School of Computer Science

Cuboid Aquarium Repopulation

It’s a little busier in the fish tank this week. 20+ new fish have joined the established Cichlid and Catfish population.

CS1006 AI Competition

The annual CS1006 challenge took place yesterday in the subhonours lab. Students had been designing AIs to play John Nash’s game, Hex, this year.

Congratulations to the competition winners –

Team – “Vanilla Dynamite’s Nuclear Computer Posse”

Students – Chris Lamb, Maria McParland and Robin Nabel.

An abundance of healthy foodstuff and some rather unique team names reflect the ingenuity and creativity of our first year students.

It’s always a fun session to end semester 2.

Graduates Return to Computer Science

Three of our alumni Andrew McCarthy, Adam Copp and James Smith, dropped by to say hello last week. They were visiting the University to represent Google at the Tech Talk by Google engineers held in the University Gateway Building.

Many will remember Adam, now a software engineer working at Google in London, as the IT and Computer Science Undergraduate of the Year in 2011. The award, sponsored by BT, was launched to find Britain’s most promising IT student securing him a summer placement at BT’s Research and Development site and a week at a BT European office.

It’s always fantastic to see our alumni and we wish them continued success at Google.

Comp Sci alumni

Alumni from left: Andrew, James and Adam

MIT Technology Review – Jakub Dostal

MIT Technology Review has written a comprehensive article about Jakub Dostal’s Diff Displays that track visual changes on unattended displays. Jakub presented the work two weeks ago at the 18th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces in Santa Monica, California, USA. The Diff Displays project is part of Jakub’s PhD thesis on proximity-aware user interfaces. His PhD is supervised by Prof. Aaron Quigley and Dr Per Ola Kristensson.

School Seminar: Neil Moore

Neil Moore obtained his PhD in Computer Science at St Andrews a couple of years ago, and is now working for Abobe.

He’ll be giving a technical talk, and describing internship opportunities at Adobe.

Title: Mutualism in software development

Abstract:
Computers are designed to be extensible at different levels: hardware can run different operating systems and operating systems are designed to expose functionality to allow third parties to write applications. It is easy to overlook extensibility at the level of application software: functionality can be added to or extracted from existing applications by third parties with no access to the source. For example: plugins, scripting environments, APIs, web services, etc.

I will talk about ways that this can benefit both the application publisher as well as third parties. I will also give practical information and examples of how this can be achieved based on my experience in working in this area for Adobe, who are heavily invested in extensibility in their products.

Event details

  • When: 1st April 2013 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Seminar

PhD Studentships – Sponsored by Time Warner Cable and Adobe

The School of Computer Science has secured support from two major companies, Time Warner Cable and Adobe, and is able to offer two fully funded PhD studentships in exciting areas of research with important applications. Both studentships are fully funded for EU applicants (covering fees, and a stipend of at least £13.5K p/a) for up to 42 months, the expected duration of the PhD. Non EU applicants may apply but may be liable for an additional approximately £11K p/a in fees.

Applicants should normally have (or expect to obtain this academic year) a 2:1 or (preferably) first class Honours Bachelors degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related topic, or a MSc (distinction preferred) in one of these subjects.

The two research topics available are:

Continue reading

PPSP in Computer Science

PPSP in Computer Science – What’s been happening in the School of Computer Science? Posters, Prizes, Scholarships and Plants of course.

Posters & Prizes
PhD students Anne-Marie, Ditchaphong and Ildiko are pictured shortly after receiving 1st, 2nd and 3rd place respectively in the annual poster session. They received Amazon vouchers as a reward.

Poster Titles and Supervisors

Anne-Marie Mann – Turning a pen into a HAT (handwriting assisting technology) Investigating the effectiveness of a digital pen to improve handwriting skills. Supervisor Aaron Quigley.

Ditchaphong Phoomikiattisak – An alternative Approach to IP Mobility. Supervisor Saleem Bhatti.

Ildiko Pete – An Incremental Software Development Framework for Maintaining Artefact Consistency. Supervised by Dharini Balasubramaniam.

Scholarships
Representatives from Adobe were in the school to award two new scholarships for Computer Science students at St Andrews. Applicants were asked to write an essay on the subject “What excites you about Computer Science?” Nathan Blades and Carson Leonard, both first year CS students, were this years recipients.

Plants
David and Ruth break new ground, planting an apple tree, in the Comp Sci garden. Security is currently two gnomes who should be approached with caution.

Talk by Dr Jost Berthold Thursday 14th March

Thursday 14th March, the regular meeting of the Functional Programming group will give the floor to our guest Dr. Jost Berthold for a public talk called “High-Level Parallel Computing in Finance — Haskell Case Studies within HIPERFIT –” .

The presentation will take place from 12.00 to 13.00, in the Jack Cole building, room 1.04 (upstairs), and everyone is welcome.

If you intend to come to the talk, it would be helpful (but is not essential) to drop me (fs39) a one-line email beforehand, to be sure that the reserved room has a suitable size.

Abstract: Continue reading

Event details

  • When: 14th March 2013 12:00 - 13:00
  • Where: Cole Bldg
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

PhD Interviews at St Andrews in CS

We have had an outstanding pool of applicants for our 600th Anniversary Scholarships to do a PhD in Computer Science.  This means that in the coming weeks we will be conducting many interviews with potential PhD students.  If you are one of those, or if you are just interested in what our interviews are like, I thought it would be a good idea to tell you what our PhD interviews are like.   I’m going to assume that “you” is somebody being interviewed for a PhD place, just to make writing the rest of this post easier.

What Our PhD Intervews Are

I’ve been doing the job of academic responsible for PhD admissions for about 3 years, and in that time I think we’ve admitted one student without an interview. Continue reading