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1824 |
School
of Computer Science |
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Weekly
Newsletter |
10 November 2014 |
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Contents |
News
from Head of School
Promotion Congratulations to Josh Knowles who has been promoted to Reader in Computational Thinking with effect from 1st November 2014. Recognition Simon Harper has been designated ACM Distinguished Scientist in ACM’s 2014 awards. School
Research Symposium The School’s annual research symposium last week was a great success, there’s an extended article written by Uli Sattler below. Wear It Pink The School wore it pink with an exceptional choice of cakes in the common room, raising money for breast cancer research. There are photos below. And finally… Another year, another Movember. It’s still not too late to take this opportunity to try a moustache and raise money for a good cause. You can join here: http://uk.movember.com/team/1653437 and you don’t have to be a man: http://uk.movember.com/get-involved/mo-sistas. News and announcements
IMG PhD student wins scholarship to attend SC14 (Supercomputing14) SC14 is the leading conference on high performance computing with over 5000 attendees and all of the major supercomputing companies demonstrating their latest innovations. This year EPSRC held a competition for funded scholarships for PhD students to attend and Ms Zeqian Meng, a second year PhD student in the Information Management Group, was one of a handful of UK PhD students selected. She will attend SC14 in New Orleans from November 16-21. This is Zeqian's second such success; she was recently awarded a scholarship to attend the IEEE eScience conference in Brazil from October 20-24. School
Research Symposium 2014 Last week we had this year’s instalment of our Research Symposium, with 36 oral presentations, 1 keynote by Stephen Brewster, ~50 poster presentations, and various prizes. I would like to say a great “Thank You” to all presenters: I hope you enjoyed the symposium as much as I did! There was a real buzz around the school, with a lot of people discussing their research. Russell Bee (IBM) was impressed by the depth and breadth of the ongoing research and the quality of the poster presentations! A big “Thank you” also goes to the session chairs and to the judges of the poster session, who helped us to identify two winning poster presenters: Iliada Eleftheriou and Jonathan Heathcote, congratulations! Posters from the symposium will be displayed on the 2nd floor of the Kilburn Building. Prof. Uli Sattler ·
Best poster to Iliada Eleftheriou (supervised by Dr Suzanne Embury
and Prof. Andrew Brass): Information portability in large, complex
organisations. ·
Best poster to Jonathan Heathcote (supervised by Dr Jim Garside and
Prof. Steve Furber): Synchronising
Clocks in an Asynchronous Super-Computer Other awards that were presented on the day: · Best Thesis Prize was awarded to Maytham Alabbas (supervised by Prof. Allan Ramsay). Thesis title: Textual entailment for modern standard Arabic (2013) · Best Paper Prize was awarded to Patrick Koopman (supervised by Dr Renate Schmidt) for Forgetting Concept and Role Symbols in ALCH-Ontologies. Patrick Koopmann and Renate A. Schmidt, published in LPAR-19, LNCS 8312, pp. 552–567, 2013. · Runner-up Best Paper Prize was awarded to Konstantinos Sechidis (supervised by Dr Gavin Brown) for Statistical Hypothesis Testing in Positive Unlabelled Data. Konstantinos Sechidis, Borja Calvo, and Gavin Brown; ECML PKDD 2014. · Runner-up Best Paper Prize was awarded to Tamas Madl (supervised by Dr Ke Chen) for Bayesian integration of information in hippocampal place cells. Madl T., Franklin S., Chen K., Montaldi D., and Trappl R. (2014); PLoS ONE 9(3): e89762. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0089762.
Patent for
PhD student Toshiba Research Europe Ltd has filed a patent application for part of the work produced by Mustafa A. Mustafa, an Industrial CASE Study PhD student supervised by Dr Ning Zhang and jointly sponsored by Toshiba and EPSRC. The title of the patent is “Method for distributing data from one or more metering devices to two or more third parties”. Mustafa is the primary inventor of the patent and Ning is the secondary inventor. PhD
congratulations! · Craig Barton (supervised by Professor Tom Thomson) has been awarded his PhD with his thesis entitled: Investigation of the structural properties in [Co/Pd] multilayers; For application on Exchanged coupled composite media · Alan Stokes (supervised by Dr Alvaro Fernandes; co-supervisor: Professor Norman Paton) has been awarded his PhD with his thesis entitled: Resilient Sensor Network Query Processing IMG PhD students win scholarship to attend SC14 (Supercomputing14) SC14 is the leading conference on high performance computing with over 5000 attendees and all of the major supercomputing companies demonstrating their latest innovations. This year EPSRC held a competition for funded scholarships for PhD students to attend and two students from the IMG group, Zeqian Meng and Ilia Pietrii, were selected one of 12 UK PhD scholarships for the event. They will attend SC14 in New Orleans from November 16-21. This is Zeqian's second such success; she was recently awarded a scholarship to attend the IEEE eScience conference in Brazil from October 20-24. 2nd ACM
womENcourage Europe - Travel grants available Following the success of the inaugural womENcourage 2014 in Manchester, womENcourage 2015 will be held at Uppsala University, Sweden.
