Congratulations David Letham!

Congratulations to David Letham who has been invited to the Gives Back Awards 2022, on behalf of University of St Andrews Charities Campaign.

David is one of the first winners of the making a difference Award. This new Award comes from students and staff who would like to nominate members of staff who have gone the extra mile within St Andrew’s community and beyond. Whether that be stepping up to help others during exceptional times, showing initiative or making a positive impact on the individuals/communities they have worked with

Enjoy the Ceremony!

 

Research participants from further education wanted

We are looking to speak to further education students of all disciplines.

Photo by David Kennedy on Unsplash

We want to understand what students want to know about personal cyber security and how they want to learn it.   To participate, you must be 16 or over and based at college, not at school, and willing to take part in an interview about this.  Sessions will last a maximum of 30-40 minutes, held on Microsoft Teams. Participants will be offered a £8 voucher for their time and contributions.

If you are interested, please get in contact using the details below. You will then be given a Participant Information Sheet with further details of our research and have the opportunity to ask questions, before being asked whether you consent to participate.

Contact Details

Amy Hunt  – student-cyber-awareness@st-andrews.ac.uk

This study is being conducted as part of a research study in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.  The researchers are Dr Jean Carletta, Kevin Doherty, Amy Hunt, and Molly Wilson.

 

Only One day to go until SISCO!

SISCO Conference, 5 & 6 February

Ian Gent, Chris Jefferson and Simon Dobson are all presenting at the SISCO conference this weekend. There will be social and networking events which include free food in the medicine cafeteria. We think that these will be nice opportunities for all students, speakers and staff to get to know one other.

You are all invited to these events, both on Saturday and Sunday.

You can get your free tickets to attend and further information on their Facebook page

Congratulations to our Emeritus Professor Ian Sommerville

Very many congratulations to our Emeritus Professor Ian Sommerville who has recently been awarded the 2022 Nancy Mead award for excellence in software engineering education.

https://mycseet.wordpress.com/nancy-mead-award-terms-of-reference/

The award will be presented at the (virtual) Conference for Software Engineering and Training next month.

This Award goes to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding contributions to software engineering education and training, as well as to the related area of software engineering professionalism. Contributions may include, but are not limited to: service to the community, papers, reports, books, tools, techniques and media for software engineering education, and outstanding practice of teaching that has been witnessed by the community at large. Contributions should have had an influence over an extended period of time at the international level. Contributions to software engineering itself (peer-reviewed research or practice) should be mentioned in a separate section of any nomination, but having made such contributions is not necessary in order to receive this award.

Well Done Ian!

PhD Scholarships in Computer Science for 2022

Scholarship Description
The School of Computer Science is offering the following types of scholarships for 3.5 years of study in our PhD programme. All UK/EU and International students are eligible:

• Fully funded scholarships consisting of tuition + stipend
• Tuition-only scholarships

This award is part-funded through the University’s new ‘handsels’ scheme.

Value of Award
• Tuition scholarships cover PhD fees irrespective of country of origin.
• Stipends are valued £15,609 per annum.

Eligibility Criteria
We are looking for highly motivated research students willing to be part of a diverse and supportive research community. Applicants must hold a BSc or MSc in Computer Science or related area appropriate for their proposed topic of study.
International applications are welcome. We especially encourage female applicants and underrepresented minorities to apply.

Application Deadline
1st February 2022 for scholarship eligibility. Late applications will be considered as funding allows.

How to Apply
Every PhD application indicating interest, if accepted, will automatically be considered for these scholarships; there is no need for a separate application.
The best way to win one of our scholarships is to make a strong PhD application. You are also encouraged to approach supervisors before formal submission to discuss your project ideas with them.
The School’s main groups are Artificial Intelligence and Symbolic Computation, Computer Systems and Networks, Human-Computer Interaction, and Programming Languages. It is highly recommended that applicants identify potential supervisors in their applications. A list of existing faculty and areas of research can be found at https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/computer-science/prospective/pgr/supervisors/).
Full application instructions can be found at https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/study/apply/postgraduate/research/.
Inquiries and questions may be directed to pg-admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Welcoming Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo for our DLS on Tuesday 9 November

As part of the schools Distinguished Lecture Series we look forward to welcoming Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo on Tuesday 9 November.

Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo  received her Ph.D. in Software Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 1999. After spending two years at CERN (the European Center for Nuclear Research) and 5 years in the UK as Lecturer, she became full professor at the University of Geneva in 2010. Since 2016, she is the Director of the Computer Science Center of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She has been nominated in 2018 among the 100 digital shapers in Switzerland. Her research interests relate to the engineering of decentralised software with self-organising and emergent behaviour. This involves studying natural systems, designing and developing artificial collective systems, and verifying reliability and trustworthiness of those systems. Giovanna co-founded the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organising Systems (SASO) and the ACM Transactions on Autonomous Adaptive Systems (TAAS), for which she served as EiC from 2005 to 2011.

This event will be held on Teams with further details to follow.

$2.2 million funding for former CS students

Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini, along with former CS students Ali Khajeh-Hosseini and Alistair Scott saw an untapped market to help engineers lower their cloud computing costs, creating Infracost as a result. Infracost provides developers with cloud cost estimates based on changes they make to their code infrastructure.

Hassan, the CEO, who attended The Robert Gordon University and The University of Edinburgh, and is a serial entrepreneur, with two of his companies he cofounded with his brother Ali (ShopForCloud and AbarCloud) being acquired. Ali, also attended The Robert Gordon University and The University of Edinburgh like his brother, and went on to obtain his Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews, with his doctoral thesis focusing on cloud computing (Thesis: Supporting System Deployment Decisions in Public Clouds). His decade of expertise in the field played a critical role in the success and acquisitions of ShopForCloud and AbarCloud. Rounding out the team is Alistair, who attended the University of St. Andrews for his computer science degree. He was also a cofounder at AbarCloud and a senior software engineer at RightScale. These three together have impressive domain expertise and a successful entrepreneurial track record in cloud computing makes it likely that will make a massive impact with Infracost in the tech industry at-large.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickdaso/2021/09/23/infracost-raises-22m-from-sequoia-to-help-engineers-lower-their-cloud-computing-costs/

 

ACL 2021 Test of Time Award

Dr. Jean Carletta has been awarded the 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics 25-year Test-of-Time paper award for Assessing Agreement on Classification Tasks: The Kappa Statistic, Computational Linguistics 22 (1), 1996. In this paper she intervened to correct a common but misleading statistical practice. As a result, her field began to require assessments of how variability in subjective analyses could bias the claims made for their results. Although her work was based on existing content analysis best practice in the humanities, the clarity of her expression led to the paper being used widely in teaching research methods to medical students as far afield as Beijing.
Jean is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science. She is engaged in a wide portfolio of work that takes a systems level approach to improving the impact Scotland’s academic community has on national cyber security and resilience.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/announcement-2021-acl-test-time-paper-award-0