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1824 |
School
of Computer Science |
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Weekly Newsletter |
14 October 2013 |
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Contents |
News from the Head of SchoolEPSRC Doctoral Prize awards Joe Mellor and Samantha
Bail have been awarded 2013 EPSRC Doctoral Prize awards. This prestigious
EPSRC scheme provides funding for a year to "help universities retain
and recruit the best PhD students receiving EPSRC support to increase the
impact of their PhD, and to improve retention of the very best students in
research careers." BCS dissertation prize Manchester graduate Dr Adam Pocock has been awarded the British
Computer Society Distinguished Dissertation Award 2013 for the best PhD
dissertation in Computer Science. Adam’s thesis, "Feature Selection via Joint Likelihood"
focused on the problem of identifying relevant and irrelevant variables in
statistical machine learning problems.
His work resulted in a unification of 20 years of publications in the
area of information theoretic feature selection, showing how each method is a
special case of one single principle. He was supervised by Gavin Brown and
Mikel Lujan. Adam is now a researcher at Oracle Labs in the Information Retrieval and Machine Learning
group in Burlington, Massachusetts. He is working on developing
fast, parallel Bayesian inference algorithms for GPUs and distributed
systems, and on applying statistical NLP to extract information from the
large quantities of text available in data warehouses, or from social media. Adam said "I'm really surprised and pleased to have won this
award, its an amazing end to my 8 years spent at
Manchester, through a BSc, MSc and a PhD. I wouldn't have managed without the
help and support from my friends in the lab, the staff in CS and especially
my supervisors Gavin and Mikel." Manchester PhD students have won the prize two years in a row, and
four times altogether. EPSRC EPSRC’s Science photograph competition
opens on 16th October, if you have any great images of science
then have a go! Frank Sumner Prof Frank Sumner died on Monday 30th September. His
funeral will be at 1:30pm on Wednesday 23rd at Reading Crematorium. There is
a card in ACSO for anyone to sign if they wish. Frank was a founder member of the team that set up the CS Department during
the 1960s and he was a Director of the Computer Centre following the
retirement of Prof Black. The Computer Conservation Society’s Committee will be writing an
obituary for the CCS’s bulletin. If
anyone in has any anecdotes or facts about Frank that they consider
important, they’d be eager to have them. If you have any facts or if you
would like to contribute please contact either Simon Lavington or Jim Miles. Announcements and newsThe Human Brain Project The Human Brain Project (HBP) has started! HBP is a 10-year, billion pound neuroscience project involving scientists from 135 institutions, including Manchester, which aims to revolutionise our understanding of the human brain. Steve Furber and Dave Lester attended the project's inauguration event last week in Lausanne, Switzerland and featured on the BBC and on the News at Ten (7 Oct). NaCTeM
success at BioCreative IV BioCreative: Critical Assessment of Information Extraction in Biology is a community-wide effort for evaluating text mining and information extraction systems applied to the biological domain. NaCTeM participated in the 4th of these challenges, which took place from October 7th-9th 2013 in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. BioCreative IV consists of several tasks (or tracks), and NaCTeM's systems outperformed other participating systems in a number of these tracks. The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) track involved recognising 4 concept types: chemicals, genes, diseases and action terms. The NaCTeM team achieved the best results among 12 participating teams in both the recognition of chemicals and genes. In terms of combined performance of the recognition of all 4 concept types, NaCTeM also ranked highest. In another track, Chemical and Drug Named Entity Recognition (CHEMDNER), NaCTeM was ranked 1st out of 23 teams participating in the Chemical Document Indexing (CDI) subtask. EventsSchool seminar 16 Oct 13 The Human Brain Project and SpiNNaker 13:30, lecture theatre 1.4, Kilburn building. Prof Steve Furber, The University of Manchester This month saw the launch of the EU ICT Flagship Human Brain Project, an ambitious €1B programme to unlock the secrets of the human brain. At Manchester, we are bringing the SpiNNaker brain-modelling platform to the HBP. SpiNNaker has been 15 years in conception and 7 years in construction, developed with EPSRC funding, and is perfectly positioned to support significant aspects of the HBP agenda. In this seminar I will outline the HBP and describe SpiNNaker and its role in the HBP. University’s Foundation Day Lecture 16
Oct 13 Drinks Reception: 16:00, University Place Foundation Lecture: 16:30, University Place The Lecture will end at 17:45. The President and Vice-Chancellor would like to invite as many members of staff as possible from across the University to attend this occasion. The 2013 Foundation Lecture will be delivered by Professor Mario Molina, best known for his study on the effect on Earth’s upper atmosphere of man-made compounds. The title of the lecture is: “Climate Change: Science and Policy”.
