Undergraduate

St Andrews Programming Competition 2014

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The St Andrews Programming Competition 2014 is a friendly programming contest organised by the School of Computer Science for students belonging to all levels, coming from any background with any amount of programming experience. Team up with up to 3 members per team, compete for 3 hours by solving a set of programming problems using your favourite programming language and win £200 worth of prizes.

Generally, programming competitions are aimed at the best programmers, this is a first-of-its-kind competition where students from all levels with any amount of programming experience stand a chance to win a prize. Another unique aspect of this competition is that it has also open to members of staff from the School of Computer Science, making this a fun experience and a bonding opportunity for staff and students.

Students can use this opportunity gain valuable exposure to solving quick algorithmic programming questions – of the style that may come up in job interviews, where candidates are required to solve problems on the fly while being observed. Such interview practices are common among many companies nowadays including Google.

For more details and registration visit: http://goo.gl/I78Hyf
Facebook: www.facebook.com/stapc14
Twitter: @stapc14

If you have any questions, please email Shyam on smr20@st-andrews.ac.uk

The event, prizes and refreshments will be sponsored by AetherStore.

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Event details

  • When: 7th April 2014 14:00 - 17:00
  • Where: Cole 0.35 - Subhons Lab

StACS Hackathon hosted by Witlr

StACS will be holding its first big event of the year! It will take place in the MSc Lab in the John Honey building between 7pm and 2am on November 14th. The topic will be data visualization and will be sponsored by Witlr (http://witlr.com/).

There will be free pizza, free hard and soft refreshments, a game room, and snacks available for everybody who participates. This event is open to PAID StACS members only and the challenge will be suitable for all skill levels. Membership may be paid for at the door and costs 3 pounds.

Event details

  • When: 14th November 2013 19:00 - 15th November 2013 02:00
  • Where: Honey 110 - MSc Lab

Senior Honours Project Success

A Multi-display exhibit that enables visitors to explore The Old Course and photographs of Lawrence Levy, and to quiz their golf knowledge was developed by Julian Petford. The display was developed during his Senior Honours Project which was supervised by Miguel Nacenta. Great job Julian. We look forward to hearing more about the event in due course.

The exhibition officially opens on Saturday, although visitors to The University Library can view the exhibit from today. Read more about the showcase on Echoes From The Vault, a blog from Special Collections, the University 600th news or view some of the images on display via the BBC website.

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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.

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

Confessions of a start-up founder

Prof Simon Dobson will be giving a lecture for CS3053 about his experience as founder and CEO of a start-up company spun-out of a university. This will focus on the business aspects — getting the company started, running it, growing, funding it, and eventually winding it down — rather than on the technology, and try to extract some lessons from what went right (and wrong).

Event details

  • When: 11th February 2013 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Maths Theatre C
  • Format: Lecture

Orientation Week BBQ

It was great to see so many undergraduate computer science students at the Orientation Barbecue yesterday. New and returning students had the opportunity to discuss the merits of studying computer science, eat burgers and consume the traditional Irn Bru in a friendly setting.

The Gaming/Programming Competition winners also received their prize in the form of Amazon vouchers. Congratulations to Maclej, Simon and Daniel.

Connect 4 anyone?

The subhonours lab was busy with the Connect 4 challenge this morning. Students taking CS1006 Programming Projects worked in pairs in a round-robin format, in which every duo plays every other once. Congratulations to Hamish and Mariya who won today’s challenge and received Amazon Vouchers as a reward.

Senior Honours Project Madness

The dedicated and talented final year Computer Science students presented their projects yesterday. Short presentations were followed by demonstrations and a poster session.
We wish them every success as they approach graduation.

Best Poster: Isobel Hale

Multiple Intrusion Detection System Testing Suite (MISTY)

Best Project Madness Presentation: Thomas Nicholson

Cross-Modal Interactive World Builder