Mario Kart Around the World

The School recently hosted “Mario Kart Around the World” for students from Newport Primary.

All versions of Mario Kart with the exception of arcade versions were available for the youngsters to play. Our visitors had access to a range of consoles and games ranging from Vectrex to Leap Motion and a great opportunity to see modern equipment and how it looked in the “olden days“.

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Staff were pictured testing out the equipment ( by way of playing Mario Kart) post event. Peter Nightingale (top left) is pictured playing the Vectrex Home Arcade System. Jon Lewis (bottom left) was seen tackling Elite on the Sinclair Spectrum.

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The successful event was organised by Ruth Letham with help from Ian Gent, Jon Lewis, Peter Nightingale, Chris Jefferson, Ian Miguel, Gonzalo Mendez and Shyam Reyal.

Images Courtesy of Ian Miguel and Ian Gent.

Torchlit Procession

The Torchlit Procession and Rectorial Drag are historic university traditions, in February the soon-to-be-installed Rector Catherine Stihler addressed all students in St Mary’s Quad. The Torchlit Procession later in the evening left from Sallies Lawn where students collected and lit their torches. The walk continued down to the pier offering some fabulous photographic opportunities.

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Stunning images from the procession were captured by MSc students Xu Zhu and Fearn Bishop.

School Hosts StacsHack 2015

The School hosted a hugely successful StacsHack last month. We congratulate Stacs St Andrews Computing Society for organising and running a fantastic event. Hackathons allow students with a range of talents and aptitudes to form groups and create innovative projects in 24hrs. It’s clear from the many photos that great fun was had by all. View some of the winning projects at the challenge post submission gallery.

Thanks to Gala Malbasic, Nick Tikhonov, Ieva Vasiļjeva and Vika Anisimova for representing the School of Computer Science in such a positive way and for all their hard work and enthusiasm.

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Sponsors: Palantir, J.P. Morgan, Braintree_Dev, Bloomberg and Thalmiclabs.

MLH Hardware Lab partners: Oculus VR, Pebble, Thalmic Labs, Sparkfun, Estimote, Leap Motion and Spark.

Images courtesy of Gala Malbasic and Major League Hacking.
More images from the event can be viewed on the StacsHack Facebook Page.

March 10th, seminar by Nick Taylor: Sustaining Civic Engagement in Communities

Speaker: Nick Taylor, University of Dundee
Date/Time: 2-3pm March 10, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews

Abstract:
Engagement with local issues is typically very low, despite digital technologies opening up more channels for citizens to access information and get involved than ever before. This talk will present research around the use of simple physical interfaces in public spaces to lower barriers to participation and engage a wider audience in local issues. It will also explore the potential for moving beyond top-down interventions to support sustainable grassroots innovation, in which citizens can develop their own solutions to local issues.

Bio:
Nick Taylor is a Lecturer and Dundee Fellow in the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee. His research interests involve the use of novel technologies in social contexts, particularly in communities and public spaces. This has involved the exploration of technologies to support civic engagement in local democracy, public displays supporting community awareness and heritage, as well as methods of engaging communities in design.

This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

Event details

  • When: 10th March 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

School Seminars: Building the News Search Engine – Bloomberg

Building the news search engine, by Ramkumar Aiyengar, Bloomberg
Abstract:
This talk provides an insight into the challenges involved in providing near real-time news search to Bloomberg customers. Our News team is in the process of migrating to using Solr/Lucene as its search and alerting backend. This talk starts with a picture of what’s involved in building such a backend, then delves into what makes up a search engine, and then discusses the challenges of scaling up for low-latency and high-load.
Bio:
Ramkumar leads the News Search backend team at the Bloomberg R&D office in London. He joined Bloomberg from his university in India and has been with the News R&D team for 7 years now. For the last couple of years, his team has focussed on rewriting almost the entire search/alert backend, used by almost every Bloomberg user to get near-real time access to news with sub-second latencies. A geek at heart, he considers himself a Linux evangelist, an open source enthusiast, and one of those weird creatures who believes that Emacs is an operating system and had once got his music player and playlists to be controlled through a library written in Lisp.

Event details

  • When: 3rd March 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series, School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Administrative Data Research Centre – Scotland, St Andrews team

The Scottish ADRC is led by Chris Dibben at the University of Edinburgh, and is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. The ADRC – Scotland:

