Earlier this week Professor Joe Armstrong from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, delivered the second set of distinguished lectures for 2015, in the Byre Theatre. The three topical, well attended and interesting lectures centred around the question “Scalability and fault-tolerance, are they the same?”
Images courtesy of Saleem Bhatti
Congratulations to Marc Werfs, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured below with supervisor Emeritus Professor Ian Sommerville, Internal examiner Dr Alex Voss, and External examiner Professor Stuart Anderson from the University of Edinburgh. Dr Gordon Baxter and Dr Juliana Bowles also supervised Marc during his PhD.
The School of Computer Science is delighted to announce that President Maria Klawe will be speaking at our Distinguished Lecture Series on March 31st 2016 in St Andrews. This event will consist of a series of talks from 9am with a tea/coffee break, a lunch break, afternoon talk and Q&A session. 
There will be a Q & A session between 15:00hrs and 15:30hrs, followed by the opportunity to meet President Klawe informally in the foyer.
A new annual competition set up to identify outstanding and innovative work, created using the British Library’s digital collections and content, has recognised Palimpsest. The 2015 British Library Labs Awards honoured projects within three key categories: Research, Creative/Artistic and Entrepreneurship. Palimpsest: Telling Edinburgh’s Stories with Maps, was runner up in the Research category.
Congratulations to Uta, David and Aaron on the continued success of Palimpsest.
Congratulations to our St Andrews Computer Science Code First Girls, for completing the Fall 2015 course and staging their final projects. Students are pictured presenting their diverse and ambitious projects to staff and students in the School. Presentations were followed by a cheese and wine reception. Prizes were awarded for overall winner to Kahina Le Louvier for MuZik4Kids and runner up to Lucy Sharp and Lucy Wallis for Amelia Florence. Well done to all. Read more about CodeFirst:Girls in our previous post Computer Science supports CodeFirst:Girls 2015.
Well done to Sophie, Caitlyn and Sarah who raised £265 pounds for Children In Need last week. They are pictured setting up shop, selling their delicious homemade cakes and a exercising a spot of merchandise quality control. Staff and students helped them raise a fabulous total.
Review their previous 2012 and 2013 cakes and fundraising through our blog posts. A great effort all round, we look forward to seeing you again next time.
Congratulations to recent graduate Aleksejs Sazonovs on winning the gold medal in the computer science category at the Undergraduate Awards.
The School of Computer Science will be holding a Graduation Reception in the Jack Cole Building on Monday 30th November 2015 from 11:00am to 14:00pm for Masters and PhD students who are graduating that day at Younger Hall.
The graduates are invited, along with their guests, to come along after the ceremony for a glass of bubbly and mini cream cake or two! Staff are encouraged to come along and join in the celebrations.
On behalf of the school may I wish those graduates unable to attend Graduation the very best for their future endeavors.
The first of this academic year’s distinguished lectures will be given by Professor Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, on Monday 16th November 2015 at The Byre Theatre. The programme is as follows:
09:15 – 09:30 Introduction By Professor Kevin Hammond
09:30 – 10:45 Lecture 1 [Setting the scene: I’ll talk about the software landscape of the mid 80’s and discuss which problems we were trying to solve. I’ll talk about the early experiments that led to Erlang.]
10:45 – 11:15 Coffee Break – Refreshments provided
11:15 – 12:30 Lecture 2 [The middle years: I’ll talk about the enhancements we made to Erlang. How we added distribution and the bit syntax and so on. I’ll talk about company politics, building a community and about the obstacles to introducing a new technology.]
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch Break – Free time
14:00 – 15:15 Lecture 3 [WhatsApp and the future: I’ll talk about what happened after Erlang became open source and how this changed everything. I’ll talk about the explosive growth of Erlang which lead to adoption by WhatsApp.
I’ll also talk about the future. What are the challenges of the Internet of things? How can we make massively distributed systems that run forever?]
15:15 – 15:30 Q & A Session – Open forum
Abstract:
Most of us might agree that ‘hands-on learning’ is good for children in the early years. But why? Is it simply more fun and sociable, or are there any more direct cognitive benefits? And what determines definitions of ‘hands-on’? Can we include iPads? This talk will draw upon an ESRC-funded project to examine the educational implications of recent theoretical arguments about the embodied nature of cognition. Video data from the project will be used to illustrate the methodological significance of the way children gesture when describing mathematical concepts and evaluate a hypothesis that numerical development is grounded upon two particular embodied metaphors. If correct, this presents a serious challenge to traditional approaches to the types of learning materials we offer children. The talk then demonstrates two embodied technologies to consider the potential of new forms of digital interaction to further our understanding of embodied cognition as well as support early learning.
Bio:
Dr Andrew Manches is a Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of Education and leads the Children and Technology group at the University of Edinburgh. He has 20 years experience working with children, first as a teacher, then as an academic. His recent research, funded by an ESRC Future Research Leader grant, focuses on the role of interaction in thinking, and the implications this has for early learning and new forms of technology. When not being an academic, Andrew is a parent of two young children and directs an early learning technology start-up that was awarded a SMART grant this year to build an early years maths tangible technology.
