MANCHESTER 1824	School of Computer Science
Weekly Newsletter	8 December 2008
Contents News from HoS This Week Documents 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 Head of School School Plan Consultation As part of the school planning process, various goals, actions and risks have been identified by areas within the school, several of which are now available for comment. Please can feedback on the proposals be emailed to the named staff by Monday 15^th December: Undergraduate: Graham Gough. Postgraduate: Roger Hubbold. PGR: Jon Shapiro. Research: John Gurd. External affairs: Bernard Strutt. Estates: Roger Hubbold. These documents will form the starting point for the writing of the school plan, which will be completed during January. RAE Announcement Meeting RAE results become known incrementally on 17^th and 18^th December (there is a press embargo until the 18^th). The somewhat finer grained reporting mechanisms that will be used this time, which in turn accommodate different ranking schemes, means that interpreting the results is more challenging than used to be the case. Anyway, with a view to enabling some discussion of the results and their interpretation, there will be a meeting led by our panel members (Chris and Steve) at 9:00 on Thursday 18^th in room 2.15. Out of Hours Events Consultation There is a proposal to change the procedures associated with organisation of out-of-hours events in the university; in essence, the effect is to concentrate most such events in a small number of buildings, not including Kilburn. If you have comments on this proposal (specifically, concrete examples of activities that might be impacted by this change), please let Ursula know, and we will respond taking into account the feedback received. Natural Language Processing Challenge Success A team containing staff from Computer Science, MIB and MCISB (Hui Yang, Irena Spasic, John Keane and Goran Nenadic) took part in an international text mining challenge in the clinical/health-care domain (document multi-classification and labelling). The team won one of the two tasks, and were one of the top 10 performing teams in the other. More details can be found at: https://www.i2b2.org/NLP/ (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (I2B2) NLP Challenge) and http://gnode1.mib.man.ac.uk/i2b2.html (local). Events EPSRC ICT Team Visit 8 & 9 Dec 08 The ESPRC ICT Team will be visiting the University on Monday 8^th and Tuesday 9^th December 2008. There will be an open session which everyone is invited to attend from 13.00 to 14.00 on Monday 8^th December. Location TBA. top On hybrid systems optimization 10 December Sid Ahmed Attia, Technische Universität Berlin 1200, Frank Adams 1, Alan Turing building Regular Seminar Series See links in contents bar for information on seminar series organised by the School of CS, E-Science North West and National Centre for Text Mining. New Funding and Award Opportunities 3 yrs funding for graduating student at Forwiss Institute The Forwiss institute at the University of Passau Germany, they have 3 years funding for a high calibre graduating student to do research into a field around computer vision (although a background in computer vision isn't necessary). More information Research Awards Title: myGrid: A Platform for e-Biology Renewal PI: Carole Goble Value: £1,154,681