The School participated in the Great Scottish Swim on Saturday, the CS team comprising Percy Perez, David Symons, Julie Dunsire, Alex Voss and Ruth Letham were swimming for Médecins Sans Frontières. All team members completed the swim in under an hour. Before and after pictures were captured by Katja who travelled along to support the team.
Congratulations to all. Their target is £1k and they’re 97% there. You can still donate via https://www.justgiving.com/uoscompsci/.
Congratulations to Chonlatee Khorakhun, who successfully defended her thesis today. She is pictured below with supervisor Professor Saleem Bhatti, Internal examiner Dr Juliana Bowles and External examiner Dr Cathryn Peoples from University of Ulster.
In September 2014 a diverse group of students commenced their studies on our MSc portfolio. Some are pictured below at our annual welcome reception.
Postgraduate welcome reception 2014
Fast forward to August 2015 and after a year of hard work, and an intensive summer dissertation project, they submitted their dissertation. Today they presented their posters and demonstrated project artefacts.
The eventful poster session provided the perfect occasion for students to meet with second markers, reflect upon their MSc journey and appreciate the projects completed by their peers.
Congratulations to Milena Marzluff, who will receive the coveted amazon voucher for best poster.
We wish them all, every success with future plans, and look forward to seeing them again at November graduation.
The results of the 2015 National Student Survey (NSS) were released this week and 100% of our students reported themselves “satisfied” with 93% responding that they were “very satisfied” with their course.
The School was also rated highly in a number of other categories including “Staff are good at explaining things”, “Feedback on my work has helped me to clarify things i didn’t understand”, “The course has helped me present myself with confidence” and “As a result of the course I feel confident in tackling unfamiliar problems”.
The NSS collects satisfaction levels from undergraduate students in the UK, via a survey. The survey is sent to all students in the UK a few months before they graduate and gets a very high return rate.
We are delighted that our recent graduates (pictured below) feel so positive about their student experience and wish them every success with future endeavours.
Computer Science: Senior Honours 2015
The IVF-predict application has been designed based on years of academic research carried out by top medical and academic laureates. Using data from more than 144,000 IVF cycles a mathematical model has been developed that allows couples to have the most accurate prediction of their chance of a live birth with IVF.
In conjunction with Dr Tom Kelsey here in the school of Computer Science, the complex formula has been transformed into a smartphone application based, calculator presented in just 9 simple steps.
The personalised, accurate and validated app has been designed to give couples the most accurate value (in %) which represents the rate of a successful outcome if they decide to undergo the IVF process. No other model predicts your chance of success with IVF taking into account your personal medical history. In addition, the application does not transmit any data outside of the device (see Privacy Policy), any data generated or calculations is stored on your device.
The research underpinning IVF-predict has now been published in the highly prestigious medical journal PLOS Medicine and is available for free download.
Find out more about IVF-Predict on the dedicated website, download the app for android or iOS and watch a short demonstration video on youtube.
On August 29th the School will be participating in the Great Scottish Swim, the team comprising Percy Perez, David Symons, Julie Dunsire, Alex Voss and Ruth Letham are swimming for Médecins Sans Frontières, an independent humanitarian charity that is committed to providing medical aid where it is most needed.
The team have been training hard in various pools around Fife in preparation for the swim challenge taking place in Loch Lomond. We also have photographic evidence of some team members road-testing their wetsuits at the East Sands.
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Their target is £1k, visit the JustGiving page and reward all their hard work while supporting a great charity.
Congratulations to Dr Ward Jaradat, who successfully defended his PhD thesis last week. He was supervised by Dr Adam Barker. Prof. Omer Rana from Cardiff University and Dr Stuart Purdie acted as External and Internal Examiner respectively.
A PhD studentship on “Reasoning about Racy Programs under Relaxed Consistency” is available in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, funded by Microsoft Research and EPSRC.
The project will involve developing reasoning principles and tools for relaxed memory consistency settings. This is a key problem in shared-memory concurrency at the low-level, whether in C or C++, or even higher-level languages such as Java.
There has been lots of work done on proving shared-memory concurrent programs correct, by the use of very sophisticated program logics such as Concurrent Separation Logic and RGsep. However, shared-memory concurrent programs actually do not satisfy a key building block of such logics, an assumption that memory is sequentially consistent. Instead, when programming at the low-level in C or C++, or even in relatively higher-level languages such as Java, programmers have to deal with relaxed memory consistency. How and whether sophisticated program logics can scale up to this setting is the open research question we seek to address. Furthermore, efficient concurrent code often have intentional races, making the problem harder (and rendering the standard prescription of data-race-freedom ineffective). If we can develop such a logic, we can build tools that can automatically analyse code and make them safe, efficient, and correct by suggesting appropriate fences or other mechanisms. With multiprocessors everywhere from personal mobile devices to servers, this is an important problem with a potential of high impact, both in theory and in practice.
The project will be supervised by Dr Susmit Sarkar at the University of St Andrews. Dr Jade Alglave of Microsoft Research Cambridge will be the Microsoft supervisor. During the course of their PhD, Scholars are invited to Microsoft Research in Cambridge for an annual Summer School, and there is also a possibility of paid internships during studies. The studentship is fully funded to pay fees and stipend for students with a relevant connection to the UK.
Applicants are expected to have or expect to obtain a UK first-class Honours or Masters degree (or its equivalent from non-UK institutions) in Computer Science, but the minimum standard we require is an upper second-class Honours degree or equivalent. Some experience in concurrent and/or functional programming and an aptitude for mathematical subjects are required. Knowledge and experience of one or more of formal verification, mechanised proofs, and programming languages is highly desirable.
For further information on how to apply, see our postgraduate web pages. Ideally the student will start in October 2015, or as soon as possible thereafter. Further details on the project and suggested reading is available from Dr Susmit Sarkar.
Welcome to Mr Nicol Thomson who joined us recently as a technician. Nicol has been working in the school casually since 2014 on a number of Lab Designs, technical support and the development of the Laddie unit you can see below. Stuart our head of systems said, “Nicol is an excellent addition to the school’s technical team and I am sure that his experience and knowledge will prove a great asset“.
We all welcome Nicol and wish him well in his new role.
Dr Vint Cerf with staff and new CS PhD graduates
On July 24th, Dr Vinton Cerf was awarded the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, by the University of St Andrews. Dr. Vint Cerf, a founding father of the Internet, graduated alongside our new PhD and Honours graduates. In his Laureation address, Professor Saleem Bhatti highlighted to the audience that, “The internet is mankind’s largest and most complex creation. It spans national boundaries and puts global communication at the fingertips of the world’s citizens. It is, in today’s world, difficult to imagine life without the information and many services that are available to us all through the internet. However, it is an invention of our time.”
This graduation ceremony was a memorable day for both staff and students and presented each person the opportunity to reflect on their own research experiences here in the University of St Andrews. Reflecting on our “Internet @ 100” symposium earlier in the week, Professor Bhatti concluded by noting that, “Easy and accessible internet communication is also seen as an empowering service for the citizens of the world“.
We wish all of our new graduates, all the best for the future.
Dr Vint Cerf with staff and new CS PhD and Honours graduates
