Virtual Worlds at Sensation

Weekend at Sensation

It’s been a busy weekend for the virtual worlds group. The reconstructed St Andrews Cathedral and other ongoing projects, were on display at Sensation in Dundee as part of the “Create and Inspire” initiative.

Friday involved organised school visits and Saturday and Sunday proved busy with members of the public entering the reconstruction to speak to Robert the Bruce and take a guided tour.

The visitors book recorded some great comments, extracts from this will be posted shortly, on the Virtual Worlds Blog.

New MSci (Hons) in Computer Science (5 years)

MSci (Hons) in Computer Science (5 years)

The MSci (Honours) in Computer Science is an exciting new integrated masters degree that is being introduced for 2013 entry. It takes place over five years, with an option for direct entry into the second year. Qualified students can therefore graduate with a Masters degree in four years.

The first three years of the MSci are shared with the BSc programmes. In the final two years, you can choose among modules at 4000 and 5000 (Masters) level, enabling both breadth and depth across the discipline.

The final year is spent in 5000 level modules as well as an advanced project. This may take the form of a project within the School, an industrial placement or a research internship, enabling MSci students to build skills that are useful for both academic and industrial careers.

Further information is available through the School Website.

UKCISA grant

Ishbel, Alan & Janie Brooks of ELT have been awarded £8000 from UKCISA (Council for International Student Affairs) to build a virtual St Andrews to aid international student orientation.

Crowdsourcing research featured in the New Scientist

The latest issue of the New Scientist magazine writes about Per Ola Kristensson‘s work on using crowdsourcing and online web sources to create better statistical language models for AAC devices: Crowdsourcing improves predictive texting.

The research paper was published in the Association for Computational Linguistics’  2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. It is published using the open access model and can be read  here. The language models are publicly released and can be found here.

Special software to trawl thousands of historic archives to uncover Empire trade boom

Professor Aaron Quigley’s research on exploratory visualisation allows historians to trace the flow of a wide range of natural resources around the globe.
By working with world experts in text mining within the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance and domain experts in York University, Canada, we can bridge the research divide and answer historical questions on trading

Full news article