Undergraduate

A highly commended project

Congratulations to our recent graduate Aleksejs Sazonovs, who’s won a Highly Commended place at this year’s Undergraduate Awards.

The Undergraduate Awards are an international and cross-disciplinary prize that aims to recognise highly creative individuals at undergraduate level. Typically this is demonstrated through excellent project work, and Aleks’ project on “A metapopulation model for predicting the success of genetic control measures for malaria” was ranked in the top 10% of submissions in the computer science category.

Aleks’ project used techniques from network science to explore what happens when mosquitoes modified to be unable to carry the malaria parasite are introduced into a wild population. Experiments like these are an essential precursor to any actual field trials. Together with supervisors from the School of Computer Science (Prof Simon Dobson) and School of Biology (Prof Oscar Gaggiotti), Aleks simulated malarial outbreaks involving different mosquito populations. He used a real geography for his experiments, taking the road network of Sierra Leone from the Open Street Map project and using this to build models of human and mosquito distributions and movement. “It’s been exciting to combine real network data with large-scale simulations,” said Prof Dobson. “It also opens-up several ideas for how to make models like this easier to build and interact with, so they could be used by experimental scientists directly and not just by computer scientists.”

The commendation comes with an invitation to all the highly commended individuals to the awards dinner in Dublin later this month, where the overall winners of the different categories will be announced.

Staff and Students with Dr Vint Cerf

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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.

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Dr Vint Cerf with staff and new CS PhD and Honours graduates

April in Computer Science: Poster Presentations and World Domination

The Senior Honours students presented their posters and final year software artifacts to staff and students last week. The best poster accolade and associated amazon voucher was presented to Callum Hyland for his poster – Android: Smoking Cessation, behavioural pattern prediction through spatial and temporal modelling. We wish them well with exam revision and look forward to seeing them at June graduation.

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The Junior Honours students finalised their team projects last Friday and competed for world domination. This year the project involved implementing a multi-player peer-to-peer world domination game, with AI. We await news of which team dominated the CS world for a time on Friday.

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Images courtesy of Lisa Dow and Simone Conte

UG short internships

Short term Virtual Worlds internships are available for students wishing to work with Alan Miller on virtual museums or with Ishbel Duncan, Janie Brooks (ELT) and Paula Miles (Psychology) on the Virtual St Andrews project.
Each project has 60 hours notational funding attached (£50 per 6 hours).
Please contact Alan or Ishbel in the first instance.

Short UG internship: Athena Swan repository

A required project for the SICSA Athena SWAN initiative is to create a repository (website, resource centre, database of statistics) for the SICSA universities ASWAN submissions. The Athena SWAN awards are to do with encouraging more women into the CS area from schools up to senior staff. This work will help CS Schools gather statistics on student numbers and staff numbers as well as good practice events, talks or resources. A notional £500 is associated with the work, 60 hours work.

Please contact Ishbel if you are interested.

School Seminars: Building the News Search Engine – Bloomberg

Building the news search engine, by Ramkumar Aiyengar, Bloomberg
Abstract:
This talk provides an insight into the challenges involved in providing near real-time news search to Bloomberg customers. Our News team is in the process of migrating to using Solr/Lucene as its search and alerting backend. This talk starts with a picture of what’s involved in building such a backend, then delves into what makes up a search engine, and then discusses the challenges of scaling up for low-latency and high-load.
Bio:
Ramkumar leads the News Search backend team at the Bloomberg R&D office in London. He joined Bloomberg from his university in India and has been with the News R&D team for 7 years now. For the last couple of years, his team has focussed on rewriting almost the entire search/alert backend, used by almost every Bloomberg user to get near-real time access to news with sub-second latencies. A geek at heart, he considers himself a Linux evangelist, an open source enthusiast, and one of those weird creatures who believes that Emacs is an operating system and had once got his music player and playlists to be controlled through a library written in Lisp.

Event details

  • When: 3rd March 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series, School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Distinguished lecture 2014

The first of this academic year’s distinguished lectures will be given by Prof Luca Cardelli of Microsoft Research and the University of Oxford, 0930–1600 on Tuesday 25 November in Lower College Hall.

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Event details

  • When: 25th November 2014 09:15 - 16:00
  • Where: Lower College Hall
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Distinguished lecture, Lecture

Talk: Internship Experiences 2014

Many St Andrews CS students do internships in the summer, but we very rarely get the opportunity to learn about them.

If you are interested in what some outstanding fourth year students did this summer, including tips and hints on how to do this yourself, you cannot miss this!

Hear them talk at 2:00pm on Tuesday.

 

Details:

Andrew McCallum worked at Inclusiq on “E-learning games for diversity”

Emily Dick worked at Accenture as a “business and system analysis to help a large government client move from a paper to an online process”

Aleksejs Sazonovs worked at Microsoft Research Cambridge (Systems and Networking group) “using insights gathered from the data, to develop an effective storage and content retrieval policy for OneDrive”

Robert Dixon worked at McLaren Racing using neural networks on a tool to help the race strategy team.

 

The speaker interns at a subsequent meal with the Head of School. From left to right, Steve Linton (HOS), Aleksejs Sazonovs, Robert Dixon, and Andrew McCallum (Emily Dick could not attend the meal).

The speaker interns at a subsequent meal with the Head of School. From left to right, Steve Linton (HOS), Aleksejs Sazonovs, Robert Dixon, and Andrew McCallum (Emily Dick could not attend the meal).

Event details

  • When: 7th October 2014 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Simone Conte: Lockheed Martin Software Engineer of 2014

Yesterday evening, in front of a crowd of about 750 people (as part of ScotSoft, the largest yearly Software and IT meeting in Scotland), one of our School graduates received the Lockheed Martin Software Engineering Award, for an outstanding project demonstrating excellent software engineering skills.

Simone Conte receiving award from Scotland IS chair of the Board - Robert Campbell

Simone Conte receiving award from Scotland IS chair of the Board – Robert Campbell

Simone was awarded this prestigious award for his Senior Honours project, which involved the design, construction and implementation of a haptic device for people with visual disabilities. The project was chosen among the final undergraduate projects of all Scottish Computer Science departments, and has been awarded for the last 25 years by Scotland IS. The selection panel includes senior software engineers and CEOs of top companies in Scotland and beyond, including Amazon, SmarterGrid, Microsoft, RBS, Chevron, Scottish Life, Skyscanner and, of course, Lockheed Martin.

An early version of the HaptiQ

An early version of the HaptiQ

The prize consists of a trophy and a check. Other awardees from the night include Blair Archibald from the University of Glasgow, Andrews White from Strathclyde and Heather Ellis from Dundee.