There are also a number of places available to attend the Foundation Day Honorary Degree Ceremony which follows the Lecture. Honorary Degree Ceremony: 18:15, Whitworth Hall Honorary Degrees will be conferred upon :- Sir Bobby Charlton Professor Peter Higgs Professor Mario Molina Ms Frances O’Grady
Unfortunately, there are a limited number of tickets available so tickets have to be allocated on a first come, first served basis. If you are interested in attending one or both elements of the Foundation Day celebrations, please request a ticket by emailing Lesley Sisson. Faculty of EPS open meeting 23
Oct 13 13-14:00, Rutherford Lecture Theatre, Schuster Building. All members of staff in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences are invited to attend a Faculty Open Meeting with Professor Colin Bailey, the Vice-President & Dean. At the meeting Colin will give an update on the Faculty’s current position followed by an open question and answer session on any matters of interest. There is no need to submit questions in advance of the meeting.
All are welcome. Seats will be allocated on a first come, first served basis. 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. Important H2020 EU Funding Opportunities Information sessions and draft documents are becoming available for
Horizon2020 (the successor of FP7 EU programme). EU research funding is
important for the School so please keep an eye out for information – calls
are expected to open at the end of the year. ERC calls 2014 Various We have some indicative deadline dates for ERC calls in 2014: • Starting Grants: end of March 2014 • Consolidator Grants: end of May 2014 • Advanced Grants: end of October 2014 • Proof of Concept: early April 2014 and early October 2014 • Synergy Grants: no call in 2014 Please note that these dates could still change. Full information is
expected in Dec 2013. REMINDER Information Session on ICT-related calls 22 Oct 13 ·
Event: 22 Oct
2013, 10.30-12.00, MIB Lecture Theatre ·
1:1 meetings: 22 Oct 2013, between
1 and 3pm, B1c Sackville Street Craig Sharp - one of the UK National Contact Points (NCP) for the
Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies (LEIT) - covering the
areas of Information and Communication Technologies, Nanotechnologies,
Advanced Materials, Production Technologies, Biotechnology and Space Technologies
will be visiting the University on 22 Oct to discuss EU funding opportunities
under this part of the Horizon 2020 Programme. 1.
Register for the information session (formal
presentation, including an open Q&A). 2.
Email Liz Fay for 1:1 meetings with Craig (1pm-3pm). Each
meeting slot will be for 20 minutes and places are limited (first come first
served). Please indicate which part of the programme you wish to discuss with
Craig and, where possible, provide information on the progress of any
proposals already underway. The focus of the presentation will be on the NMP area of the draft
work programme – the most recent DRAFT work programme is attached. Please
take a look - the School has overlap with a lot of these areas: REMINDER
Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) 23
Oct 13 · Closing date: noon 23 Oct 2013 EPSRC has awarded The University of Manchester over £3.2M
to deliver an Impact Acceleration Account (IAA), which runs from 2012-15 for
knowledge exchange based on EPSRC research (following on from the Knowledge
Transfer Account). · Relationship Incubation (up to £10k available) Engaging with businesses and business communities to sow the seeds of new collaboration and enhance strategic engagement · Concept Development and Feasibility Studies (up to £30k available) Support for the very early stages of transforming research outputs into commercial opportunities · Exploitation Secondments (up to £60k available) Flexible support for secondments between The University of Manchester and businesses and other organisations
Both Simon Harper and Sean Bechhofer have been successful in previous calls. DE2013: Open
Digital Event at Media City 28
Oct 13 · Registration deadline: 28 Oct 2013 · Event: 4-6 Nov 2013, MediaCityUK, Salford Good opportunity to network…Industry and universities will be attending this event, including the BBC and other local companies. Registration is available for a single day or for the whole event (£95-£320). Remember… the School has funding available for making links with research funders subject to feeding-back to the School. Contact Robert Stevens/ Sarah Chatwin for more information. MICRA
Seedcorn call – funding for interdisciplinary research in ageing 02
Dec 13 ·
Closing date: 2 Dec
2013 The Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing (MICRA) have up to £6K available for multi-disciplinary proposals explicitly related to ageing. A maximum of 8 projects will receive funding. Previous successful applicants have been drawn from across a variety of disciplines. For more information see attached: Research Professional is a useful search engine for finding
other funding opportunities. 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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