Congratulations to Bilal Hussain, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured below with supervisor Professor Ian Miguel, Internal examiner Professor Simon Dobson and external examiner Dr Peter Gregory, from Teesside University.
PhD
Computer Science Student Reps 2016
We are delighted to congratulate the student representatives for 2016/7, elected by their peers. Reps play a very important part in the life of the school by providing a healthy communication channel between staff and the students they represent, and also by chairing and running the Staff-Student Consultative Committee, amongst many other roles.
The reps are shown outside the Jack Cole Building in November 2016, and are (from left to right)
- Juris Bogusevs (1st year)
- Seamus Bonner (1st year, library)
- Keno Schwalb (3rd year, careers)
- Christa-Awa Kollen (welfare)
- Vika Anisimova (4th year)
- Anastasiia Izmailova (2nd year, social)
- Masha Nedjalkova (masters, careers, minutes)
- Fearn Bishop (postgraduate research)
- Robin Nabel (school president)
Many thanks to the reps for arranging this photo (taken by Alex Bain who can be seen in the reflection), which should help staff and students put faces to the names.
Thanks to everyone who volunteered to be a student rep.
PhD Viva success: Oche Ejembi
Congratulations to Oche Ejembi who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured below with supervisor Professor Saleem Bhatti, internal examiner Dr Tom Kelsey and external examiner Dr Marwan Fayed from Stirling University.
Welcome to new 2016 PhD Students
The School is very happy to welcome its new group of PhD students who have started in 2016. Shown outside the Jack Cole Building on 13 October 2016 are:
(Back row, left to right) Fahrurrozi Rahman; Xue Guo; Teng Yu; Yanbei Chen; Guilherme Soares Carneiro; Yasir Alguwaifli; and Xu Zhu.
(Front row, left to right) Mun See Chang; Zahida Almuallem; Esme Benssassi; Sidi Zhan; and the Director of Postgraduate Research, Miguel Nacenta.
Absent from the photo are Dawand Sulaiman and Saad Attieh.
PhD Viva Success: Michael Mauderer
Belated congratulations to Michael Mauderer, who successfully defended his thesis earlier this month. Micheal’s thesis, augmenting visual perception with gaze-contigent displays, was supervised by Dr Miguel Nacenta. Professor Aaron Quigley acted as internal examiner and Professor Hans Gellersen, from Lancaster University acted as external examiner.
Welcome to new PhD students
We are delighted to introduce three female PhD students funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council.
Xue Guo (JC1.06)
“I am Xue Guo, a returning student from Beijing. My PhD research into Complex Networks is supervised by Prof. Simon Dobson. Last seven years, I hopped over five places: four undergraduate years in BUPT and UCSD, one master year in St Andrews, and two gap years – one in Phoenix TV as a technology journalist, and one in Skyscanner as a software engineer. A three-to-four-year research in one town seems quite a LONG journey for me, but I am sure it will NOT be a LONGLY one in this warm academic community of School of Computer Science. My current research interest is modelling real world phenomena using complex networks, esp. smart city design. Born in Beijing, a city with a population of over 20 million, I have experienced most urban problems that a metropolis can suffer from. I would like to design a research tool for the city designers to generate solutions to traffic congestion and give advice on city infrastructure distribution. I am looking forward to learning from you and exploring more applications of complex networks. In my free time, I enjoy fencing, snowboarding, calligraphy and music.”
Yanbei Chen (JC1.19)
“From 2011 to 2014, I was studying in Zhejiang University in China, with a speciality in Automation. In 2014, I started my master program in KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, with a major in System, Control and Robotics. In the summer of 2015, I enrolled in Tohoku University Engineering Summer Program in Japan. In the first half of 2016, I conducted my master thesis in the field of machine learning, deep learning and multimodal learning under the supervision of Dr. Atsuto Maki in Computer Vision and Active Perception Lab in KTH.Currently, with the scholarship from China Scholarship Council and University of St Andrews, I will start my PhD study under the supervision of Dr. Juan Ye. My research interests lie in the fields of activity recognition, machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. From now on, my research will focus on activity recognition based on sensor data from smartphone. In my leisure time, I enjoy music, travel, reading, and jogging.”
Sidi Zhan (JC1.11)
“Hi, I am Sidi Zhan! I completed my BEng in Computer Science at Beijing Foreign Studies University, focusing on recommending doctors to patients in online healthcare QA community. I am now working as a PhD student in Computer Science under the supervision of Dr. Tristan Henderson and Dr. Juan Ye. My proposed research is to enhance peers mutual help and promote their social support in online healthcare community by using recommender to match-make the patient users. My research project will include collecting and analyzing users’ profiles and records data, so policies on user privacy protection will also be examined. I enjoy studying and living in St Andrews, the beautiful coastal city, very much. I am so willing to combine my hobbies with the life here by experiencing local culture, like jogging along the East Sands, singing in a chorus and going Ceilidh dances.”
PhD Viva Success: Vinodh Rajan Sampath
Congratulations to Vinodh Rajan Sampath, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured below with supervisor Dr Mark-Jan Nederhof, research student Juan Mendoza Santana and internal examiner Dr Tom Kelsey. Dr Peter Stokes from King’s College London, acted as external examiner.
Computer Science: June Graduation Reception 2016
Congratulations to our Senior Honours Class of 2016, and our PhD students Dr Jan de Muijnck-Hughes, Dr Christopher Davies, Dr Jakub Dostal, Dr Marc Werfs, Dr Ditchaphong Phoomikiattisak, Dr Bruce Simpson and Dr Ward Jaradat who graduated yesterday. Students were invited to a reception in the school to celebrate their achievement with staff, friends and family.
Saad Attieh, one of our talented SH students was awarded this year’s Principal’s Medal, which recognises exceptional endeavour and achievement during a student’s time at St Andrews. Read more about the medal and his journey in the University News.
Our graduates 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.
SACHI presence at CHI 2016
The SACHI group were well represented at CHI 2016 held in San Jose, California. The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction, and an exciting venue to discover, discuss and learn about the future of how people interact with technology.
SACHI presented five full papers, one note and a workshop paper, ran a successful workshop on Proxemic Mobile Collocated Interactions and designed many of the vibrant SIGCHI banners on display throughout the conference.
Well done to all concerned. SACHI group activities, conference keynote and plenary sessions are pictured below. CHI 2017 will be held in Denver, Colorado next year with a September deadline for papers and notes.
Images courtesy of Aaron Quigley
Teaching Rewards: Shyam Reyal
Congratulations to Shyam who featured as Instructor of the month with CodeFirst Girls and was nominated for a teaching award by undergraduate computer science students. Shyam has been busy working on first level modules this semester and his passion for Computer Science, friendly approachable personality and all his hard work, has been duly rewarded.
