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
On October 10th, we were delighted to welcome back Professor Ursula Martin from the University of Oxford, to deliver the semester one distinguished lecture series in the Byre Theatre. Earlier in her career Prof Martin was professor of Computer Science here, and in fact only the second female professor in the history of the University of St Andrews.
The lectures covered numerous aspects of the history of computing. A particular highlight was to hear about Ada Lovelace’s early work, on Ada Lovelace day. As a trained mathematician and computer scientist who has studied her papers in detail, Ursula has discovered new insights about Ada’s education and work with Charles Babbage. She also focussed on aspects of computing history that are often ignored, such as history of computing in countries other than the USA or UK. Another aspect was how, even today, the contribution of women in history is often ignored, which Ursula herself has been able to correct in some cases.
The well received lectures centred around what every computer scientist should know about computer history. Professor Martin is pictured at various stages throughout the lectures and with Head of School, Prof Simon Dobson, DLS Coordinator, Prof Ian Gent and Principal and Vice-Chancellor, Prof Sally Mapstone. Read more about Professor Martin and the individual lectures in what every computer scientist should know about computer history. Recordings of each lecture can be viewed at the end of this post.
Images courtesy of Ryo Yanagida.
Lecture 1- The Early History of Computing: Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage and the early history of programming.
Lecture 2 – Case Study, Alan Turing, Grace Hopper, and the history of programming.
Lecture 3- What do historians of computing do, and why is it important for computer scientists today.
Following on from a successful visit last year, J.P. Morgan returned to the School of Computer Science last week, to promote tech careers, internships and other student opportunities.
Staff from the company and CS students are pictured viewing project challenges and their solutions highlighted in their technology showcase whilst discussing future career openings and enjoying the complimentary pizza.
J.P. Morgan is a popular destination for our graduates demonstrated by four Alumni (Maria McParland, Nada Kartouch, Conner Somerville and Peter Cockroft) who were part of the team representing the company at the successful event.
We are delighted to announced that the School of Computer Science has achieved an Athena SWAN Bronze Award, as recognition of our commitment to advancing gender equality.
Almost all teaching staff contributed to the application for the award, as well as many other staff in all categories, research students, masters students, and undergraduates. In congratulating staff, Simon Dobson as Head of School said:
It really does have all our fingerprints on it. The award reflects the fact that we’ve identified things that we wanted to change and have planned how to make them happen: from now on they’ll all just be “how things are” rather than part of an external process.
Statistical models in e.g. machine learning are traditionally expressed in some sort of flow charts. Writing sophisticated models succinctly is much easier in a fully fledged programming language. The programmer can then rely on generic inference algorithms instead of having to craft one for each model. Several such higher-order functional probabilistic programming languages exist, but their semantics, and hence correctness, are not clear. The problem is that the standard semantics of probability theory, given by measurable spaces, does not support function types. I will describe how to get around this.
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.
Postgraduate students, led by Paul Dobra, organised the first ever CS Ball in August. The celebration coincided with finishing summer dissertations and the annual poster and demo session. The school sponsored Smurfalicious Blue Ball proved very popular and sold out of tickets earlier in August. The theme was blue and the location was The old Manor Hotel, in Lundin Links. The evening comprised of champagne, dinner and a Ceilidh till midnight. Students are pictured enjoying the 3 course dinner and fully embracing the spirit of a Cèilidh. We look forward to seeing them at December Graduation.
Images courtesy of Paul Dobra, Ula Rustamova, Nick Tikhonov, and Xu Zhu.
– Main Organisers: Paul Dobra & Shyam Reyal
– Promotion (online): Yin Noe, Nouchali Reyal
– Promotion (offline): Gillian Baird, Fiona George, Midhat Un Nisa
– Material Design: Yin Noe
– Photography: Ula Rustamova and Nick Tikhonov
– Decorations: Fiona George, Midhat Un Nisa, Anke Shi, Masha Nedjalkova, Sihan Li
– Electronics / Multimedia / Drone: Xu Zhu
– Music for Disco: Blair Fyfe
