Congratulations to Ditchaphong Phoomikiattisak, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured below with supervisor Professor Saleem Bhatti, Internal examiner Professor Simon Dobson, and External examiner Dr Mahesh Marina from the University of Edinburgh.
Congratulation to our STACS community, on running another successful hack day earlier this month in conjunction with Major League Hackers The event hosted in the School looked like great fun and provides a great learning, building and socialising opportunity. Night bus tracker, CS story!, Crash alert, Game of phones, Notilife, Sports report and Bubble tree are just some of the resulting applications.
The students captured some great photos and a short video stream on their twitter account. The takeaway message appears to be that “hacking is a serious business”, but also great fun when it involves STACS. We look forward to hearing about the next event.
Images courtesy of Viktoriya Anisimova and STACS.
As the new academic year gets underway we welcome the following new PhD students to the School. Good luck guys!
Uchechukwu Awada
Awada
My name is Awada Uchechukwu, I am starting a PhD program with the Systems Research Group at the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, where I will be researching on innovative technologies that addresses the current and future data-intensive challenges. Prior to this, I was a PhD research assistant with the Network and Cloud Computing Laboratory at the School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, China. I received my MEng degree in Computer Applied Technology, from Harbin Engineering University (China) and my BSc in Computer Science from Ebonyi State University (Nigeria).
Fearn Bishop
Fearn
Fearn is interested in the creation of information visualizations. Primarily her research is looking at how children visually represent datasets, and how this knowledge can be used to aid the creation of new visualizations, perhaps also aiding in their accessibility. She also has an interest in tangibles and the physicalization of data. She has blue hair and plays more board games than are necessarily advisable.
Tom Dalton
Tom
I’m a new PhD student in the department working on Data linkage with direction from Graham and Al. My research is likely to focus on the preservation of provenance in our linkages and how we handle the associated uncertainties while still trying to produce high quality linkage solutions – obviously it’s still month one and we haven’t yet nailed down an exact research question yet, so things are liable to change slightly.My undergrad was also here in the department and so the place, and the people, isn’t all that different to me – but having an office is definitely something that I’m enjoying. I’m originally from Manchester where I spent all of my life before escaping to St Andrews.In my free time I enjoy climbing mountains, watching cycling and cricket, I’m also involved in the CU and the Free Church in town; otherwise I’ll be hidden behind my new camera or in the pub.
Michael Pitcher
Mike
I’m Mike, and I’m originally from the North Wales-Shropshire border region. I graduated from Keele University in 2010 with a dual honours degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. I then worked for 4 years as a computer programmer before coming to St. Andrews in 2014 to complete a Masters in Artificial Intelligence, after which I started my PhD. My hobbies include football, rugby and video gaming and I’m also Secretary of the University’s Real Ale Society.
For my PhD, I’m working with both the School of Computer Science and the School of Medicine, and my research is investigating the use of complex network based computer models to study diseases, in particular tuberculosis. The aim is to create realistic models of human physiology and disease dynamics within the body to aid the testing and discovery of new treatments.
Hui-Shyong Yeo
Yo
My name is Hui-Shyong Yeo, but feel free to just call me YO. I am from Malaysia which has the best food in the world.
I graduated from Multimedia University in Malaysia for my undergrad and Dongseo University in Korea for my master. Before coming to St Andrews. I worked as a researcher for one year in UVR Lab, KAIST, Korea.
I am starting my PhD in SACHI, under Prof. Aaron Quigley. I am particularly interested in exploring and developing novel interaction techniques that transcend the barrier between human and computers, especially on topics such as gestural/mid-air interaction, mobile/wearable interaction, augmented/virtual reality and text entry. For my PhD, I am likely to focus on Around Body Interaction with free-hand gestures.
I like to talk about latest research in HCI and I actually maintain a educational fan-page on Facebook for sharing interesting HCI news/papers. Please feel free to have a look.
The School hosted a local programming contest in conjunction with UKIEPC on Saturday. Students and staff are pictured tackling problem sets throughout the day. Results and contest standings can be viewed on the UKIEPC Scoreboard. Aetherstore who sponsored the 2014 event, once again offered their backing, we thank them for their continued support.
Images courtesy of Graham Kirby.
Students from all years of study took advantage of the annual Technology Career Fayre, held last Friday at Agnes Blackadder Hall. The event was followed by a networking opportunity within the School of Computer Science. Representatives from Tech companies Adobe, Skyscanner, Toshiba, Avaloq, Amazon and Bloomberg met with students throughout the busy afternoon session. Participants were photographed during the Q&A, look closely and you could spot some alumni…
Images courtesy of Alex Bain.
The School of Computer Science welcomed back three alumni to give keynote talks at our lost in translation event earlier this week. The well-attended and informative event organised by Professor Aaron Quigley, afforded current PhD students and early researchers in computer science an exclusive opportunity to hear from previous students about their transition from academia to industry.
