Students from all years of study took advantage of the annual Technology Career Fayre, held last Friday at Agnes Blackadder Hall. The event was followed by a networking opportunity within the School of Computer Science. Representatives from Tech companies Adobe, Skyscanner, Toshiba, Avaloq, Amazon and Bloomberg met with students throughout the busy afternoon session. Participants were photographed during the Q&A, look closely and you could spot some alumni…
Images courtesy of Alex Bain.
The School of Computer Science welcomed back three alumni to give keynote talks at our lost in translation event earlier this week. The well-attended and informative event organised by Professor Aaron Quigley, afforded current PhD students and early researchers in computer science an exclusive opportunity to hear from previous students about their transition from academia to industry.
Talks chaired by Dr Ognjen Arandelovic, highlighted the challenges and opportunities faced during their PhD journey but without doubt strengthened the concept of transferable skills provided by postgraduate study and research activities. Presentations incorporated research skills, internships, analytical ability, teamwork, the value of teaching and tutoring responsibilities, designing the CS merchandise, communication skills, the flexibility of research areas and the importance of social activities.
Breakout sessions permitted small group discussions with each of our alumni, where they conveyed different experiences of research activities in the school, and their on-going experience of working within industry and within a recent start up. We are extremely proud of our alumni and thank them for their continued contribution to scheduled events, and for being fantastic ambassadors for Computer Science at St Andrews. You can read Neil’s “moving from academia to industry” blog post for his personal journey and reflection.
Alumni Keynote Speakers:
James Smith, Google, London.
Angus Macdonald, Aetherworks, New York.
Neil Moore, Adobe, Edinburgh.
Invited Guest:
Polly Purvis, CEO of ScotlandIS.
The event was funded by SICSA, The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance.
Congratulations to St Andrews student Simone Ivan Conte, who has been selected as one of the four finalists in the Young Software Engineer of the Year Award 2014.
Simone’s project (pictured below) involved creating a haptic device and API for displaying vector graphics (e.g., trees and graphs) for people with visual disabilities. According to his Senior Honours dissertation supervisor, Dr. Miguel Nacenta
this work demonstrates a lot of ingenuity and has a large potential impact.
The Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards are given for the best undergraduate software projects completed by students studying computer science and software engineering in Scotland.
Simone graduated in Computer Science from St Andrews earlier this year and is currently working for Adobe on a summer internship. In September he will start his doctoral studies, funded by Adobe, with Professor Alan Dearle at St Andrews.
Previous finalists and prize winners have included Thomas Grimes, Alistair Scott, Craig Paul, Angus MacDonald, Ben Catherall and Graeme Bell. Further testament to the quality of talented students graduating from the School of Computer Science.
The winners of this year’s award will be revealed on 2nd October 2014! Fingers crossed.
Words we use to describe our alumni, who work in New York, Switzerland, London and Edinburgh amongst other places.
Whether working for established companies such as Adobe and Google or in their own business start-ups such as AetherWorks LLC. and PlanForCloud (formerly ShopForCloud) our graduates continue to flourish. And rumour has it more of our talented CS graduates will be joining some of them shortly. The suspense! They are all exemplars of why St Andrews is the only Scottish university to feature in the 2013 High Fliers, a report about the graduate market in 2013.
Clockwise from top left:
Rob, Angus and Greg from AetherWorks LLC., who took time out to capture a photo of themselves outside their offices in New York.
Ali at graduation, sporting a colour-co-ordinated Google Glass (who knew!). Listen to Ali discuss his career at the SICSA PhD conference careers panel.
We caught up with Adam, Andrew and James earlier this year when they represented Google at the Tech Talk by Google engineers.
Neil (complete with sunglasses) visited the school last week, on an unusually sunny day, with colleagues from Adobe.
Thanks to:
AetherWorks LLC.: Robert MacInnis, Angus MacDonald, Allan Boyd and Greg Bigwood.
PlanForCloud: Ali Khajeh-Hosseini and Alistair Scott.
Adobe: Neil Moore.
Google: James Smith, Adam Copp and Andrew McCarthy.
Editorial Support: Anne Campbell