If you want to check what memorable two days were womENcourage 2014, follow this link. For more information about womENcourage 2015, check this link! Wear it Pink 31
Oct 14
Wear it Pink day was held on Friday 31 October in
Computer Science and once again we’ve raised a respectable sum for the
charity (we’ve yet to count it all!).
Thank you to everyone who came.
Events
eHealth
Policy & Implementation in Scotland & Evaluation of the U.K. dallas
Programme 12
Nov 14 14:00, lecture theatre 1.4, Kilburn building. Dr Matt-Mouley Bouamrane, University of Aberdeen & Glasgow. A woman’s
place? 12
Nov 14 Event to be held in Lancaster University. Hurdles still exist for women who wish to further their careers in science, both in industry and academia. This event aims to bring together the latest research and showcase the best practice from both sectors, with a range of speakers and workshops. Lunch is provided and there will be plenty of opportunity for networking.
Anyone with an interest in promoting women's careers in science, whether in an industrial or an academic setting. Speakers and workshops The programme will include talks by Professor Haifa Takruri-Rizk (University of Salford), Dr Valerie Bevan (Lancaster University) and others, as well as interactive workshops by Athena SWAN and unconscious bias expert Lara Warmelink. Booking: Tickets for this event cost £10 and can be bought online. For more information follow this link Joint FMHS-MIB Symposium sponsored by THERMO 12 Nov 14 MIB lecture theatre and atrium. The Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences (FMHS), and the Manchester
Institute of Biotechnology (MIB) are organising a showcase event aimed at
building fruitful research collaborations and joint grant applications. The event will include a series of short highlight presentations from
both FMHS and MIB researchers including CS staff, in thematic sessions
covering disease areas (eg cancer and Alzheimer’s disease), and technical
approaches (such as ‘omics and systems approaches). In addition, the day will
incorporate a built-in ‘speed networking’ session, as well as other informal
networking opportunities, including a wine reception. The event will be
supported by Research Strategy Coordinators from the FMHS Research Deanery
and MIB, who will be on hand to identify funding opportunities and follow-up
actions that will lead to grant applications. If you would like to present a poster at the event please contact Sarah Barton with details. For queries contact: Research Strategy Coordinators Katherine Boylan or Lisa Hearty in the FMHS Research Deanery, or Penny Johnson at MIB. Children in Need 14 Nov 14
The time has come to start clearing out your
cupboards and donating wonderful items for our annual Children in Need Online
Auction (a bit like Ebay). Please
bring your donations to ACSO, Kilburn room 2.127 anytime from now on – and we
will open the auction for a week on Monday 10 November. It will close at 16:00 on Friday 14
November. We will send the link round
to the auction when it opens. http://www.bbc.co.uk/childreninneed ICT KTN 30 Community
Networking event 27 Nov
14 London. The Horizon 2020 ICT 2015 ICT is
now open for large projects in 'Internet
of Things and Platforms for Connected Smart Objects'. This is
potentially a great opportunity but what's required, how does the process
work and how do you connect with the European actors? The KTN is pleased to host
a Community Networking day where you can get details of the call, learn how
H2020 works and decide if it’s for you, meet representatives of the EU Public
Private Partnerships (that set the Strategic Research Agenda) and have the
opportunity to flag your interest by presenting your credentials and/or
outline project proposals. Funding
Opportunities
Research
Support Office Please contact us through researchsupportcsm@manchester.ac.uk. There is information about support for grant writing, submission and
successful examples at http://staffnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/reso/
and through EPS. The EPS blog The Word contains features
News, Events and comment relevant to Postgraduate Researchers, Research Staff
and Supervisors or PIs. Important: Changes in EU Funding Opportunities More detailed information is available now
that for Horizon2020 has started (the successor of FP7 EU programme). EU
research funding is important for the School and it’s important to understand
what’s available http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/desktop/en/opportunities/index.html EU funding-related documents are placed by
the University's EU team at: A great resource
recommended by the ICT National Contact Point is http://www.ictic.org/, which also provides handy overview
documents. Interested in
FET-ICT? Here are some webstreams from a recent ICT Proposers' Day in
Florence. Includes a webstream on Health and wellbeing https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/news/ict-proposers-day-2014-webstreams Coming-up: RAEng Engineering Leadership Advanced Awards Due to open: November 2014 This programme
aims to provide support and motivation to some of the most exceptional
engineering undergraduates in UK universities. These awards help
ambitious and inspiring engineering undergraduates, who want to become
leadership role models for the next generation of engineers, to undertake an
accelerated personal development programme. Recipients will get the
opportunity to acquire the skills needed to fulfil their potential, helping
them to move into engineering leadership positions in UK industry soon after
graduation. For further queries, please email Ms Jacqueline Clay. London
