology through a Philosophical Lens

Technology fundamentally shapes our communication, relationships, and access to information. It also evolves through our interaction with it. Dialoguing across disciplines can facilitate an understanding of these complex and reciprocal relationships and fuel reflection and innovation.

This hands-on, participant-driven and experimental workshop will start a discussion of what can come from considering technology through a philosophical lens. Through discussions and hands-on design activities, it will provide an introduction to and reflection on questions at the intersection of computer science and philosophy, such as:

How have philosophy and technology shaped each other in the past?
How can philosophical ideas and methods guide research in Computer Science?
How can thinking through technology help Humanities researchers discover relevance and articulate impact in their research?

Engaging these questions can provide participants an entry-point into exploring these themes in the context of their own research.

This workshop is aimed at researchers from computer science who are curious about philosophy and how to leverage it to inform technically oriented research questions and designing for innovation. It is also aimed at researchers in the arts & humanities, social sciences, and philosophy who are curious about current research questions and approaches in computer science and how questions of technology can stimulate philosophical thought and research.

Attending the workshop is free but please register by emailing Nick Daly: nd40[at]st-andrews.ac.uk

Organisers: Nick Daly (School of Modern Languages) and Uta Hinrichs (School of Computer Science)

Event details

When: 18th May 2017 10:00 - 13:00
Where: Cole 1.33a
Format: Workshop

MPhil viva sucess: Yunjia Wang

Congratulations to Yunjia Wang, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured with Internal examiner Dr Alice Toniolo and Supervisor Dr Ishbel Duncan.

ACM SIGCHI: Communication Ambassador & Turing Award Celebration News

Congratulations to Hui-Shyong Yeo, who has been selected as both an ACM SIGCHI communication ambassador and to represent SIGCHI at the ACM 50 Years of the A.M. Turing Award Celebration.

Yeo is a 2nd year PhD student and is particularly interested in exploring and developing novel interaction techniques. Since joining us in SACHI, he has had work accepted at ACM CHI 2016 and CHI 2017, ACM MobileHCI 2016 and 2017 and ACM UIST 2016. His work has featured at Google I/O 2016, locally on STV news and he gave a talk at Google UK in 2016 about his research. His work has also featured in the media including in Gizmodo, TheVerge, Engadget and TechCrunch., see his personal website for more details. Continue reading

PhD viva success: Anne-Marie Mann

Congratulations to Anne-Marie Mann, who successfully defended her thesis yesterday. She is pictured with Internal examiner Dr Colin Allison and external examiner Dr Paul Marshall, from UCL.

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