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1824 |
School
of Computer Science |
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Weekly Newsletter |
09 Sep 2013 |
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Contents |
News from the Head of SchoolNSS results publishedThe NSS results for undergraduate programmes have been published. The School achieved an overall satisfaction rate of 88%. The University and Faculty averages for 2013 are 85%, so within the University we are doing reasonably well. However, amongst UK Computer Science departments we are 35th out of 111, with almost all of the Russell Group above us. We aim to be amongst the best in the country in research and teaching so this is a disappointing position to be in, but it is not impossible to improve our ranking significantly. If we raised our score by 5% we would be 5th equal in the UK. Around 150 students completed the survey and so changing the opinions of 8 students either way would make a huge difference to our position. I urge you all to keep that in mind when dealing with students this year. Two new lecturers in the APT groupDirk Koch takes up his new post on Monday 9th September,
and Antoniu Pop will join us on 14th October. Dirk comes to us
from the University of Oslo where he has been working on reconfigurable
systems on FPGAs. Antoniu comes to us from INRIA Paris where he was working
on programming language design and compiler optimisation for parallel
architectures. New staff in the External Affairs TeamHolly Dewsnip joins us as External Affairs Intern and Nina Agravat joins us as UG Admissions Assistant. New web pagesThe School’s externally
facing web pages have been totally revamped and go live today at http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ This has been a huge task for many staff in
the School and the Faculty web team. The new look and feel is consistent with
the rest of the Schools in the Faculty. So far the emphasis has been on the
pages relating to student recruitment and admissions, the focus of attention
will now move to research pages. New IT infrastructure for taught studentsThe CSIS team, Faculty IS team and several academic staff from the School have undertaken a total rebuild of the IT systems that we provide for taught students. This has been a colossal undertaking for them, and has kept many people very busy through the summer. Once the new system is bedded in it should enable the CSIS team to manage our teaching systems much more efficiently and provide a higher level of service to the rest of the School. Samantha Bail and the Festival of CodeSamantha Bail, who recently successfully defended her PhD thesis,
helped to organise the Media City UK Festival of Code in association with
Young Rewired State this week. Young Rewired State is a charity that gets
young people to build software by pairing mentors together with young people
across the UK in a week-long Festival of Code. There is a video of Sam
describing the Festival in Frith Ellingham’s blog post from the BBC.
Laura Howarth KirkeLaura has been selected as one of the three finalists for the
Information and Communications Technology section of the Science, Engineering and Technology
Student of the Year Awards.
Laura’s final year project was using Machine Learning for Gesture
Recognition on the Microsoft Kinect. She developed a system which learnt and
recognized dynamic body gestures, capable of controlling devices like a TV.
The School awarded Laura the Kilburn medal and she won a University
Outstanding Academic Achievement Award. She is now on the BBC's prestigious
Future Media Graduate Scheme. First aid sessionIf you missed the first aid session on 4th September it
will be repeated on Thursday 12th Sept, 10.30 – 11:30, Alan Turing Building
room G107. The session is not intended to turn you into a qualified first
aider, but should make you a little more confident that you will know what to
do if something happens in any activity that you are in charge of – lectures,
labs, seminars, or at any other time. Kilburn window replacementEstates are attempting to improve the temperature control of the
Kilburn Building and make the environment a little better. They are trying
double glazed opening windows, a sample of which can be found opposite the
goods lift on the 2nd floor. These will initially be fitted to the
windows around the inside of the courtyard because of ease of external
access. If these are found to improve the affected offices they will be
fitted more extensively. IBM sponsor research school conferenceIBM have sponsored our annual research school
conference which will take place in reading week of the 1st
semester. Steve Furber Welcome week lectureSteve Furber will give one of the University Welcome Week
Distinguished Lecture series. Steve’s lecture, “Computers with Brains” will
be at 18:30 – 19:30 Monday 16th September in Lecture Theatre B,
University Place. Booking is essential, you can book here. Computing for a Sustainable FutureSteve Furber is an organiser of a Royal Society meeting im Manchester
timed to coincide with the Conservative Party Conference, to be opened by the
Rt Hon David Willets MP. “More
efficient computing – from smarter algorithms, better chip design, more
