Computer Science: June Graduation 2017

Congratulations to our Senior Honours Class of 2017, MSci Honours students and our PhD students Dr Anne-Marie Mann, Dr Ildiko Pete, Dr Yuchen Zhao and Dr Michael Mauderer, who graduated on Wednesday. Students were invited to a reception in the School prior to the ceremony, to celebrate their achievement with staff, friends and family. We echo the sentiments expressed by our Head of School, Professor Steve Linton, during his Graduation address.

“For what you have achieved here, we are so proud of you. For what you will achieve, we wait eagerly and will always be proud. And wherever you are, we hope you will always regard St Andrews as a place you can call home.”

Our graduates will indeed 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.

Images courtesy of Annemarie Paton and Ryo Yanagida.

Best Final Year Student at Lovelace 2017

We are delighted to congratulate Iveta Dulova, who attended the 10th BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium, and walked away with the prize for “Best Final Year Student”. Iveta’s poster, titled “SensorCube: An end-to-end framework for conducting research via mobile sensing“, was based on her final year project supervised by Dr Juan Ye.

The event was held at Aberystwyth University on April 12, 2017. Also attending from St Andrews were Chloe Collins, competing in the second year category with the poster “Pedal to the metal – the role of technology in transportation” and Laura Brewis with her poster “What percentage of solitaire games are actually winnable?”.

It showed great commitment for these three students to undertake the lengthy trip at a busy time of semester. Like St Andrews, Aberystwyth, is a beautiful small seaside town with an excellent Computer Science department. Iveta took a couple of photos showing off the beach and the campus.

Workshop on Considering Technology through a Philosophical Lens

Technology fundamentally shapes our communication, relationships, and access to information. It also evolves through our interaction with it. Dialoguing across disciplines can facilitate an understanding of these complex and reciprocal relationships and fuel reflection and innovation.

This hands-on, participant-driven and experimental workshop will start a discussion of what can come from considering technology through a philosophical lens. Through discussions and hands-on design activities, it will provide an introduction to and reflection on questions at the intersection of computer science and philosophy, such as:

How have philosophy and technology shaped each other in the past?
How can philosophical ideas and methods guide research in Computer Science?
How can thinking through technology help Humanities researchers discover relevance and articulate impact in their research?

Engaging these questions can provide participants an entry-point into exploring these themes in the context of their own research.

This workshop is aimed at researchers from computer science who are curious about philosophy and how to leverage it to inform technically oriented research questions and designing for innovation. It is also aimed at researchers in the arts & humanities, social sciences, and philosophy who are curious about current research questions and approaches in computer science and how questions of technology can stimulate philosophical thought and research.

Attending the workshop is free but please register by emailing Nick Daly: nd40[at]st-andrews.ac.uk

Organisers: Nick Daly (School of Modern Languages) and Uta Hinrichs (School of Computer Science)

Event details

When: 18th May 2017 10:00 - 13:00
Where: Cole 1.33a
Format: Workshop

Junior Honours: Software Team Project 2017

Earlier today our Junior Honours students presented their Team Projects. The projects involve substantial team based software engineering and rely heavily on collaborative development. There are many aspects of software and professional development along with considerable inter-team and intra-team collaborations. This year the students were asked to develop a version of the Settlers of Catan with AI players. They were further asked to make their games interoperate so one teams AI or human player might play on another teams game and board.

The teams demonstrated lots of creativity with the use of software tools, approaches to AI, use of domain specific languages, remote services, games environments, graphics development, collaborative frameworks and many tools for software engineering project development. Thanks to all the students, supervisors and coordinators for their hard work this year.

We wish all our junior honours students success with their forthcoming exams and we look forward to seeing them again for their senior honours year in September.

Images and text courtesy of Professor Aaron Quigley

Senior Honours: Poster Presentation and Demo Session 2017

Our talented hard working SH students from CS4099: Major Software Project and CS4098: Minor Software Project presented their posters and final year software artifact to staff and students earlier this week.

As Illustrated in the above collage, the busy poster session is the perfect opportunity to discuss output from their year long project with markers, and provides time to share research ideas and reflect on the experience with their peer group. We wish them success with forthcoming exams and look forward to seeing them during June graduation celebrations.

