MANCHESTER

           1824

School of Computer Science

Weekly Newsletter

6 August 2012

Contents

News from HoS

This Week

School Events

External Events

Funding Opps

Prize & Award Opps

Research Awards

Staff News

Vacancies

 

Links

News Submissions

Newsletter Archive

School Strategy

School Intranet

School Seminars

ESNW Seminars

NaCTeM Seminars

 

News from the Head of School

Eamon Griffin

Eamon Griffin left the School on Friday 20th July. The words below were written by Allan in my absence but I fully endorse them.

 

I would like to thank Eamon, who has recently retired from the School, for all the sterling work he has done for us over the past few years.

 

Eamon has worked in the School since 2006, having previously worked in other parts of the university since 1990. In his time with us he has managed numerous projects, small and large, helping with all possible aspects of each task. Whenever we have contemplated some change to the structure or use of the Kilburn and IT Buildings he has helped us to see what was feasible, what would work and what wouldn't, and what was likely to be affordable. When we have embarked on a project he has looked after the details, and has liaised with the university's Estates department. He has paid particular attention to the needs of the buildings' users, ensuring as far as possible that disruptive building work took place outside teaching periods and also outside periods when the buildings were in use for external activities such as open days and conferences. The one major task that he has been unable to see to completion is the improvement of the heating and ventilation systems in the Kilburn Building, but he got the current review of this under way and a report is likely to be received by the University soon.

 

ACSO will take any donations to a collection to mark Eamon's contribution to the life of the school. I would just like to reiterate my thanks--without the work he has done for us over the last six years our everyday working environment would be considerably less attractive than it is now.

Allan Ramsay, Deputy Head of School

 

If you have any issues that you would normally have taken to Eamon, please email environs@cs.man.ac.uk or speak to Karen Varty.

Pavel Klinov

Pavel Klinov’s PhD thesis “Practical Probabilistic Description Logics” (2011) was nominated for the E.W. Beth Dissertation Prize for outstanding dissertations in the fields of Logic, Language, and Information. Pavel was elected to the five leading candidates, an excellent result for an international thesis prize.  

Conference thanks

In June, The Alan Turing Centenary Conference and the 6th International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning were held in Manchester, both with great success – we received loads of very nice compliments from attendees regarding the location, hospitality, and friendliness of service they experienced. Both events were supported by the school (the Turing Centenary also by the university), and the organizers are extremely grateful for the superb support and help they received from members of the school, in particular to our fabulous student helpers Mohammad Khodadadi, Biser Milanov, Patrick Koopmann, and Fabio Papacchini, and to the brilliant Vicki Chamberlin, Tony Curran, Eamon Griffin, Ruth Maddocks, and Rina Srabonian!

Uli Sattler

Featured publications this week (by Robert Stevens)

This is a regular section in the weekly newsletter.  This is a small step to help us all to know what research is happening in the School and what is being published. Please continue to add all of your new publications to eScholar, but also send ones that you wish to advertise in the newsletter to Robert.Stevens@manchester.ac.uk.

 

Alan Rector, Sebastian Brandt, Nick Drummond, Matthew Horridge, Colin Pulestin  and Robert Steven, “Engineering use cases for modular development of ontologies in OWL”, Applied Ontology Volume 7, Number (2012), 113-132, DOI: 10.3233/AO-2012-010

http://iospress.metapress.com/content/e03535x37752730n/fulltext.pdf

 

Rak, R., Rowley, A. and Ananiadou, S. (2012). Collaborative Development and Evaluation of Text-processing Workflows in a UIMA-supported Web-based Workbench. In: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), pp. 2971-2976 URL

 

Rak, R., Rowley, A., Black, W.J. and Ananiadou, S. (2012). Argo: an integrative, interactive, text mining-based workbench supporting curation. In: Database: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation, 2012 URL

Steve Furber’s article “Low-Power Chips to Model a Billion Neurons” is the front cover story in August’s IEEE Spectrum, which is written for the entire membership of the IEEE. The full article is available online at:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/lowpower-chips-to-model-a-billion-neurons/0

Events

ICO Alan Turing Centenary Lecture                                                        11 Sept 12

The ICO celebrates the life of Alan Turing with inaugural lecture.

 

2012 is the 100 year anniversary of the birth of mathematician, code breaker, logician and computer scientist Alan Turing. Alan Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.

 
To mark this anniversary, the ICO is also pleased to announce that the first ICO Alan Turing Lecture will be held at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester on Tuesday 11 September.


The inaugural lecture will be delivered by distinguished Cambridge historian Professor Christopher Andrew, the official historian of MI5, who will be discussing the life and work of Turing.


If you would be interested in attending you are invited to send your expressions of interest to
dpc@ico.gsi.gov.uk. While places are limited we will be doing our best to accommodate those wishing to attend.

 

We hope to arrange similar lectures in the future to highlight important issues connected to the Information Commissioner’s Office’s work.

High performance computing course - free                                          25 Sept 12

Mixed Mode OpenMP/MPI programming for multicore computers

1 day course run by NAG (Numerical Algorithms Group) in Manchester on 25th September.  Provided free of charge to UK academics whose work is covered by the remit of one of the participating research councils (EPSRC, NERC and BBSRC).

Further information

 

Funding Opportunities

School Research Office

There is information about support for grant writing and submission at http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/reso/

 

Research and Grant Awards

Integration of Dynamic Documentation Knowledge Services into Siemens Framework

Funding Body: Siemens Plc   
PI: Bijan Parsia
Award Amount: £1015568.86

Visiting Fellowship

Funding Body: Royal  Academy of Engineering   
PI: Ross King
Award Amount: £3600

University Research Fellowship

Funding Body: The Royal Society   
PI: Konstantin Korovin
Award Amount: £260646.43