energy-aware software, and improved power management – offers opportunities
to reduce energy consumption, improve mobile computing function, increase
large data use, encourage sustainable behaviour, and lower the cost. From
developing countries to global business, the benefits will be felt by all”. More information and registration details
can be found here. SpiNNaker at the Conservative Party conferenceNo, it’s not a
speaker, but SpiNNaker has been chosen as one of four research
projects that the University will display at the Conservative Party
conference (in Manchester) at the end of the month. President’s visit 2013/14The President’s
annual visit to the School will take place on Wednesday, 5 March 2014, 2.00 –
3.30pm. As usual the visit will include 30 minute open sessions for staff and
students. Staff departuresBernard Richards has left the University after 60 years, having joined as a Masters student in 1953, working with Alan Turing on Mathematical Biology and Morphogenesis. Aravind Vijayaraghavan is leaving Computer Science to join the School of Materials Science. Rina Srabonian has left the School for a post in the Faculty of EPS. Matt Makin in ACSO is leaving us for a new job in Physics, starting on 16th September. ...and finally: Talk like a pirate dayThursday September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day. I note from my diary that there is
a meeting of Faculty Leadership Team, which might be interesting. AnnouncementsManchester Computer Science research ranked 5th in
UK! Steve Pettifer featured in Nature! Steve Pettifer
has featured in a Nature Careers article talking about how using
Altmetrics has strengthened his CV. Altmetrics are a
way of expressing research impact that go beyond academic citations; taking
into account digital use and sharing of data — which can include the number
of times a paper or research product (software, datasets etc.) have been
tweeted, 'liked' on Facebook, covered by the media or blogs, downloaded,
cited on Wikipedia or bookmarked online. Altmetrics offer
researchers a way to showcase the impact of papers that may have not yet
gathered many citations, and to demonstrate engagement with the public. Steve
used them in his CV for promotion to easily illustrate the importance of his
publications. For example, the annotations showed that the PLoS article 'Defrosting the Digital Library:
Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web' with Dr Duncan Hull and Prof. Doug Kell
had been viewed or downloaded more than 68,000 times, making it the
most-accessed review ever to be published in any of the seven PLOS journals! EventsResearch
Photography competition 23
Sep 2013 All researchers at Manchester are invited to take part in the Images of Research
Photography Competition 2013. Submit your original photographs that encapsulate
the theme “The Big Picture and share the wonder, beauty and curiosity
of what you do, why you do it, and how it matters to others. Entries should
aim to raise the general public’s curiosity about the research issue that you
are illustrating. In addition
to the original photographic image, each submission must include an
interesting title and a 150-word abstract describing how and why your
research matters to others. The
Prizes: Public vote: £200 Amazon voucher
| Judges votes: First prize: £150 Amazon voucher | Runners up: £100
Amazon vouchers | Highly commended: £50 Amazon voucher. Submissions
close 23 September 2013, 12 noon, so get snapping! Funding OpportunitiesResearch
Support Office Please contact us through researchsupportcsm@manchester.ac.uk. There is information about support for grant writing and submission at
http://staffnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/reso/ and the EPS
blog The Word contains features News, Events and comment
relevant to Postgraduate Researchers, Research Staff and Supervisors or PIs. Funding
for engineering public engagement 30
Sep 2013 The Royal Academy of Engineering are
looking for new projects to fund through Ingenious - the grant scheme for creative public engagement with
engineering projects. Research Professional is a useful search engine for finding
other funding opportunities. Featured Research OutcomesResearch presented at MedInfo 2013 The paper
describes a methodology that reduces the dimensionality of Electronic
Health Records (EHRs) to make it more amenable to visualisation, mining and
clustering. Research AwardsCongratulations to all of those involved in the following awards! Lazarus: Resurrecting data and knowledge from life
science articles by crowd-sourcing
2013
IBM Faculty Award for CS in Big Data Engineering John Keane, Goran Nenadic Funding body: IBM Award amount: $10k John Keane is one of the winners of IBM's 2013 Big Data and
Analytics Faculty Awards. He joins 13 other researchers from around the
world who will each receive $10,000 to bring together their innovative
research for the benefit of curricular development. The winning proposal at
Manchester is one of only four 2013 IBM Faculty awards in the UK. Have we missed something? If you have some award news
that you would like us to know about please contact Sarah Chatwin. |
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