The HEA has recently funded 20 scholarships which are aimed at helping HEIs work with partner schools and consider the impact of CfE on future higher education content and delivery when school-leavers enter higher education from 2015/16. Lisa Dow has been awarded a scholarship to develop the use of virtual environments in Social Science and History education in local schools.
Cuboid Aquarium Repopulation
CS1006 AI Competition
The annual CS1006 challenge took place yesterday in the subhonours lab. Students had been designing AIs to play John Nash’s game, Hex, this year.
Congratulations to the competition winners –
Team – “Vanilla Dynamite’s Nuclear Computer Posse”
Students – Chris Lamb, Maria McParland and Robin Nabel.
An abundance of healthy foodstuff and some rather unique team names reflect the ingenuity and creativity of our first year students.
It’s always a fun session to end semester 2.
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- Chris and Robin
Frotscher Medal Runner-Up
Juliana Bowles, the School Disability Coordinator, was runner-up for the new Frotscher Helping Hands Medal for Excellence in Supporting Students. This recognises her selfless commitment to providing support to students at St Andrews.
In the current academic year, we have been very happy to welcome our first totally blind student, Saad Attieh. Juliana has coordinated and largely provided our support for Saad’s studies in Computer Science. She made contact with his teachers in Edinburgh, learned about Braille (including the different ways of representing mathematics in Braille) and in depth design and preparation of teaching materials for accessibility. She has researched, selected and commissioned a range of equipment for preparing accessible diagrams and handouts. She has checked over lecture slides, coursework and exams, nagged other lecturers, including professors, to get their slides ready in time, and attended many lectures to check that the lecturers’ delivery is appropriate.
We hope to be welcoming another partially sighted student in 2013-14.
The photo shows Juliana with the Proctor, Professor Lorna Milne, at the award ceremony in the MUSA galleries (with a slightly alarming painting as backdrop).
Juliana Bowles with the Proctor at the Frotscher Medal Award Ceremony
Summer School – Big Data Information Visualisation
SACHI the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group and the Big Data Lab St Andrews are pleased to announce they will jointly run a SICSA supported “Big Data Information Visualisation” summer school in 2013. This summer school is concerned with the processing, management and hence presentation of “big data”, in an intelligible form with information visualisation techniques and methods. Data-intensive researchers talk about the “three Vs” of Big Data: Volume, Velocity and Variety (see CACM post). In this summer school we aim to demystify the concept of big data by introducing a systematic, scientific and rigorous approach to tackling it. We take a blended theory and practice approach here, by providing both theoretical underpinnings and practical use of the infrastructure to process big-data and the means to understand it with information visualisation.
See the SACHI website for more details.
Event details
- When: 8th July 2013 - 12th July 2013
- Format: Summer School
Junior Honours Team Project
The Honours Lab proved rather lively this afternoon as the JH team projects draw to a close. The students have been exploring OpenSimulator with a view to creating a 3D Interactive St Andrews. Demonstrations highlighted a variety of research areas ranging from social media scraping to NPCs conversing about historical St Andrews. Good effort everyone! Enjoy the Cakes.
Graduates Return to Computer Science
Three of our alumni Andrew McCarthy, Adam Copp and James Smith, dropped by to say hello last week. They were visiting the University to represent Google at the Tech Talk by Google engineers held in the University Gateway Building.
Many will remember Adam, now a software engineer working at Google in London, as the IT and Computer Science Undergraduate of the Year in 2011. The award, sponsored by BT, was launched to find Britain’s most promising IT student securing him a summer placement at BT’s Research and Development site and a week at a BT European office.
It’s always fantastic to see our alumni and we wish them continued success at Google.
Alumni from left: Andrew, James and Adam
System Seminar: Middleware support for wireless sensor network, by Prof. Danny Hughes, KU Leuven, Belgium
Abstract:
Contemporary ICT infrastructures are trending towards a pervasive substrate of internet-connected sensors, actuators and human interfaces. Effective use of this pervasive infrastructure is key to solving 21st century challenges such as: mass transportation, energy conservation and environmental monitoring. Building effective applications that execute on this infrastructure requires advanced middleware support that respects the resource constraints of embedded devices. In this talk, I will present recent work from KU Leuven in the area of middleware support for sensing applications, with a focus on the Loosely-coupled Component Infrastructure (LooCI). I will then discuss emerging opportunities for ‘social sensing’ wherein online social networks are used to source and configure participatory sensor networks.
Bio:
Dr. Danny Hughes is an Assistant Professor with the iMinds-DistriNet group of the department of Computer Science at KU Leuven, Belgium. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University in 2007. He has since worked as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley (USA) and Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) and as a lecturer at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (China). His research interests are in distributed systems, with a focus on middleware support for dynamic systems such as wireless sensor networks, peer-to-peer networks and online social networks. You can find out more about his research at: https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/people/showMember.do?memberID=u0061846
Event details
- When: 2nd May 2013 14:00 - 15:00
- Where: Cole 1.33a
- Format: Seminar
2012 Bill Buxton Best Canadian HCI Dissertation Award
The recipient of the 2012 award for the best doctoral dissertation completed at a Canadian university in the field of Human-Computer Interaction is Dr. Uta Hinrichs. Uta is a postdoc in the SACHI Group with us here.
Canadian Human Computer Communications Society
Société canadienne du dialogue humain-machine
Uta Hinrichs
2012 Bill Buxton Best Canadian HCI Dissertation Award
System Seminar: Unifying sensor fault detection with energy conservation, on 23 April, by Lei Fang, University of St Andrews
Abstract
Wireless sensor networks are attracting increasing interest but suffering from severe challenges such as power constraints and low data reliability. Sensors are often energy-hungry and cannot operate over a long period, and the data they collect are frequently erroneous due to complex causes. Thus a challenging research question is how to optimise energy consumptions on sensors while keeping the collected sensor data accurate. The current literature often treat these two problems separately, however, in this talk we will present an integrated self-organising solution for model-based data collection that can preserve sensors’ energy by reducing the amount of communications and as well as deal with sensor errors.
Bio
Lei Fang is a PhD student supervised by Prof. Simon Dobson and Dr Dharini Balasubramaniam. He received his first degree in Information and Computing Science from the University of Liverpool. His research interests reside in sensor data modelling, fault detection and inference.
Event details
- When: 23rd April 2013 13:00 - 14:00
- Where: Cole 1.33a
- Format: Seminar