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Weekly Newsletter |
15 Nov 2010 |
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Contents |
News from Head of SchoolSteve Furber to be REF Panel Chair Congratulations to Steve Furber on his selection as the Chair of the Research Excellence Framework Panel for Computer Science. Being selected for such a responsible role is a strong signal as to his standing in the national computer science community. Research Council Grant ApplicationsThe recent Comprehensive Spending Review has been reasonably supportive of science, and it is anticipated that budgets for research councils will reduce only at close to the rate of inflation over the next four years after a period of growth. This means that the school should be in a position to broadly maintain its research council income over the next few years. Unfortunately, 2009/10 was not an especially strong year for the school. Although our EPSRC success rate was 50% and our BBSRC success rate was 28%, this was in the context of a much reduced total number of applications where the average size was smaller than in previous years, giving rise to much reduced income. Early signs in relation to our 2010/11 research income are not especially promising, so this email is to encourage research active staff to compete for research council funding for research. Operational Performance ReviewThe university carries out an annual Operational Performance Review (OPR), which explores many different figures on teaching and research performance. For the most part, Computer Science seems to perform reasonably well (although lots of figures are hard to compare across schools). The current state of play in headline activities is that our research funding is reasonably flat after a period of growth, and that our citation position is strong using the methodology the university prefers. In teaching, our National Student Survey score is now satisfactory (in general we should not be satisfied with satisfactory…), and in the current year our admissions position looks quite strong. The two things the university is most worried about in the school are:
Various people did a lot of leg work trying to improve our understanding of some of the numbers in the OPR in the run up to the grilling this tends to be; their help is much appreciated! PhD Plus awardsCongratulations to the following who have recently received a PhD Plus award: Christoph Sticksel Congratulations to Djihed AfifiOne of our postgraduate students, Djihed Afifi, has won the prize for Best tool/Demo paper as part of the 1st International Runtime verification conference held at the beginning of November 2010. The paper was titled “ESAT: A Tool for Animating Logic-based Specifications of Evolvable Component Systems” and the prize involves a cash sum of €200. EventsCICADA Workshops 15/16 and 18 Nov 10 The Centre for Interdisciplinary Computational and
Dynamical Analysis (CICADA) announces two workshops to be held in the week
beginning 15 November 2010. Both workshops are in the 15-16 Nov: Meeting in Honour of Dave Broomhead's 60th birthday 18 Nov: IM-CPS 2010 International Symposium on Interdisciplinary Modeling of Cyber-Physical Systems Parallel Computing using MPI 16 Nov 10MPI (Message Passing Interface) has emerged as a standard for writing portable, message-passing programs for parallel computers with distributed memory (such as the national HPC facility, HECToR). An intensive one day course, introducing the essentials of MPI, sufficient to parallelize a serial code, and including hands-on sessions is being run by IT Service on Tuesday 16 November. To apply for a place please visit the site. School Board meeting 17 Nov 101530-1700 in IT
building room 407. Annual Sustainability Focus event 17 Nov 10Come along to the University's Focus on Travel exhibition on Wednesday, 17 November and learn more about what we as individuals and as a University can do to reduce the carbon emissions caused by our daily commuting and business travel. The University is committed to reducing its carbon footprint by 40% by 2020 and transport-related emissions make up a significant part of this footprint. The exhibition will run from 10am to 2pm at www.sustainability.manchester.ac.uk/campus/travel Cyber bullying session 17 Nov 1012:30, to last around 45 minutes. G021 As part of Anti Bullying Week (November 15th – 19th) and November’s Diversity Calendar Theme of Dignity at Work, we are delighted to announce a lunchtime session on ‘Cyber Bullying’. Spaces are limited, please contact Paul Marks-Jones for further information or to reserve a place. Cloud computing: an overview and an example using next generation sequencing 19 Nov 10Robert Haines,
myGrid Team, 14-15:00, Room
1.10, The Scholarly Communication Landscape: Opportunities and challenges 30 Nov 1010-17:00, The This is a one day symposium with keynote presentations from renowned speakers. The purpose is to help University staff and research students understand some of the more complex issues presented by the technological, financial and social developments that are transforming scholarly communication. The event is aimed at University researchers (staff and students), research support staff, librarians, research managers, and anyone with an active interest in the field will find this symposium helpful to their developing use and provision of research in digital formats. To register an interest, please visit our website, or email Carly Rolfe. Closing date for registration is 26 November 2010. Funding OpportunitiesTSB funding opportunity: Technology-Inspired Collaborative Research and Development. October 2010 competition for funding 18 Nov 10 SummaryThe Technology Strategy Board proposes to stimulate
innovation across its key enabling technology areas to help ensure that
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