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1824 |
School
of Computer Science |
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Weekly Newsletter |
4 July 2011 |
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Contents |
News from Head of SchoolAnother
Farewell! We also said farewell last week to Len Freeman who has been in the University since October 1976! Our very best wishes to Len for his future, which I believe is going to include a substantial amount of golf, and our sincere thanks to him for all his contributions to the University and the School over the years. Animation11
On Friday 1 July the School ran the 4th annual Animation11
Film Festival and Inspirational Computer Science Day, at the Martin Harris
Centre, here on campus. We welcomed over 350 schoolchildren, teachers and
parents from all over the UK, making this
event the highight of our Public Engagement
programme. Afternoon activities included a superb talk on Animation in Games
from Fred Gill of Electronic Arts, a talk on stereo vision from Steve Pettifer and Dave Thorne, and two rooms of hands-on
workshop activities, the highlight for many people being Ben Blundell's
"Only Kinect" installation (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG2wkZnuQ-8).
Photos and a video of the day will be published soon. Sincere thanks to our
generous sponsors Electronic Arts, Google and The Granada Foundation, and a
huge thank-you to all the team running the competition. Next up...
Animation12! -- Toby Howard Reminder:
School Best Thesis Prize - Call for Nominations Each year, we award a prize for best PhD thesis. Apart from obviously being good for the student's CV, the hope is that among the nominations will be a future BCS Distinguished Dissertation Winner. Last year, we had no submissions, and the School Best Thesis Prize was subsequently not awarded. It would be a real shame to do so again this year. So far we have had 1 submission. I urge you to consider your students who have viva'd in the past 12 months - details on how to submit (via Janet Boyd) are below. Gavin Brown This is a reminder that the deadline for nominations is 15 July 2011. http://intranet.cs.man.ac.uk/researchs/prizes.php
To nominate, please send the following supporting evidence to Janet Boyd
Janet Boyd EventsRecent event: Beyond
the PhD: Academia vs Industry On Friday 17th of June the academic event “Beyond the PhD: Academia vs Industry” was held in IT 407, School of Computer
Science. The event was organised by the Mentors of the School and involved a
panel discussion between the following invited people from industry and
academia: Dr. Matt Horsnell – Research Engineer at ARM Dr. Ugo Ekweozor – Solution Analyst at Computer Sciences Corporation Dr. Daniel Owen – IBM (Manchester) Prof Ulrike Sattler – Professor, University of Manchester Dr Barry Cheetham – Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester Dr Simon Harper - Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester The floor was open to questions and many topics were touched during the discussion some of which were: - the usefulness of a PhD degree when choosing a career path in academia and industry - differences and similarities between research in academia and research in industry - challenges in research You can watch videos of the event here. More information and photos from the event will be added in Mentor’s webpage. British National Conference on Databases 11-14 July 11 The school will be hosting the 28th British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD), and associated workshop on Teaching, Learning, and Assessment of Databases (TLAD), from 11th to 14th July. BNCOD is a forum for discussing original research in the theory and practice of database systems, and attracts an international audience to discuss the leading research topics of the day in the field of data, information and knowledge management. The theme of BNCOD 2011 will be "Linked Data" with keynotes from Professor Christian Bizer from the Free University of Berlin, and Professor Karl Aberer from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. For more information and full details of the programme please see http://bncod2011.cs.man.ac.uk/. We invite members of the school to join us. However, spaces for all sessions are limited so we ask that you contact us on bncod2011@googlegroups.com to reserve a seat by Thursday 7th July. Confirmation of your allocation will be sent on Friday 8th July. Emerging Technologies 15 July 11 The University GPU Club Presents: Prof. Jack Dongarra speaking on Emerging Technologies 14:00, John Casken theatre, Martin Harris Centre Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are fast becoming an option for undertaking intensive computational research without having to buy expensive computers with fast interconnects. The 100+ people at each University GPU Club pays testament to the interest in this area, but what are the barriers to using GPUs for High End Computing (HEC) and how will we overcome them? GPU technology isn't standing still. Chip manufacturers are looking at combining elements of traditional CPUs, memory and GPUs, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are in re-ascendence and research abounds in the hardware architecture field. Hardware is only part of the issue: how to program new hardware efficiently will increasingly be key. Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies, Materials and new Production Technologies, National Contact Point visit – 18th AugustThe EU Office
have arranged for the National Contact Point for the FP7 theme ‘NMP’ (Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies, Materials and new
Production Technologies) Dr Alastair McGibbon from
the TSB, to come to Manchester on 18th August to present the
2012 NMP work programme following the summer calls in July. Please note
that Liz Fay will shortly be advertising the time and venue of the event. The formal
presentation should take no longer than a couple of hours during which time
Dr McGibbon will give more detail and some insider
knowledge on the requirements of the specific calls. This session
should prove invaluable for EPS staff wishing to engage in this round of
calls. Dr McGibbon has said that following the presentation he will
be happy to meet with staff already engaged, or wishing to engage, in
research in the areas covered by the NMP calls either over lunch or at some
point later in the afternoon. Could you please let
Vicki Holt (Victoria.holt@manchester.ac.uk) know by 13th July
if you wish to:
Funding OpportunitiesERC 2012 Work Programme Various Link (csonly) to a draft of the ERC 2012 Work Programme which is due to be published next month. It outlines the details for 4 expected ERC calls:
As this is a draft document please treat its content with caution and do not circulate beyond the University. |
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