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Maths Lecture Theatre B
Time: 14:00 to 15:00
Date: Tuesday 4th March

Event details

  • When: 4th March 2014 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Maths Theatre B
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Student Placements for Female Undergraduates

In September 2013 the Scottish Resource Centre for Women in SET, funded by Scottish Government, launched a ground breaking new initiative called Careerwise, with the aim of encouraging more women to pursue science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers through work placements aimed at female undergraduates in Scotland.
Twenty organisations have signed up to Careerwise between them offering 43 paid work placements, presenting a unique opportunity for women to gain valuable work experience in industries where they are significantly underrepresented.
Placements take place between June and August 2014 and are paid at a salary of at least £16K pro rata. Applications are welcome from women currently studying STEM subjects at any Scottish University. The closing date for all applications is 31st March 2014.

Organisations providing placements include Ace Winches, Technip, National Oilwell Varco, Atkins, Leiths, Nova Biotics, Nallatech, Cairndene, Selex ES, KP Technology, Insight Arcade, URS, Toshiba Medical Visualization Systems, Edinburgh Napier University, Heriot-Watt University, Royal Botanic Gardens, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and the University of Edinburgh.

They have 17 computer science opportunities available for female undergraduates.

Students can View the placements here and download the Interest Application Form

Any enquiries regarding the Careerwise initiative should be directed to careerwise@napier.ac.uk or 0131 455 2267.

The Minister for Universities and Science, David Willtts MP, announced funding of £4.6 million for 21 Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities projects as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) investment in Big Data.

On Thursday 6 February 2014 the Minister for Universities and Science, David Willtts MP, announced funding of £4.6 million for 21 Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities projects as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) investment in Big Data.
Along with colleagues in the School of Informatics and the Department of English & Scottish Literature in the University of Edinburgh Aaron Quigley and Uta Hinrichs have been awarded one of these grants for the project Palimpsest: an Edinburgh Literary Cityscape. In this project they aim to create a new, visualised literary cityscape, based on an extensive dataset of literary texts. This project has a focus on Edinburgh but the plan is for the techniques, methods and tools to apply to other UNESCO World Cities of Literature or indeed any literary city.
Universities and Science Minister David Willetts said: “Getting quality data out of the hands of a few and into the public domain is an important goal for this Government. This funding will help to overcome the challenge of making vast amounts of rich data more accessible and easier to interpret by the public. These 21 projects promise to come up with innovative long-lasting solutions.” [1]
Palimpsest will be available to an online community of remote visitors, those with an interest in the literature of Scotland and its constituent places who explore the city and its culture from a distance. Palimpsest arises out of the idea of creating an innovative way of engaging people with literature, and drawing on literature’s own dependence on, and engagement with, place and space. Exploration of the relation between urban places and literature first arose in sociology in the mid 19th century.
Professor James Loxley from the University of Edinburgh said “We are looking forward to working with expert colleagues at St Andrews on this project. Palimpsest is all about learning to look at the literary writing of Edinburgh in ways that reveal collective imaginative investments in place and patterns within the work of individual authors. Visualisation is key to this – we want to be able to see the literary city, and the city in literature, in new and exciting ways that are also intuitively comprehensible to users coming to the resource for the first time.”
Professor Andrew Prescott the Digital Transformation theme Leadership Fellow commented; “The exciting projects announced by the Arts and Humanities Research Council illustrate how the arts and humanities can help exploit the opportunities offered by these vast data resources. They cover an amazing range of subject areas, from classical history and more efficient retrieval of information about music to the use of online gambling data for more accurate political analysis. By developing better tools for the visualisation and analysis of data, these projects will have significant impact beyond the arts and humanities and will assist the UK in grasping the economic and social opportunities offered by big data.” [1]

1. AHRC announcement 06/02/2014.

School delivering for Code First Girls

The School of Computer Science is delivering a Code First Girls programme. Code First: Girls is the coding education arm of Entrepreneur First, a not-for-profit organisation supporting graduates to build their own tech startups. Within this industry there is a recognition that women are at a disadvantage due to their lack of technical knowledge and this is something that they are keen to correct. Entrepreneur First is supported by Microsoft, McKinsey & Co., Experian, The City of London, BSkyB and Silicon Valley Bank and endorsed by the government.

