The CS3102 students have been working on a variety of OpenSim projects and produced some interesting and original interactive simulations.
Imaginative virtual environments were used to explain a variety of topics including cellular networks, wireless networks, cloud computing, network topologies and denial of service. We caught up with them last week as they finalised their practical work.
Great work everyone.
Congratulations to David on receiving an early Christmas present from CAPOD. He is pictured receiving his Passport to Environmental Excellence.
After a year of hard work our MSc students 2011/12 finished their dissertations in August. Graduation on Friday gave them time to reflect on their MSc experience. Here’s what they said.
Students representing the many MSc courses within Computer Science, stopped by the video room yesterday, to provide a short snippet of their MSc experience. Excellent work everyone. Videos will follow in due course. A bit of reflection and much hilarity ensued but here is a clue as to the personalities involved.
Congratulations to the Masters Class of 2012, and our PhD students, who graduated yesterday. Students were invited to a reception in the school to celebrate their achievement with staff, friends and family. Our graduates have moved on to a wide variety of interesting and challenging employment and further study opportunities, and we wish them all well with their future careers.
A team of Computer Science students from the University of St Andrews came first in their category and runner up overall in the J.P.Morgan Code for Good Competition 2012
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. Students had to be on track for a 2:1. 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 team representing St Andrews was
Leo Liberti, the director of the Optimisation and Sustainable Development Chair at Ecole Polytechnique, will be giving a seminar on Monday 19th November, 2012, at 11am-12, in Jack Cole 1.33a.
Symmetry in Mathematical Programming
Abstract: When solving Mathematical Programming (MP) problems (be they linear or nonlinear, continuous or mixed-integer) using Branch-and-Bound (BB), the presence of symmetries of the solution set results in BB taking longer than strictly needed, due to the symmetries induced on the BB tree. I shall illustrate a class of “symmetry breaking” methods based on reformulating the symmetric MPs so that some of the symmetric optima become infeasible. I shall show how to automatically detect MP formulation symmetries by reducing MP to graphs, and how to automatically generate reformulated MPs with (hopefully) fewer symmetric optima. Although computational tests show that reformulations may not always succeed in making BB terminate faster, they can be applied very efficiently – so they can be considered an efficient “pre-solving step” to running BB.
Interested in writing science fiction then read on. The Paterson Prize was set up by one of our former employees Dr Norman Paterson for students in computer science who liked to write science fiction stories.
Closing date for entries is 31st March 2013
The Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance in association with ScotlandIS hosted their 5th annual DEMOfest, a technology showcase of Scottish Universities Informatics and Computer Science on the 6th November.
The school had three posters at the DEMOfest. Derek and Gordon were promoting their work on the SFC funded Horizon Project “Services to the Cloud”, Masih’s poster was “On The Propagation of Network State Knowledge In Structured Peer-to-Peer Networks”, which forms part of his PhD, and Chris was talking about the work he’s been doing with Alex Voss on “Analysing Social Media”.
In addition, for the first time, workshops were included as part of the DemoFest. Gordon organised the first of these on the topic of Cloud Computing. The lunchtime workshop was aimed at software developers who are considering moving their product to the cloud, and comprised three invited speakers and an open panel Q&A/discussion session.
It was attended by 37 people from industry and academia, and is the first in a series of dissemination workshops being organised as part of the Services to the Cloud project.
The School of Computer Science will be holding a Graduation Reception in the Jack Cole Building on Friday 30th November starting at 12:00 for the Masters Class of 2011. Students are invited to attend after their graduation along with any guests attending the event. Current MSc Students are also invited to the reception, which will continue until 17:00, to meet with the graduates and discuss their experiences both during the course and since they have left.