Mathematical Society (LMS) "Scheme 7" travel grant 15 Nov 14 Closing date: 15 November 2014 The LMS "Scheme 7" grant programme provides
small financial awards (max £500) to help support a visit for collaborative
research at the interface of Mathematics and Computer Science. This
is a great opportunity to cover the costs of a brief visit with a (named)
Computer Scientist or Mathematician - either travelling to see them at
another institution within the UK or abroad, or having them come to you. The
scheme is overseen by the Computer Science Committee of the LMS, which exists
to promote the development of links between Mathematics and Computer Science. REMINDER -
ESRC Impact Accelerator Account Launch 21
Nov 14 Closing date: 12pm 21 November 2014 The IAA will be used to fund knowledge exchange activities to accelerate the impact of research in the social sciences and is open to academic staff in all Schools and Faculties across the University. The three schemes are: · Staff exchanges/ placements · Policy/ evidence seminars · Research into practice A leaflet containing an overview of the IAA can be downloaded here. If you have any queries please contact Louise Mcmahon. Royal
Academy of Engineers Distinguished Visiting Fellowship scheme 24
Nov 14 Closing date: 16:00, 24 November 2014 The RAEng scheme provides up to £6k to host an
international specialist at UK university engineering departments for up to a
month. Visiting Fellows can be from any overseas academic centre of
excellence. This is great opportunity for promising researchers or
specialised groups to learn from international experts. Activities funded
include: working collaboratively on joint papers and research, expert
workshops to graduates/undergraduates as well as guiding the design and
delivery of new teaching modules and/or programmes. For further queries, please
email Ms
Eleanor Hood. RAEng Visiting Professors 2
Dec 14 Closing date: 16:00, 2 December 2014. Funding is
available for this industry-into-academia initiative aiming to utilise the
experience of the Visiting Professors to enhance student learning as well as
the employability and skills of UK engineering graduates. Under the scheme,
senior industry practitioners deliver face to face teaching and mentoring at
the host university. They may also contribute to postgraduate teaching,
curriculum development (such as the development of new modules / programmes)
and strategy development. For further queries, please email Ms Jacqueline Clay. The ESRC
Transformative Research Call 15
Dec 14 Intentions to bid (to include a one page summary of
the proposal and the names of a potential reviewer) by Monday 15th
December 2014. This is a major research funding call which aims to provide a stimulus for genuinely transformative research ideas at the frontiers of the social sciences, enabling research which challenges current thinking to be supported and developed. Only two applications can be submitted by each
eligible research organisation and the Faculty of Humanities will coordinate
this process, with the final submission being endorsed by a peer review panel
led by the Deputy Dean for Research, Professor Colette Fagan. Please ensure
that intentions to bid are submitted to Gillian Whitworth (cc Jared Ruff) by Monday 15 December.
Further details of the review process will be communicated when we have a
clearer idea of the number of applications involved, after the intention to
bid deadline. The timeline for the peer review process will be as follows: ·
Drafts to be submitted by Friday 16 January 2015 ·
Drafts to Reviewers by
Monday 19 January 2015 ·
Comments back from Reviewers
by Monday 2 February 2015 ·
Decision-making panel to meet between 2 and 5 February 2015 ·
Decisions to applicants by 6
February 2015 ·
ESRC Deadline 16:00 Thursday 19th
February 2015 REMINDER: Toshiba Fellowship Programme 2015 5
Dec 14 Closing date: 5 December 2014 The Fellowship is
an excellent opportunity for PhD students to gain a rare experience of
working in a leading technology company’s R&D labs in Japan for 2 years,
allowing them to conduct new research within their field and learn about key
R&D techniques as well as about different country and workplace cultures.
Candidates must be of EU nationality and at PhD-level with no more than 10
year’s post-Doctoral experience. Research Topics
for 2015 include:
RAEng Research chairs and Senior Research Fellowships – renewed scheme 2
Feb 15 Closing date: 16:00 2 February 2015 Industrial
co-funded scheme to support Professorial and Reader level appointments for
five years at UK universities to develop world leading research programmes as
well as strengthen industry-academia links. For queries, please contact Ms Tapsi Khambra. Featured
Research Outcomes
Did you know…papers featured in the newsletter also go on display in the
Kilburn Building (outside finance: 2.03)? Send your new publications to Robert
Stevens so that more
people get to know about your research. Oriol Arcas-Abella, Geoffrey Ndu, Nehir Sonmez, Mohsen Ghasempour, Adria Armejach, Javier Navaridas, Wei Song, John Mawer, Adrian Cristal and Mikel Lujan: An empirical evaluation of High-Level Synthesis languages and tools for database acceleration. Proceedings of the 2014 24th Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL) Yan Xu, Ji Hua, Zhaoheng Ni, Qinlang Chen, Yubo Fan, Sophia Ananiadou, Eric I-Chao Chang, Junichi Tsujii: Anatomical Entity Recognition with a Hierarchical Framework Augmented by External Resources. PLoS ONE 9(10): e108396 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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