MANCHESTER 1824	School of Computer Science
Weekly Newsletter	25 March 2013
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 Animation 13 Animation13, the School's 6th annual UK schools computer animation competition, closed for entries at midnight on Friday 22 March. This year we had a record number of schools registered, 667, and we received 1,120 entries from 1,583 students in 154 schools. The team will be watching all the entries over Easter, shortlisting for the Education/Industry external judges who come on 1 May to make the final awards. Festival day is Friday 12 July at Martin Harris -- come in the afternoon and join in the fun (the morning is sold out). National Science and Engineering Week Science Fair CS PG and UG students exhibited stands on Augmented Reality and Nanoscience at the National Science and Engineering Week Science Fair at the Great Hall, Sackville Street Building. Over 850 school students, mostly Y7 - Y9, attended the science fair over 4 days. This year included a special session for primary school students as well. Thanks to Aravind Vijayaraghavan for organising the School’s contributions. Recruitment and Admissions Manager Cassie Barlow has been offered and accepted the post of Recruitment and Admissions Manager.  Cassie is currently the University's Admissions Officer in the central admissions team, she was previously an International Officer and has also worked at UCL. Announcements 2013 Karen Spärck Jones lecture 23 May 2013 Professor Barbara Liskov will be presenting the 3rd Karen Spärck Jones lecture, honouring women in computing research. This is an evening event, with sponsorship from IBM and BCS, that will follow the London Hopper Colloquium at the BCS London office.  Professor Liskov is the winner of the 2008 Turing Award, and combines the roles of Institute Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Associate Provost for Faculty Equity, MIT, USA. Professor Liskov's lecture is titled 'The power of abstraction' and will discuss how the abstraction mechanisms we use today came to be, how they are supported in programming languages, and some possible areas for future research. http://academy.bcs.org/ksj Events Hitting the Sweetspot: Economic Rewriting of Knowledge Bases 25 Mar 13 Prof Birte Glimm. University of Ulm 14:00, Lecture Theatre 1.3, Kilburn Building Seminars web page The incredible ELK 26 Mar 13 Dr. Yevgeny Kazakov, University of Ulm 15:00, Lecture Theatre 1.3, Kilburn Building Seminars web page Seminar: Building social media theory from case studies: A new frontier for IS research 26 April 13 Manchester Informatics will be hosting a seminar on “Building social media theory from case studies: A new frontier for IS research” on Friday 26th April, from 12.30pm to 2:00pm in Room IT407, IT Building, Oxford Rd. The seminar will be led by Professor Chris Holland, Manchester Business School, the speaker will be Professor Cathy Urquhart, Chair of Digital and Sustainable Enterprise, Research and Knowledge Exchange, Manchester Metropolitan University http://www2.business.mmu.ac.uk/staff/staffdetails.php?uref=430 Tea/coffee and cakes will be available – please register here so that we have an idea of numbers. Funding Opportunities How safe will tomorrow's railway be?"  workshop report Richard Banach's report on the "How safe will tomorrow's railway be?"  workshop. RRUK (Rail Research UK) ran a workshop in York on "How safe will tomorrow's railway be?" on 19 March. The idea was to explore ways of reducing risk associated with the railways even further, prompted by a desire to reduce costs by a billion or so. (No one said "get rid of the lawyers", unfortunately.) Anyway, there is a small amount (100k) to fund a small number of feasibility studies in this area. You have to be part of a consortium involving a participant at the workshop (me, RHB) to play. From what was said by presenters, it seems to me that there are certainly opportunities for machine learning and text mining (and any other "big data" technologies). Industry participants seemed unusually keen to talk, perhaps because all projects have to be university led. Proposals (4-5pp.) to be submitted by 29 April, to start by 5 Sept and finish by 6 June 2014. Perhaps unfortunate that there was a fatality on the line on my way back. Guess this stuff is really needed. For further information contact Richard Banach. Featured Research Outcomes Martin Grymel's thesis "Error Control with Binary Cyclic Codes" was passed with no corrections on 18th February 2013 (supervisor Steve Furber). Eleni Mikroyannidi's thesis "Detection of Syntactic and Semantic Regularities inOntologies" was passed with minor corrections on 22nd February 2013 (supervisors Robert Stevens and Alan Rector).