Students from all years of study took advantage of the annual Technology Career Fayre, held last Friday at Agnes Blackadder Hall. The event was followed by a networking opportunity within the School of Computer Science. Representatives from Tech companies Adobe, Skyscanner, Toshiba, Avaloq, Amazon and Bloomberg met with students throughout the busy afternoon session. Participants were photographed during the Q&A, look closely and you could spot some alumni…
Images courtesy of Alex Bain.
The school’s Athen SWAN charter is now on our main website.
The School of Computer Science welcomed back three alumni to give keynote talks at our lost in translation event earlier this week. The well-attended and informative event organised by Professor Aaron Quigley, afforded current PhD students and early researchers in computer science an exclusive opportunity to hear from previous students about their transition from academia to industry.
Talks chaired by Dr Ognjen Arandelovic, highlighted the challenges and opportunities faced during their PhD journey but without doubt strengthened the concept of transferable skills provided by postgraduate study and research activities. Presentations incorporated research skills, internships, analytical ability, teamwork, the value of teaching and tutoring responsibilities, designing the CS merchandise, communication skills, the flexibility of research areas and the importance of social activities.
Breakout sessions permitted small group discussions with each of our alumni, where they conveyed different experiences of research activities in the school, and their on-going experience of working within industry and within a recent start up. We are extremely proud of our alumni and thank them for their continued contribution to scheduled events, and for being fantastic ambassadors for Computer Science at St Andrews.
Alumni Keynote Speakers:
James Smith, Google, London.
Angus Macdonald, Aetherworks, New York.
Neil Moore, Adobe, Edinburgh.
Invited Guest:
Polly Purvis, CEO of ScotlandIS.
The event was funded by SICSA, The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance.
The school recently celebrated the retirement of Teaching Fellow, Judith Malcolm who retired last month.
During nearly 20 years of teaching within in the School, she worked on many undergraduate and postgraduate modules, participated in a number of teaching initiatives and coordinated both the Evening Degree and Communication and Teaching in Science.
During her leaving presentation she conveyed how much she will miss the school community, students and staff and will remember her years here very fondly. Having requested a list of recommended books and films from staff and students, to occupy some of her spare time we can be assured our influence will endure.
Judith has not completely escaped the world of Computer Science, and will continue to contribute to our successful evening degree modules.
The School of Computer Science is proud to be supporting the 2015 Code First Girls programme, currently in its third run. Code First: Girls was originally the coding education arm of Entrepreneur First, a not-for-profit organisation which supports graduates building their own tech startups, but is now an independent organization by itself. CF: G is a social enterprise that aims to address the issue of getting more women into tech and tech entrepreneurship. This is done through two main brackets of activity:
CodeFirst:Girls Fall 2015
The feedback received about these classes has been overwhelmingly positive, and includes the following testimonial from one of its current students:
“I have found the skills I am currently learning in these sessions invaluable both to my personal development and future employability. The course provides me with an exciting challenge, and at the end of every task successfully completed I feel empowered as an individual: women shouldn’t feel like outsiders looking in on an all-boys club when it comes to technology, and I’m very proud to be able to partake of a movement which seeks to level that playing field.”
St Andrews has consistently run as one of CF:G’s most active and successful courses; we’re running our beginners course (which covers basic front-end web development in HTML and CSS) for the third time now and are looking to run it again next semester alongside our first advanced course – building on the beginner’s curriculum with the introduction of Python to build more powerful back-end elements. Within the tech industry, women are often at a disadvantage due to a lack of technical knowledge; Code First: Girls exists precisely to address this educational disparity, and this is why the School is keen to see students from all disciplines and years of study participate in these informative, friendly and interactive sessions.
CodeFirst:Girls 2015
CodeFirst:Girls 2014
Text and images courtesy of Mary Dodd, Mary Chan, Shyam Reyal, Adeola Fabola and Vinodh Sampath.
The virtual reconstruction of St Kilda developed by the Open Virtual Worlds Group, has reached the finals of Scottish Gaelic Awards in the category Gaelic as an Economic Asset. The awards highlight aspects of Gaelic culture, education and language showcasing excellent work undertaken to maintain cultural heritage. The event taking place in November will embrace a variety of traditional and virtual entertainments.The Awards will be presented at a high-quality dinner in St Andrew’s in the Square, Glasgow on November 18th. Good luck to all involved in the virtual reconstruction and museum installation.
![1526424_787674084578553_330837344778465729_n[1]](http://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/csblog/files/2015/10/1526424_787674084578553_330837344778465729_n1.jpg)
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.
Abstract:
To build a scalable system the important thing is to make small isolated independent units. To scale up we just add more units. To build a fault-tolerant system the important thing to do is make small isolated independent units…. Does that sound familiar? Haven’t I seen that somewhere before? Oh yes, in the first paragraph! So maybe scalability and fault tolerance are really different names for the same thing.
This property of systems, namely that fault-tolerant systems were also scalable, was noticed years ago, notably in the design of the Tandem computer system. The Tandem was design for fault tolerance but rapidly became a leading supplier of scalable computer platforms. Thus it was with Erlang.
Erlang followed a lot of the Tandem design, it was built for fault-tolerance but some of the most successful applications (such as WhatsApp) use it for its scalability.
In this lecture I’ll talk about the intimate relationship between scalability and fault-tolerance and why they are architecturally the same thing.
I’ll talk about the design of Erlang and why scalable systems have to be built on non-shared memory abstractions.
Bio:
Joe Armstrong has been programming since 1967. He invented the programming language Erlang. He has worked as a programmer, founded a few successful companies and written a few books. He has a PHD in Computer Science from KTH. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Congratulations to CJ Davies, who successfully defended his thesis today. CJ is pictured below with supervisor Dr Alan Miller and Dr Luke Hutton. Dr Ishbel Duncan acted as internal examiner and external examiner was Prof. Vic Callaghan from the University of Essex.
Adeola Fabola (one of our PhD students) is coordinating the Academic Skills Project (ASP) in the School of Computer Science for the 2015/2016 session. The ASP is a scheme managed by CAPOD, and run by postgraduates, designed to deliver discipline-specific skills and tailored workshops.
Yesterday afternoon the first informative and lively workshop, Securing Internships and Job Placements , attracted in excess of 100 students. After an introduction to the internship recruitment process, and tips on enhancing your required skills and CV, some of our Honours and PhD students shared their internship experiences. Workshop participants heard from Shyam Reyal, Peter Josling, Robin Nabel (Google), Simone Conte (Adobe), Ilia Shumailov (Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase), Maria Kustikova (Soliton Systems) and Nick Tikhonov (Amazon). The workshop session included a panel discussion and Informal networking session.
Details of future workshops
The slides used during the first workshop are now available, you can also sign up for next week’s workshop and remember if you missed yesterday’s session, you can still benefit from the next events. Thanks to Ade, Shyam and all the panel members for running a great event for the CS student community.
The School had another successful Coffee Morning and Raffle organised by Ishbel Duncan today. September 25th is the UK’s annual biggest coffee morning in aid of MacMillan Cancer care. Some of the home baking on offer is pictured below. There are still some cakes and biscuits on offer in the coffee area. Donate generously.