Success in the Laidlaw Undergraduate Internship Programme in Research and Leadership

Congratulations to Patrick Schrempf and Billy Brown who have been successful in their applications for a Laidlaw Undergraduate Internship in Research and Leadership for 2017. You can read further details about Billy and Patrick below.

Billy Brown:

I’m a fourth year Computer Science student from Belgium with too much interest for the subject. I play and referee korfball for the university, and I am fascinated by Old English and Norse history and mythology. I plan on using the Laidlaw Internship programme to get into the field of Computer Science research.

Project summary:

The Essence Domain Inference project aims to improve automated decision making by optimising the understanding of the statements used to define a problem specification. As part of the compilation of the high level Essence specification language, this project would tighten the domains to which a specified problem applies, with a domain inference algorithm.

The work is very much in the context of the recently-announced EPSRC grant working on automated constraint modelling in an attempt to advance the state of the art in solving complex combinatorial search problems. The modelling pipeline is akin to a compiler in that we refine a specification in the Essence language Billy mentions down to a number of powerful solving formalisms. The work Billy plan is to improve the refinement process and therefore the performance of the solvers, leading to higher quality solutions more quickly.

Patrick Schrempf:
I am currently a third year Computer Science student from Vienna. After enjoying doing research with the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction (SACHI) group last year, I am looking forward to the Laidlaw Internship Programme. Apart from research and studying, I enjoy training and competing with the Triathlon Club and the Pool Society.
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Computer Science Student Reps 2016

We are delighted to congratulate the student representatives for 2016/7, elected by their peers. Reps play a very important part in the life of the school by providing a healthy communication channel between staff and the students they represent, and also by chairing and running the Staff-Student Consultative Committee, amongst many other roles.

The reps are shown outside the Jack Cole Building in November 2016, and are (from left to right)

Juris Bogusevs (1st year)
Seamus Bonner (1st year, library)
Keno Schwalb (3rd year, careers)
Christa-Awa Kollen (welfare)
Vika Anisimova (4th year)
Anastasiia Izmailova (2nd year, social)
Masha Nedjalkova (masters, careers, minutes)
Fearn Bishop (postgraduate research)
Robin Nabel (school president)

Many thanks to the reps for arranging this photo (taken by Alex Bain who can be seen in the reflection), which should help staff and students put faces to the names.

Thanks to everyone who volunteered to be a student rep.

Royal Television Society Bursary: Henry Hargreaves

Congratulations to Henry, one of our second year students, who secured a Royal Television Society bursary. The bursary scheme is supported by a cross industry panel with senior representatives from Arqiva, BBC, BT, Channel 4, Fujitsu, Ericsson, Institute of Engineering Technology, ITV, Sky and Youview.

The new venture for the Royal Television Society, is intended to start to address a skills gap and attract some talented young people on top computer science or engineering courses to consider the option of a career in the broadcast industry. Further details of the scheme can be found here: https://rts.org.uk/education-training/technology-bursaries

Bursary recipients attend a two-week summer tour of the industry, spending a day in each of the 10 companies backing the scheme. A financial award per year for the three years of the bursary, membership of the Royal Television Society and mentoring or placements in their final year of study.

As an R.T.S Bursary recipient, Henry explained that he has not only benefited financially; helping towards my course at St Andrews but it has introduced him to career opportunities within the TV industry.

“I have gained a useful insight by participating in a range of activities organised by the RTS. These have really opened my eyes to how Computer Science plays a vital role in broadcasting, which I was previously, unaware of.”

Computer Science hosts Hack the Bubble

Earlier this month the School hosted hack the Bubble, a 12-hour hackathon organized by STACS, the St Andrews Computing Society and sponsored by J.P. Morgan. Hackathons are great events for teams of students to build projects from scratch and compete for awesome prizes.

The main aim of this event was to show our first and second year students what a hackathon is in a more accessible 12-hour format instead of the traditional 24 or 48 hour ones. The event was a great success with 70 students participating and 15 teams presenting their projects at the end.

This event wouldn’t have been possible without the help of the School of Computer Science for providing the venue, and sponsors J.P. Morgan for the food and prizes.

Hack the Bubble October 2016

Images and text courtesy of STACS.

Google@Computer Science in St Andrews

The School hosted another successful Google event on Wednesday. Students heard first hand, from four of our talented alumni, and had an opportunity to chat with current students who have completed internships. The well-received and very well attended session also covered mock interviews and rewarded students with the customary pizza.

Computer Science Blog