Research

Honourable mentions for two ACM research papers

Per Ola Kristensson has two recent papers published in top ACM conferences that have received honourable mentions:

Best student poster award at IWSOS

Congratulations to Lei Fang, one of our SICSA postgrads, on winning the best student poster award at the recent International Workshop on Self-Organising Systems (IWSOS) in Delft NL.

The poster (PDF), entitled “Towards self-management in WSNs by exploiting a spatio-temporal model”, presents early work on using statistical methods to find and exploit correlations between the observations made by nodes in a wireless sensor network. The aim is to use these correlations to detect errors, improve calibration and reduce data traffic.

Crowdsourcing research featured in the New Scientist

The latest issue of the New Scientist magazine writes about Per Ola Kristensson‘s work on using crowdsourcing and online web sources to create better statistical language models for AAC devices: Crowdsourcing improves predictive texting.

The research paper was published in the Association for Computational Linguistics’  2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. It is published using the open access model and can be read  here. The language models are publicly released and can be found here.

Special software to trawl thousands of historic archives to uncover Empire trade boom

Professor Aaron Quigley’s research on exploratory visualisation allows historians to trace the flow of a wide range of natural resources around the globe.
By working with world experts in text mining within the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance and domain experts in York University, Canada, we can bridge the research divide and answer historical questions on trading

Full news article

Alan Frisch Seminar Video

From October to December 2011, the School of Computer Science hosted Dr Alan Frisch from the University of York as a SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow. While here, Dr Frisch kindly agreed to give a seminar entitled “Decade of Progress in Constraint Modelling & Reformulation: The Quest for Abstraction and Automation”, the video of which can now be found here.

During his Fellowship Dr Frisch also visited, and spoke at, the universities of Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Event details

  • When: 3rd October 2011 - 22nd December 2011
  • Format: Seminar

PhD Research featured in Poster Session

Last week we had a very successful poster session for PhD students to feature their research in the School of Computer Science.  As previously blogged, three prizes were awarded by Professor Emeritus and former head of School, Ron Morrison.

Many of the posters featured at this session, including all the prizewinners, are now available for everyone to look at.

Competition entrants included:

Many thanks to all the students for their hard work in creating such interesting posters, and to Ron for his very careful prizegiving.

Funded Research Studentships

The School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews has funding for students to undertake PhD research in any of the general research areas in the school:

http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/research

We are looking for highly motivated research students with an interest in these exciting research areas. Our only requirements are that the proposed research would be good, we have staff to supervise it, and that you would be good at doing it. We have up to 6 funded studentships available for students interested in working towards a PhD. The studentships offer costs of fees and an annual tax-free maintenance stipend of about £13,590 per year for 3.5 years. Exceptionally well qualified and able students may be awarded an enhanced stipend of an additional £2,000 per year. Students should normally have or expect at least an upper-2nd class Honours degree or Masters degree in Computer Science or a related discipline.

For further information on how to apply, see our postgraduate web pages. The closing date for applications is March 1st 2012 and we will make decisions on studentship allocation by May 1st 2012. (Applications after March 1st may be considered, at our discretion.) Informal enquiries can be directed to pg-admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk or to potential supervisors.