Computer Gaming Industry careers: Aardvark Swift presentation – Get in the Game

Tuesday 27 November, 1400-1500, 1.33a Jack Cole building (Computer Science)

Aardvark Swift, recruitment agents for the gaming industry, will be talking about how to break into the sector. Get advice from those in the know on the key skills you will need, the common pitfalls, and how to maximise your chances. Ideal for programming enthusiasts of all disciplines, and for anyone interested in a gaming career. http://www.aswift.com/index.jsp#holder1-start

AS will also be giving details of how to enter their nationwide programming competition Search for a Star! SFAS is designed to highlight and reward the UK’s most promising video games developers. The winner will be announced at the Eurogamer 2013, with last years winner securing a job at Sony Evolution . This years competition is being sponsored by Microsoft http://www.aswift.com/searchforastar/

Event details

  • When: 27th November 2012 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Talk

Google

At 2pm today there will be a series of talks in Physics Lecture Theatre B by Google engineers and myself. Event details here: https://plus.google.com/events/cugartcmak5aabt8a91q6kfb0h8

“Ryan Shatford, a senior engineering manager from California who has been with Google since 2001 will talk about his experiences of Google as it grew from a silicon valley startup to a corporation with global reach.

Ben Birt, a St Andrews Computer Science graduate, will speak on his experience of transitioning from student life to working at Google and tell us a bit about the Google developed programming language Go.

James Smith, a PhD student in the School of Computer Science will talk about his internship with Google on their Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team in Dublin.

Jen McColl, Google’s University liaison officer for St Andrews will participate in a live Google+ Hangout to answer any questions on careers at Google.”

All welcome! Please RSVP on the Google+ Event: https://plus.google.com/events/cugartcmak5aabt8a91q6kfb0h8

Lab PC upgrade

The School has started the tender process for replacement of our Lab PCs. The new PCs will have a similar form-factor to the current PCs but will have faster more power efficient CPUs, more memory, quieter cooling and twin HDDs for simpler dual boot configuration. We will be replacing the current displays with LED back-lit HD (1920×1080) screens and some of the PCs will have dual displays.

The current timetable will see the new PCs deployed in January.

Shuttle SH61R4 H61 PC base unit

Base unit for the new CS Lab PCs - Shuttle SH61R4 H61

The components specified in the tender are as follows:

  • Shuttle SH61R4 base-unit.
  • Intel Core i5, 3450S, 2.80GHZ, 65W CPU.
  • 8GB DDR3 1333MHz memory.
  • Dual 250GB HDD, 5400RPM, energy efficient.
  • 21” – 24”, 1920 x 1080, LED backlit, DVI, energy efficient display.

Bake Sale for Children in Need

It’s Children In Need this Friday.

Well done to Sophie Gent, who raised £133 for children in need in October. The delicious cakes were the result of 3 days hard baking in the Gent household. They proved to be very popular and were certainly a welcome addition during coffee time in the school.



Find out more about fundraising for Children in Need at the BBC website

Four Geeks and an Entrepreneur

Al Dearle, Monty Widenius, Steve Linton, Ian Gent

Al Dearle, Monty Widenius, Steve Linton, Ian Gent (left to right), St Andrews, 15 October 2012

We were privileged today to hear three lectures from Monty Widenius, main author of the MySQL database system.   His main focus was on entrepreneurship and being an entrepreneur while giving away source code on an open source basis.

Three staff members from St Andrews are pictured with Monty before the first lecture, in St Salvator’s quad at the University of St Andrews.

Event details

  • When: 15th October 2012
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series

Adobe Prize Bursaries

The School of Computer Science is delighted to announce two Adobe prize bursaries available this year.

The bursaries are open to students currently in their first year at St Andrews with a degree intention of Computer Science or any joint honours combination involving Computer Science who are eligible for the full means-tested loan or grant from SAAS or the English, Welsh or Northern Irish equivalents. The value of the bursaries is £1000 per year for up to four years, subject to the students remaining eligible and maintaining an annual grade point average of at least 13.0.

If you wish to apply for one of these bursaries, please submit 500 words on the subject of “What excites me about Computer Science?” and email it to admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk. The deadline for submission is 1st November 2012.

These bursaries are the first in a number of new initiatives between Adobe systems and the School of Computer Science, including both teaching and research. We will be announcing several more over the next few months.

School Seminar – Mari Ostendorf

Professor Mari Ostendorf of the University of Washington is visiting
Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews as part of a SICSA Distinguishing
Fellowship.

Title: Rich Speech Transcription for Spoken Document Processing

Abstract:
As storage costs drop and bandwidth increases, there has been rapid growth of spoken information available via the web or in online archives — including radio and TV broadcasts, oral histories, legislative proceedings, call center recordings, etc. — raising problems of document retrieval, information extraction, summarization and translation for spoken language. While there is a long tradition of research in these technologies for text, new challenges arise when moving from written to spoken language. In this talk, we look at differences between speech and text, and how we can leverage the information in the speech signal beyond the words to provide a rich, automatically generated transcript that better serves language processing applications. In particular, we look at how prosodic cues can be used to recognize segmentation, emphasis and intent in spoken language, and how this information can impact tasks such as topic detection, information extraction, translation, and social group analysis.

Event details

  • When: 27th November 2012 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Format: Seminar

Distinguished Lecture Series: MySQL and Open Source Business, by Monty Widenius

Monty Widenius delivered the Semester 1 Distinguished Lecture Series on Monday 15th October 2012, from 10am to 3.30pm, in Upper College Hall.

Monty is CEO & CTO at Monty Program Ab, and is perhaps best known as founder of MySQL, the world’s most used open source.

Monty delivered three lectures on MySQL and Open Source Business.  He has kindly made the slides available – linked to from the titles.

The lectures were  introduced by the Dean of Science, Prof Al Dearle, and refreshments were provided at 11am.

These lectures were open to all.

The detailed programme is available as a pdf: Monty Widenius DLS Programme

Event details

  • When: 15th October 2012 10:00 - 15:30
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Seminar

Professor Aaron Quigley Inaugural lecture

Professor Aaron Quigley will be giving his Inaugural Lecture in School III on Wednesday 31st October at 5:15 p.m.

Billions of people are using interconnected computers and have come to rely on the computational power they afford us, to support their lives, or advance our global economy and society. However, how we interact with this computation is often limited to little “windows of interaction” with mobile and desktop devices which aren’t fully suited to their contexts of use. Consider the surgeon operating, the child learning to write or the pedestrian navigating a city and ask are the current devices and forms of human computer interaction as fluent as they might be? I contend there is a division between the physical world in which we live our lives and the digital space where the power of computation currently resides. Many day to day tasks or even forms of work are poorly supported by access to appropriate digital information. In this talk I will provide an overview of research I’ve been pursuing to bridge this digital-physical divide and my future research plans. This talk will be framed around three interrelated topics. Ubiquitous Computing, Novel Interfaces and Visualisation. Ubiquitous Computing is a model of computing in which computation is everywhere and computer functions are integrated into everything. Everyday objects are sites for sensing, input, processing along with user output. Novel Interfaces, which draw the user interface closer to the physical world, both in terms of input to the system and output from the system. Finally, the use of computer-supported interactive visual representations of data to amplify cognition with visualisation. In this talk I will demonstrate that advances in human computer interaction require insights and research from across the sciences and humanities if we are to bridge this digital-physical divide.

Event details

  • When: 31st October 2012 17:15 - 18:15
  • Where: Various
  • Format: Lecture