As you probably know, all three main University trades unions have called for a second strike day on 3 December. Since it’s revision period, not much teaching is scheduled for that day. If you do have a revision tutorial, catch-up lecture or meeting with your supervisor scheduled, we would expect it to go ahead. Unless you hear definitely that it is not happening, please turn up on time as usual.
We can confirm that the Jack Cole and John Honey buildings will be open. Adequate safety cover, including first aiders and fire marshals will be in place.
Over the past three years the School has been involved in the Sapere project, funded by the European Commission. Sapere has been looking at new ways to build large-scale pervasive systems, moving away from traditional client/server approaches to explore biochemically-inspired system models in which services and users can “bond” spontaneously as they encounter each other in the real world. Sapere was co-ordinated by the University of Modena Reggio Emilia and — as well as St Andrews — involved the University of Bologna, University of Geneva, and Johannes Kepler University of Linz. Sapere had its final review this week and was ranked as “excellent … the project has even exceeded expectations”.
The project achieved considerable visibility by being deployed at the Vienna City Marathon to provide services including runner tracking and guiding spectators to possible viewing opportunities. The deployment had several thousands users downloading and using a smartphone app throughout the event, as well as several large attention-sensing public displays that responded directly to people stopping to look at them.
The scientific highlights of Sapere include developing a formal model of spontaneous interactions; building a middleware platform based on these ideas; developing a catalogue of useful patterns that describe co-ordinated interactions at a high level; and creating several exciting new algorithms for context awareness and situation recognition. This last activity was led from St Andrews by Simon Dobson, Juan Ye, and Graeme Stevenson, and allowed us to recognise activities going on in “busy” spaces where multiple things are happening simultaneously — a problem that has been extremely resistant to solution until now.
Sapere shows that pervasive systems are now “ready for prime time,” and that even research that seems highly speculative and challenging can lead to results that affect people’s lives directly. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with our collaborators, and we’ll certainly be looking to take these ideas forward in new projects and directions.
Here’s a non-technical overview video introducing Sapere:
A team of Computer Science students from the University of St Andrews came first in the J.P.Morgan Code for Good Competition 2013
The Coding Challenge was open to all students enrolled fulltime at a university located in the United Kingdom, who are under-graduates or post-graduates and are 18 years of age or over. Teams of 4-6 students competed against each other on behalf of a charity assigned to them in order to provide a technological solution to a problem that the charity faces.
The winning team (four from St Andrews, one from Southampton and one from Warwick) created a solution for Eneza Education, whose mission is to make 50 million kids across rural Africa smarter. In Kiswahili, “eneza” means “to reach” or “to spread,” and the group distributes education through SMS and text based quizzes, tutorials and questions. The team created an Android-based application for teachers and parents, which, when implemented, can quadruple the educational impact for students. The St Andrews team members comprised the following
Enterprise First is the UK’s top graduate startup accelerator, sponsored by government as well as global companies such as McKinsey, KPMG and Microsoft.
Entrepreneur First is coming to St Andrews to deliver an intensive, practical workshop on how to actually start a startup as a computer scientist.
When: Friday 22nd November, 4-5pm.
Where: Physics Theatre C
Why: Maybe you’ve already thought of founding a startup after graduation. But, maybe you’re going into a tech company to gain experience or staying in academia to research your idea. Entrepreneur First thinks best way to build something amazing is to actually do it from Day 1. Why should you compromise? Last year 32 graduates joined Entrepreneur First and built 11 companies now worth over $35million, two of which went on to Y Combinator. Come and find out how.
This is the hardest, most challenging career path available, and is almost exclusively open to technical graduates. The Founders of Entrepreneur First will show you what it takes, and highlight previous St Andrews students who have gone on to create successful startups on the programme.
If you’re the sort of person who wants to build big, world-changing products, Entrepreneur First was designed for you. Almost everyone has strong technical backgrounds. Entrepreneur First is the only programme in the world to select individuals purely on the basis of talent, often pre idea and pre team, and give them the opportunity to build their ideas with other exceptional people.
Entrepreneur First is a not-for-profit backed by the City of London, McKinsey & Company, KPMG, Microsoft, Nokia, Experian, Osborne Clarke, Rackspace, Sky, SVB, and Workspace. You can read about them in the BBC, The Daily Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Tech City News, and the Financial Times. Find out more:
Anna Clements, Head of Research Data and Information Services, University of St Andrews.
Open Science’ seems to be one of the hottest topics around with organisations and funders from the G8 downwards stressing the importance of open data in driving everything from global innovation through to more accountable governance; not to mention the more direct possibility that non-compliance could result in research grant income drying up.
Here at St Andrews we have had an institutional research information system (CRIS) since 2006 which has evolved in tandem with the rapidly changing research policies and slower cultural shifts towards more and more open access to research outputs, outcomes and impact. But, we now face, perhaps, the biggest challenge so far in determining the extent to which Institutional infrastructure and services can support this transition to an ‘open by default’ culture. I will argue that this challenge cannot be met without researchers engaging with the debate and driving the agenda forward with the support services here at St Andrews – there is a joint responsibility very clearly articulated in the EPSRC policy framework on research data. So there will be some suggestions on what we could do by building on our existing infrastructure, including examples of best practice from elsewhere, but also an invitation to the audience for suggestions on how to respond to this incessant and increasing clamour for access to research outputs and, in particular, research data.
Dear Students,
As you probably know, all three main University trades unions have called for a withdrawal of labour on 31 October. In the School of Computer Science, we expect that most teaching scheduled that day will take place, and would advise all students to turn up for their lectures as normal, or even better, to turn up a little early just in case.
In particular, we can confirm that the Jack Cole and John Honey buildings will be open. Adequate safety cover, including first aiders and fire marshals will be in place.
Once we know what lectures, if any, have not been delivered, and whether the lecturers intend to cover the missed material themselves, we will make arrangements to fill any gaps. All lecture material should be placed on student resources as normal no later than the following day 1 Nov.
StACS will be holding its first big event of the year! It will take place in the MSc Lab in the John Honey building between 7pm and 2am on November 14th. The topic will be data visualization and will be sponsored by Witlr (http://witlr.com/).
There will be free pizza, free hard and soft refreshments, a game room, and snacks available for everybody who participates. This event is open to PAID StACS members only and the challenge will be suitable for all skill levels. Membership may be paid for at the door and costs 3 pounds.
Event details
When: 14th November 2013 19:00 - 15th November 2013 02:00
Dr Alan Boyd and Dr Nicholas Malden, D Young & Co LLP (Patent Attorneys) Intellectual Property – What, why, and how?
In many technological fields, especially computer science, output isn’t a physical object that can be sold, but is an idea or an expression of an idea that comes from your mind. But how can industry take advantage of such ideas or expressions, and what’s to stop a competitor from simply copying your hard work and benefiting from it at your expense? In this talk, we’ll take you through the basics of Intellectual Property (IP) and look at how it can be used by a computer scientist, its importance to new start-ups and large multinationals alike, and also introduce you to the patent attorney profession. We’ll give you a chance to try your hand at writing a patent claim, and we’ll give a prize to the best one!
In response to student interest, the Open Virtual Worlds group are seeking students interested in making things on a school hosted Minecraft server (accessible from both inside & outside the school). If interested, please get in contact with CJ on cjd44@st-andrews.ac.uk.