The programme is a 7 week course, 2 hours a week, teaching basic programming techniques. At the end of the programme, the participants will be able to build a simple website, be confident in conversing with technical peers and have the stepping stones to start further exploring this area.

The course team consists of 3 of our PhD Students (Anne-Marie Mann, Lakshitha De Silva and Oche Ejembi) and one of our honours students Melissa Mozifan. The programme is supported by the Malcolm MacLeod Vice Principal (Enterprise and Engagement) and Bonnie Hacking in careers. There are 54 women, from across all schools and years of study, signed up for the programme
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Data Matching Research at the Australian National University

Seminar by Peter Christen, Australian National University

Techniques for matching, linking, and integrating data from different sources are becoming increasingly important in many application areas, including health, census, taxation, immigration, social welfare, in crime and fraud detection, in the assembly of national security intelligence, for businesses and in bibliometrics, as well as in the social sciences.

Today, data matching (also known as entity resolution, duplicate detection, and data or record linkage) not only faces computational challenges due to the increasing size of data collections and their complexity, but also operational challenges as many applications move from static environments into real-time processing and analysis of potentially large and fast data streams, where real-time matching of records is required. Finally, with the growing concerns by the public of the use of their data, privacy and confidentiality often need to be considered when personal information is being linked and shared between organisations.

In this talk I will present a short introduction to data matching, describe these above discussed challenges, and provide an overview of three areas of research currently conducted in data matching at the Australian National University:

  1. Scalable real-time entity resolution on dynamic databases
  2. Scalable privacy-preserving record linkage techniques
  3. Efficient matching of historical census data across time

 

Event details

  • When: 12th February 2014 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Honey 103 - GFB
  • Format: Seminar

Live stream from the Informatics Forum by Kevin Dorren, CEO of Diet Chef


The iV Tuesday Speaker Series features a new programme of talks given by prominent members of the business community. The programme seeks to inspire and motivate those who wish to develop their careers in different directions or have entrepreneurial ambitions.

Event details

  • When: 25th March 2014 18:00 - 19:30
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: iVTues Speaker Series

At the Edge by Alan Dix, University of Birmingham

Abstract:
From buying plane tickets to eGovernment, participation in consumer and civic society is predicated on continuous connectivity and copious computation . And yet for many at the edges of society, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, and those in rural areas, poor access to digital technology makes them more marginalised, potentially cut off from modern citizenship. I spent three and half months last summer walking over a thousand miles around the margins of Wales in order to experience more directly some of the issues facing those on the physical edges of a modern nation, who are often also at the social and economic margins. I will talk about some of the theoretical and practical issues raised; how designing software with constrained resources is more challenging but potentially more rewarding than assuming everyone lives with Silicon Valley levels of connectivity.

Bio:
Alan is Professor of Computing at University of Birmingham and Senior Researcher at Talis based in Birmingham, but, when not in Birmingham, or elsewhere lives in Tiree a remote island of the west coast of Scotland.

Alan’s career has included mathematical modelling for agricultural crop sprayers, COBOL programming, submarine design and intelligent lighting. However, he is best known for his work in Human Computer Interaction over three decades including his well known HCI textbook and some of the earliest work in formal methods, mobile interaction, and privacy in HCI. He has worked in posts across the university sector as well as a period as founder director of two dotcom companies, aQtive (1998) and vfridge (2000), which, between them, attracted £850,000 of venture capital funding. He currently works part-time for the University of Birmingham and is on the REF Panel for Computer Science. He also works part-time for Talis, which, inter alia, provides the reading list software used at St Andrews.

His interests and research methods remain, as ever, eclectic, from formal methods, to technical creativity and the modelling of regret. At present he is completing a book, TouchIT, about physicality in design, working with musicologists on next generation digital archives, envisioning how learning analytics can inform and maybe transform university teaching, and working in various projects connected with communication and energy use on Tiree and rural communities.

Last year he completed a walk around Wales as an exploration into technical issues ‘at the edge’, the topic of his seminar.

Event details

  • When: 6th May 2014 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Maths Theatre B
  • Format: Seminar