School of CS newsletter

Congratulations to the folowing staff that will be promoted with effect from 1 August 2018:

Simon Harper promoted to Professor

Dirk Koch promoted to Senior Lecturer

Vasilis Pavlidis promoted to Senior Lecturer

Antoniou Pop Promoted to Senior Lecturer

Well done to them all.

Robert.

We had a good turn out for the first Memory Day on Thursday 21 June. this day was seventy years since the Manchester Small scale Experimental Machine ("The baby") was switched on and worked. The world's first electronic digital stored programme computer and all that it has entailed has had a massive impact upon the world; something of which we and Manchester should be proud. I want a celebration of this day each year and for the seventy fifth anniversary I think we and the wider university should do something big.

With delightful serendipity, on the seventieth anniversary of the Baby, the "B" was replaced in the "Kilburn ilding" sign at the walkway entrance.

Robert.

The School is advetising for a full-time teaching focused position in Data management. The advert can be found at

https://www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/displayjob.aspx?jobid=15596

The closing date is 23 July 2018. informal enquiries should be made to Toby Howard (toby.Howard@mancehster.ac.uk).

Robert.

The University has launched a survey asking for your views on current staff communications and what you’d like to hear more or less about in the future.

The first 3,000 respondents to complete a quick 10 minute online survey will be emailed with a Food on Campus voucher for a free hot drink. This initiative is in response to the findings of the Staff Survey 2017. We want our research to be as representative of your views as possible. Therefore we would urge you to take part.

Your responses will be treated completely confidentially and used to help shape our future approach to staff communications at a University-wide and local level.

You can access the survey here (http://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/communications-and-marketing/staff-communications/comms-survey-2018/).

School Seminar

Title: Elastos - Innovation Capitalism through Blockchain Technology

• Speaker:   Dr  Feng Han  (Tsinghua University's iCentre)

• Host:   Richard Banach

• 13th July 2018 at 14:00 in Kilburn L.T 1.5

Elastos is the world's first internet-based operating system which focuses on the redecentralisation of the internet, leveraging blockchain technology to secure identities. It utilises the internet as the base-layer infrastructure rather than as an application and uses decentralised ID's issued via the blockchain in place of standard IP addresses. As society becomes more and more connected through smart devices, IoT and with autonomous vehicles looming, network security is becoming more important than ever. Elastos addresses this as the emphasis is on the separation of network communications from application computing. As a result, applications are prohibited from direct access to the network which in turn minimises viruses and other malicious attacks such as middlemen or DDoS. The overarching philosophy of the Elastos Foundation is redefining the internet as we know it, to empower user innovation and in the process redistribute wealth more evenly through society via a new global economy. The creation of a secure, trustless 'smart web' opens opportunity for the conception of new profit models all in society can benefit from. Users will have total control of their information and content as data transferred over the network will be in the form of 'code'. This way all users can truly own their data. Drop by the seminar to find out how all this is possible and more.

Dr Feng (Sunny) Han is one of the most reputable blockchain thinkers from China. Dr Han has background in Quantum Physics and Computer Science and has taught physics in China. As a developer and course instructor at the Tsinghua University's iCentre, he initiated the postgraduate course series 'Cyber Intelligence Economics and Block Chain'. Feng's book 'Blockchain: On Quantum Wealth' was a 2017 best-seller on Amazon China. He is also Co-founder and an Executive Council Member of the Elastos project. Dr Han's various other activities include, Associate Dean of the Massachusetts Blockchain Research Institute, Blockchain Advisor at Huawei Central Institute, Secretary General of Asia Blockchain DACA (Distributed Autonomous Coalition of Asia) Association, blockchain development at Alibaba, and member of the Tencent Talent Pool to name a few.)

School Seminar on 23rd July 2018 at 1pm in Kilburn L.T 1.4

Title: Recent developments in computer science education research

Computer science education research relating to school has been gathering momentum over the last few years, although the field is still in its infancy in comparison to science and mathematics education. Fields of interest include, but are not restricted to blocks/text-based programming environments, strategies for teaching programming, computational thinking, diversity, assessment, collaborative work, tools and techniques and teacher education. There is considerable commonality between research in school and higher education and much that researchers in these fields can learn from each other. In this talk Sue will look at recent developments in computer science education research, with particular references to new work around the teaching of programming, which is relevant to both school and higher education educators alike.

Dr Sue Sentance is a senior lecturer in computer science education at King’s College London, and this year moving to work at the Raspberry Pi Foundation as Chief Learning Officer. At King’s she has set up the Computing Education Research Centre to facilitate interdisciplinary work between education and computer science departments. Her research interests are pedagogical strategies for programming, learning with physical computing devices, the computing curriculum and teacher education in computing. Last year she was awarded the BERA Public Engagement and Impact Award for work on removing the barriers to effective computing education. Her new edited book Computer Science Education: Perspective on Teaching and Learning in School, was published in March 2018.

Funding of up to £5M is available under the Digital Economy (DE) theme to support around 10 awards for projects lasting between 18-36 months.

Proposals may align with the current DE Theme priority areas below, or make a case for a unique research agenda:

• Trust, identity, privacy and security • Digital business models • The internet of things for a service economy • Content creation and consumption

Applicants are encouraged to be creative in their ways of working and the involvement of different groups of individuals and organisations, and to be adventurous and ambitious in creating their proposals, incorporating a balanced consideration of potential risks and outcome.

Key points:

• Standard EPSRC eligibility rules apply
• No equipment over £10K will be funded
• Proposals should identify and address nationally-important real-world research problems in the digital economy and be co-created by interdisciplinary research teams

 Please see the full call document for further information.

The University runs half a dozen Exchange email servers. Staff accounts are distributed evenly across them. Recently, one server broke and had to be rebuilt/restored. If your email was on this server, in some cases email access might still be being rejected. IT Services say this can be fixed by re-setting your account's expiry date. Phone them or call in at the ground floor Kilburn desk to request this, if you think you are affected.

The University High Throughput Computing Condor pool has just passed 4000 years worth of computational results. (i.e. If you had a PC with a single core, it would take roughly 4000 years to compute what the Condor pool has done.) This resource is free to use for PGR and staff. Ian Cottam is an expert user if you need help getting started. ian.cottam@manchester.ac.uk