Congratulations to Adam Barwell, who successfully defended his thesis yesterday. Adam’s thesis was supervised by Professor Kevin Hammond. He is pictured with second supervisor Dr Christopher Brown, Internal examiner Dr Susmit Sarkar and external examiner Professor Susan Eisenbach from Imperial College, London.
PhD
Computer Science Student Representatives 2017
Congratulations to our student representatives for 2017/8, elected by their peers last month. Our Reps are integral to the proactive communication channel between staff and the students and also chair and run the Staff-Student Consultative Committee (SSCC) held each semester within the School.

The reps are pictured outside the Jack Cole Building, after this semester’s SSCC meeting and are (from left to right)
- Lewis Mazzei (1st year, minutes)
- Beatrice Olivera (1st year, minutes)
- Jamie Bell (2nd year, careers)
- Gergely Flamich (School President)
- Arnold Haidu (MSc, library)
- Stacey Izmaylova (3rd year, social)
- Xu Zhu (PhD, Postgrad)
- Keno Schwalb (4th year)
- Paul McKay (Evening)
Image courtesy of Ula Rustamova
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.
PhD viva success: Martin McCaffery
Congratulations to Martin McCaffery, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured with supervisor Dr Mark-Jan Nederhof, Internal examiner Dr Graham Kirby and external examiner Dr Maja Popović from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
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.
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.