  • Brings together major Scottish centres of research, and builds on predecessor organisation structures, involving secondary analysis of public-sector data in order to create a common framework for research based on an integrated data linkage service These groups, funded by research councils, charities and Government, include the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS), Administrative Data Liaison Service (ADLS), the UK Census and Administrative data LongitudinaL hub (CALLS), Applied Quantitative Methods Network (AQMeN), Scottish Health Informatics Centre (SHIP) and eHealth Research Centre (eHIRC), the national digital data centre (EDINA), Centre for Research on Environment Society and Health (CRESH) and the Centre for Cognitive Ageing & Cognitive Epidemiology.
  • Involves world leading experts in the theory, methods and policy of record linkage for secondary uses, including public engagement, ethics, information governance and law; linkage and analysis of large datasets; geocoding, natural language processing and machine learning. This includes experts from a range of sectors from which administrative data is derived including housing, transport, income, labour markets, health, crime and criminal justice, education, social services.
  • Builds on existing services – enabling immediate access to state-of-the-art facilities for research access to de-identified administrative data by accredited researchers.
  • Co-locates with the Scotland hub of national health informatics research endeavour, which has already brought together key infrastructures, technologists and research groups, enabling synergies and collaborations that will ensure rapid progress towards a national informatics centre of world importance.
  • Exploits Scotland’s unique holding of linked, machine readable, historical administrative data, including the 1932 and 1947 Scottish Mental Surveys, civil registration data (1855-present), Aberdeen Children of the Nineteen Fifties (ACONF), and others, to make available powerful administrative data based cohort and longitudinal studies.
  • Aims to support National Records of Scotland (NRS) in their work exploring alternatives to the traditional decennial based census.
  • Will have a significant programme of public engagement – including working with citizens to produce statistics of use and relevance to them, and press engagement to ensure that accurate messages are reported.
  • The ADRC research programme will inform the entire UK Administrative Data Research Network and produce research – both specific to administrative data use and more broadly social science – world-leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour.

The St Andrews team will lead research in data linkage methodology, and are currently investigating the potential to use prefabricated secure rooms within the premises of institutions where researchers require secure access to sensitive data.

The St Andrews team involves:

  • Graham Kirby, Alan Dearle – researchers
  • Darren Lightfoot – project manager
  • 2-year research fellow to be appointed summer 2015

The data linkage methodology research programme also includes Alasdair Gray at Heriot-Watt and Peter Christen at Australian National University.

CoDiMa (CCP in the area of Computational Discrete Mathematics)

Steve Linton and Alexander Konovalov were successful in the application for the EPSRC-funded Collaborative Computational Project called CoDiMa (CCP in the area of Computational Discrete Mathematics): CoDiMa (CCP in the area of Computational Discrete Mathematics)

CoDiMa is centred on two open source software systems: GAP and SAGE which are already widely used for research and teaching in abstract algebra, number theory, cryptography, combinatorics, graph theory, coding theory, optimisation and search, among other areas.

The CCP aims to support the ecosystem of users, extenders and developers of these systems and encourage best practice in their use, and to support the more rapid uptake of new features such as parallel programming support.

The project will run for 5 years starting from March 1st, 2015.

A PhD studentship, in collaboration with MSR (Cambridge)

Reasoning about Racy Programs under Relaxed Consistency

A PhD studentship, in collaboration with MSR (Cambridge)

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/global/apply-europe.aspx>

Each Microsoft scholarship consists of an annual bursary up to a maximum of three years. The amount varies in different countries and may depend on specific arrangement with public research funding agencies. The bursary continues automatically the following years, provided the Scholar meets the requirements of the institution.

Payment is made to the institution. The amount of the scholarship is the maximum amount Microsoft Research pays to the institution. In addition, every Scholar receives a laptop allowance.

During the course of their PhD, Scholars are invited to Microsoft Research in Cambridge for a PhD Summer School that includes a series of talks of academic interest and posters sessions, which provides the Scholars the opportunity to present their work to Microsoft researchers and a number of Cambridge academics.

Some of the Scholars may also be offered—at the sole discretion of Microsoft Research—an internship in one of the Microsoft Research laboratories. Internships involve working on a project alongside and as part of a team of Microsoft researchers. Scholars are paid during their internship—in addition to their scholarship bursary. Interested Scholars can apply through the Microsoft Research internship website.

 

What’s happening to computer hardware, and what does it mean for systems software?

Mothy RoscoeThe first set of Computer Science Distinguished Lectures in 2015 will
be given by Prof Mothy Roscoe of ETH Zurich, 09:15–15:30 on Thursday 2nd April
in the Byre Theatre.

Computer systems are not what they used to be, and the days when a
machine could be described as a processor, some memory, and some I/O
devices are long gone. Modern machines, from Systems-on-a-Chip in
phones to rack-scale data appliances, are themselves complex networks
of heterogeneous processing elements, different kinds of memory, and
diverse communication links.
Continue reading

Event details

  • When: 2nd April 2015 09:15 - 15:30
  • Where: St Andrews
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Distinguished lecture

Notable Woman in Computing Card Deck

Available on a coffee table (Jack Cole) near you: Notable Women in Computing playing card deck featuring 54 notable women in computer science. Play your favourite card game and learn more about the history and future of women in computer science. Read more about the KickStarter and Wiki Project.

WIC