Congratulations to the Masters Class of 2017, and MPhil student Yunjia Wang, who graduated last week. Each year, students are invited to a reception in Computer Science, to celebrate their achievement and reflect on their time in the School.
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.
We invite our graduating students and their relatives to join us next Thursday, between 12 and 3.30 in the Jack Cole coffee area, for a glass of fizz to celebrate graduation. We look forward to seeing you soon.
Alumni Paul Dobra will host a short session about Salesforce graduate opportunities on Friday the 8th December, at 11am in Jack Cole 1.33. Target audience MSc, MSci and Honours students.
The School will celebrate more student successes and accomplishments next week, when our recent MSc and PhD students graduate. We look forward to toasting their success at our graduation reception in the School of Computer Science, next Thursday afternoon, between 12 and 3.30. Over the years graduation has involved cakes, fizz, laughter, changeable weather and lots of reminiscing as pictured below. For family and friends who can’t make it to graduation ceremonies, the University broadcasts each graduation ceremony live.
Summer and Winter Graduations 2010 – 2014
Celebrations, Kilts and Graduation 2010- 2014
Abstract:
Searching for complex objects (e.g. images, faces, audio or video), is an everyday problem in computer science, motivated by many applications. Efficient algorithms are demanded for reverse searching, also known as query by content, in large repositories. Current industrial solutions are ad hoc, domain-dependant, hardware intensive and have limited scaling. However, those disparate domains can be modelled, for indexing and searching, as a metric space. This model has been championed to become a solution to generic proximity searching problems. In practice, however, the metric space approach has been limited by the amount of main memory available.
In this talk we will explore the main ideas behind this technology, present a successful example in audio indexing and retrieval. The application scales well for large amounts of audio because the representation is quite compact and the full audio streams are not needed for indexing and searching.
Speaker Bio:
Edgar Chavez received his Phd from the Center for Mathematical Research in Guanajuato, Mexico in 1999. He founded the information retrieval group at Universidad Michoacana where he worked until 2012. After a brief period in the Institute of Mathematics in UNAM, he joined the computer science department in CICESE in 2013, where he founded the data science group. His main research interest include access and retrieval of data and data representation, such as fingerprints and point clouds. In 2009 he obtained the Thompson-Reuters award for having the most cited paper in computer science in Mexico and Latin America. In 2008 he co-funded, with Gonzalo Navarro, the conference Similarity Search and Applications, which is an international reference in the area. He has published more than 100 scientific contributions, with about 3500 citations in google scholar.
Congratulations to David Castro, who successfully defended his thesis today. David’s thesis was supervised by Professor Kevin Hammond. He is pictured with Internal examiner, Dr Edwin Brady and external examiner Professor Graham Hutton, from the University of Nottingham.
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.
November 2002, and plans were unveiled in the university news, for a new computer science building. Stages of the build were photographed for posterity.
Fast forward to March 2005, and the Jack Cole building was officially opened by the then First Minister, Jack McConnell. The building was named after the founder of Computer Science at St Andrews, Professor Alfred Jack Cole.
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)
Image courtesy of Ula Rustamova
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
