Students placed third in Hackin’ The City Hackathon

UCL Financial Industry Series
Hackin’ The City Hackathon
April 6 – 7 2013

Organised by the UCL Financial Industry Series (UCL FIndS) in partnership with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Financial Services Knowledge Transfer Network, SWIFT and Level39 Technology Accelerator at Canary Wharf, the Hackin’ The City Hackathon brought together 55 students from a dozen of top universities in the UK to pit their skills in a round-the-clock hackathon to design and develop an application over 24 hours.

Six students from the university’s Computer Science department (Waqas Arshid, Gordon Coupar, Robert Dixon, Valentin Tunev, Alex Waller and Ben Lovell) were invited to attend the event in London. Five entered as ‘Team StACS’ and Ben as an individual participant with the intent of forming a team.

The aim of their project was to enable the creation and validation of safe buildings that have optimal escape routes in the event of disasters. Through the use of pathfinding algorithms, building floor plans can be analysed and statistics presented. Subsequently through these adjustments, improvements can be made in order to aid safety in the event of an emergency.

On Sunday morning, 12 teams presented their value proposition, technology solution and ran a live demo of their projects. Judges after long deliberation came up with six finalists. By 1530 on Sunday after 25 minutes of intense debate, senior judges The St Andrews team was awarded 3rd place and team members each received Amazon vouchers.

Group photo

 

Computer Science Research 2013 & Beyond

Cloud 1

Q: What do the words in the tag cloud have in common?

A: They all relate to research happening in the School of Computer Science. Some are conference contributions coming to a conference near you soon, and some will appear as forthcoming journal articles.

The University research portal features publications and awards, and can be customised to explore research happening in the School of Computer Science.

Thinking of studying in the School or contemplating collaboration with a research group? Use the words above to search and peruse the research publications for some inspiration.

Carnegie-Cameron Taught Postgraduate Bursaries 2013

Congratulations to Alice Herbison who has been selected to receive a Carnegie-Cameron Taught Postgraduate Bursary. Alice has studied a number of undergraduate modules in the school and will begin her postgraduate studies in September on our new MSc in Human Computer Interaction. We look forward to seeing her in the department again soon.

The Carnegie Trust For The Universities Of Scotland, supports the bursaries, which were established by Andrew Carnegie in 1901.

Computing Reviews’ Notable Books and Articles 2012

ACM Computing Reviews has selected a recent survey paper written by Per Ola Kristensson and colleagues as one of the Notable Computing Books and Articles of 2012.

The list consists of nominations from Computing Reviews reviewers, Computing Reviews category editors, the editors in chief of journals covered by Computing Reviews, and others in the computing community.

The selected survey paper is entitled “Foundational Issues in Touch-Surface Stroke Gesture Design — An Integrative Review” and it was published by the journal Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction in 2012.

What Next for Senior Honours?

As the exam diet draws to a close for another year, our final year students are considering their next step after graduation. Stephen Haley will join PlanForCloud in August as a Software Engineer, working alongside Alistair Scott, another graduate from the school.

PlanForCloud, originally ShopForCloud, was established by Hassan and Ali Khajeh-Hosseini and acquired by RightScale in 2012. While studying for his PhD in Computer Science at St Andrews, Ali worked as a software engineering intern at RightScale. Their continued success means that they are actively recruiting, visit the PlanForCloud recruitment page for further information.

More next steps to follow…

Alumni Numbers Increase in New York City

We like to share success stories, especially when they relate to our Alumni. Congratulations to Greg Bigwood who recently joined AetherWorks LLC. as Senior Software Architect. AetherWorks LLC. is a Software Engineering, Research & Development lab in New York City.

Computer Science Graduates Robert MacInnis, Allan Boyd and Angus Macdonald launched software company AetherStore™ earlier last year. Visit their websites at www.AetherWorks.com and www.AetherStore.com to read more about their journey. We wish them continued success as they approach the anniversary of their launch.

Gesture-based Natural User Interfaces

Research into personalised gestures for user interfaces carried out by Miguel Nacenta, Per Ola Kristensson and two of our recent MSc students, Yemliha Kamber and Yizhou Qiang featured in the University News last week. You can read more about their research in the MIT Technology Review, and Fast Company’s Co.DESIGN. Their results question whether pre-programmed gestures need the personal touch to make them more effective.