Talks chaired by Dr Ognjen Arandelovic, highlighted the challenges and opportunities faced during their PhD journey but without doubt strengthened the concept of transferable skills provided by postgraduate study and research activities. Presentations incorporated research skills, internships, analytical ability, teamwork, the value of teaching and tutoring responsibilities, designing the CS merchandise, communication skills, the flexibility of research areas and the importance of social activities.
Breakout sessions permitted small group discussions with each of our alumni, where they conveyed different experiences of research activities in the school, and their on-going experience of working within industry and within a recent start up. We are extremely proud of our alumni and thank them for their continued contribution to scheduled events, and for being fantastic ambassadors for Computer Science at St Andrews. You can read Neil’s “moving from academia to industry” blog post for his personal journey and reflection.
Alumni Keynote Speakers:
James Smith, Google, London.
Angus Macdonald, Aetherworks, New York.
Neil Moore, Adobe, Edinburgh.
Invited Guest:
Polly Purvis, CEO of ScotlandIS.
The event was funded by SICSA, The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance.
The school recently celebrated the retirement of Teaching Fellow, Judith Malcolm who retired last month.
During nearly 20 years of teaching within in the School, she worked on many undergraduate and postgraduate modules, participated in a number of teaching initiatives and coordinated both the Evening Degree and Communication and Teaching in Science.
During her leaving presentation she conveyed how much she will miss the school community, students and staff and will remember her years here very fondly. Having requested a list of recommended books and films from staff and students, to occupy some of her spare time we can be assured our influence will endure.
Judith has not completely escaped the world of Computer Science, and will continue to contribute to our successful evening degree modules.
The School of Computer Science is proud to be supporting the 2015 Code First Girls programme, currently in its third run. Code First: Girls was originally the coding education arm of Entrepreneur First, a not-for-profit organisation which supports graduates building their own tech startups, but is now an independent organization by itself. CF: G is a social enterprise that aims to address the issue of getting more women into tech and tech entrepreneurship. This is done through two main brackets of activity:
CodeFirst:Girls Fall 2015
The feedback received about these classes has been overwhelmingly positive, and includes the following testimonial from one of its current students:
“I have found the skills I am currently learning in these sessions invaluable both to my personal development and future employability. The course provides me with an exciting challenge, and at the end of every task successfully completed I feel empowered as an individual: women shouldn’t feel like outsiders looking in on an all-boys club when it comes to technology, and I’m very proud to be able to partake of a movement which seeks to level that playing field.”
St Andrews has consistently run as one of CF:G’s most active and successful courses; we’re running our beginners course (which covers basic front-end web development in HTML and CSS) for the third time now and are looking to run it again next semester alongside our first advanced course – building on the beginner’s curriculum with the introduction of Python to build more powerful back-end elements. Within the tech industry, women are often at a disadvantage due to a lack of technical knowledge; Code First: Girls exists precisely to address this educational disparity, and this is why the School is keen to see students from all disciplines and years of study participate in these informative, friendly and interactive sessions.
CodeFirst:Girls 2015
CodeFirst:Girls 2014
Text and images courtesy of Mary Dodd, Mary Chan, Shyam Reyal, Adeola Fabola and Vinodh Sampath.
The virtual reconstruction of St Kilda developed by the Open Virtual Worlds Group, has reached the finals of Scottish Gaelic Awards in the category Gaelic as an Economic Asset. The awards highlight aspects of Gaelic culture, education and language showcasing excellent work undertaken to maintain cultural heritage. The event taking place in November will embrace a variety of traditional and virtual entertainments.The Awards will be presented at a high-quality dinner in St Andrew’s in the Square, Glasgow on November 18th. Good luck to all involved in the virtual reconstruction and museum installation.
![1526424_787674084578553_330837344778465729_n[1]](http://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/csblog/files/2015/10/1526424_787674084578553_330837344778465729_n1.jpg)
The first of this academic year’s distinguished lectures will be given by Professor Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, on Monday 16th November 2015 at The Byre Theatre.
Abstract:
To build a scalable system the important thing is to make small isolated independent units. To scale up we just add more units. To build a fault-tolerant system the important thing to do is make small isolated independent units…. Does that sound familiar? Haven’t I seen that somewhere before? Oh yes, in the first paragraph! So maybe scalability and fault tolerance are really different names for the same thing.
This property of systems, namely that fault-tolerant systems were also scalable, was noticed years ago, notably in the design of the Tandem computer system. The Tandem was design for fault tolerance but rapidly became a leading supplier of scalable computer platforms. Thus it was with Erlang.
Erlang followed a lot of the Tandem design, it was built for fault-tolerance but some of the most successful applications (such as WhatsApp) use it for its scalability.
In this lecture I’ll talk about the intimate relationship between scalability and fault-tolerance and why they are architecturally the same thing.
I’ll talk about the design of Erlang and why scalable systems have to be built on non-shared memory abstractions.
Bio:
Joe Armstrong has been programming since 1967. He invented the programming language Erlang. He has worked as a programmer, founded a few successful companies and written a few books. He has a PHD in Computer Science from KTH. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
