PhD

iVoLVER receives Best Demo Jury Award at ACM ISS

The iVoLVER system, created by Gonzalo Méndez and Miguel Nacenta from the SACHI group at the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, received Best Demo Jury Award at the ACM Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ACM ISS) conference last week.

ACM ISS 2017, took place in Brighton, UK and selects a different location each year, with Tokyo, Japan selected as next year’s destination. The conference is a premier venue for research that studies how people interact in smart spaces and surfaces and how to design and engineer solutions for novel interfaces.

iVoLVER is a web-based visual programming environment that enables anyone to transform visualizations that they find in-the-wild (e.g., in a poster or a newspaper) into new visualizations that are more useful for them. Congratulations to the iVoLVER team. You can try out the open source iVoLVER prototype using a browser.

An example iVoLVER interface

Best Demo Jury Award

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.

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

School of Computer Science – PhD Scholarships

The School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews offers funding for up to six students to undertake PhD research starting in the Fall of 2017 in any of the areas of research carried out by its academic faculty (which includes, but is not limited to, Artificial Intelligence and Symbolic Computation, Computer Systems Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, and Programming Languages).

We are looking for highly motivated research students willing to be part of a diverse and supportive research community.

Applicants must hold a BSc or MSc in an area appropriate for their proposed topic of study (usually Computer Science, but not restricted to it). The Scholarship covers PhD fees and provides a tax-free maintenance stipend of £14,296 per year for 3.5 years. Exceptional students can apply for an additional £2,000 per year. International applications are welcome.

We especially encourage female applicants and underrepresented minorities to apply. Admission is competitive but candidate selection takes into account the motivation, skills and previous experience of the candidates. If you are interested, please get in contact with us by e-mail even if you are not sure of your eligibility or strength as a candidate (write an e-mail to pg-admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk Subject: Informal PhD Inquiry). We will facilitate contact with a member of research staff in your area of interest (for a list of existing faculty and areas of research see http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/prospective-pg/postgraduate-supervisors).

For further information, including the step-by-step procedure on how to apply please check our postgraduate-research web page (http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/prospective-pg/research-degrees). The closing date for applications is March 31st 2017 and we will make decisions on studentship allocation by April 30th 2017. Before preparing a full application we recommend that you contact us by e-mail at pg-admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk.