School of CS newsletter

Welcome to Christoforos Moutafis who joins the School as a lecturer in the NEST group on 2^nd February. Christoforos comes to us from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland where he has been working on skyrmions. A paper on this work, “Dynamics and inertia of skyrmionic spin structures” will appear in Nature Physics on 2^nd February.

Schools are finding it hard to cope with the expansion of computing activities and the new computing curricula. Most schools have no staff with a suitable background and skills to teach the subject, and schoolchildren often fail to realise that computing is an exciting and creative subject, leading to exciting and creative careers.

The School of Computer Science has taken a lead in supporting schools in their adoption of computing. Amongst our many activities in this area is a new venture: the Kilburn Club, led by Suzanne Embury, Cassie Barlow and David Rydeheard. This is a club formed from selected schools across Greater Manchester and surrounding areas - schools that we believe would specially benefit from strong ties with the School of Computer Science and whose students will be capable of joining us in the future.

The inaugural meeting of the Kilburn Club took place last semester, where the highlight was a talk by Gerry Pennell on the computing infrastructure of the London Olympics. The latest meeting focussed on the extraordinary diversity of jobs available to those with strong computing skills - a diversity that is not, in general, appreciated in schools, by teachers or by students.  We had talks from IBM, the BBC, Bank of America and Barclays, as well as our employability tutor, Duncan Hull. The feedback from schools has been very positive and we intend the Club to be a means of establishing long-term relationships with these schools.

FutureEverything and the Greater Manchester Data Synchronisation Programme (GMDSP) are hosting a Lean Startup weekend for entrepreneurs, technologists, creative professionals and social innovators on 21^st and 22^nd February. Participants will be given the opportunity to work with highly skilled specialists to help bring their business ideas to life.

£25,000 worth of prizes are available for the best concepts developed during the weekend. These are designed to help accelerate digital startups and assist product development in established businesses.

More details can be found here: http://futureeverything.org/events/gmdsp-lean-startup-weekend/

Has your research made an impact?

The University’s Social Responsibility team has just launched its new ‘Making a Difference’ awards.
The 'Outstanding benefit to society through research' award category will recognise success in collaborative working, partnerships and KE activities that have enabled Manchester research to deliver significant economic, social, health, environmental or quality of life benefits.


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14:00, 4th February 2015, Kilburn Lecture Theatre 1.4.

Speaker:   Radouane Oudrhiri  (CTO, Systonomy, London.)

Host:   Kung-Kiu Lau

Abstract

Any engineering discipline is usually defined as the combination of three main components: practices, science and economics. What is the status of the software engineering industry and discipline? How much of these three dimensions do we really cover? ... Can we really qualify Software development as a true engineering discipline? This thought-provoking seminar will start by presenting the state of the practices within the sofware community and raises some fundamental questions. It will then introduce an Empirical and Experimental approach to Software Engineering Process Improvement, yet a pragmatic one. The proposed approach is, a problem solving method, based on many years of application within the area of sofware process improvement throughout various industries. It aims at linking the dots between the three dimensions, mentionned above, and more precisely focuses on the Economics of Software Engineering, in a way to link explicitly between the day-to-day actions and a return on investment (value). This pragmatic view of software process improvement and the experimental problem solving approach make it an accelerator for enterprise level improvement programs. A number of practical examples from IT and Software organisations will be presented.

Biography

Dr. Radouane Oudrhiri is CEO of Systonomy, he has more than 20 years of teaching and consulting experience in software quality engineering, Lean Six Sigma and DFSS for Software, empirical and experimental software engineering and maturity-based models. He implemented software process initiatives within large and small organisations. He is a Six Sigma MBB trained by GE Medical Systems and Motorola. Radouane sits on the board of high-tech start-ups and is part of chair many standardisation initiatives. Radouane has an M.S. in Operations Research, MBA and PhD in Information Systems and formal Logic. He is a Lecturer at La Sorbonne Paris, HEC, ESSEC, Telecom Paris and an evaluator at the European Commission).

Event: 11:00, 17 February 2015, 2.19 Kilburn building.

Perpendicular magnetic anisotropy: from ultralow power spintronics to cancer therapy: Russell Cowburn

Most thin magnetic films have their magnetization lying in the plane of the film because of shape anisotropy. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in thin magnetic films which exhibit a magnetization easy axis along the surface normal due to so-called Perpendicular Magnetic Anisotropy (PMA). PMA has its origins in the symmetry breaking which occurs at surfaces and interfaces and can be strong enough to dominate the magnetic properties of some material systems. In this talk I explain the physics of such materials and show how the magnetic properties associated with PMA are often very well suited to applications. I show three different examples of real and potential applications of PMA materials: ultralow power STT-MRAM memory devices for green computing, 3-dimensional magnetic logic structures and a novel cancer therapy.
 

Biography
 
Russell Cowburn has research interests in nanotechnology and its application to magnetism, electronics and optics. Before returning to Cambridge in 2010 he held positions at the CNRS Paris, University of Durham and Imperial College London. He is the founder of two start-up companies and the inventor of the anti-counterfeiting technology ‘Laser Surface Authentication’. He has had over 60 patents granted and is a frequent invited speaker at international conferences. He is the winner of the GSK Westminster Medal and Prize, the Degussa Science to Business Award, the Hermes International Technology Award and the Institute of Physics Paterson Medal and Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Event: 24 Feb 2015 12.15-1.45pm, rm G.306A Jean McFarlane Building

Funding Opportunity: Enabling Innovation within Medical & Human Sciences

This event will provide academics with the opportunity to learn more about using KTPs to engage with industry to deliver and demonstrate impact. Includes lunch.

Register via Eventbrite.

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Within the School, both Jon Shapiro and John Brooke has been awarded successful KTPs recently.

Event: 26 Feb (Leeds); 18 Mar 2015 (London)

The Economic and Social Research Council is offering free mid-career media training to researchers on two dates, Leeds on 26 February and London on 18 March.    

A report from the January brokerage event

Kung-Kiu Lau attended the ARTEMIS brokerage event in Amsterdam, 21-22 January 2015 (https://artemis-ia.eu/brokerage2015/index.html).

ARTEMIS-IA (ARTEMIS Industrial Association) (https://artemis-ia.eu/) funds research under the ECSEL Joint Undertaking (http://www.ecsel-ju.eu/).

The next ECSEL Call is expected in March 2015, Project Outline deadline around May 2015 and Full Project Proposal deadline in September 2015.

Closing date: 20 Mar 2015

ESRC has awarded The University of Manchester over £860k to deliver the Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) until 31 March 2018. The IAA will be used to fund knowledge exchange activities to accelerate the impact of research in the social sciences, across the University.

Applications are invited under the following schemes:

Staff exchanges/placements. Flexible support for secondment-out of academics to external partner organisations or enabling secondment-in of external partners. This scheme is to increase the exchange of knowledge through mobility of people, enhance external links of the academic team and provide the secondee with experience of working in an external organisation (or academic environment where this is a secondment-in).

Policy/evidence seminars. Facilitated events centred on strategic themes that bring together policymakers/research users and academic staff to define problems and influence policy development through the research base. Ideally these will develop into co-produced social science research which impacts policy, strategy and practice.

Research into practice. Activity to translate research evidence for use by research users/practitioners. The scheme is flexible and open to innovative projects but activities may include relationship incubation (to support early stage contact and strategic alignment between academics and external organisations), building sustainable relationships or coproduced research etc. 

note: ESRC IAAs do not have to be based on ESRC research

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• Dr Vasilis Pavlidis
• Royal Society International Exchanges Kan Tong Po Visiting Fellowships Programme 2014
• £2,350

Vasilis Pavlidis is collaborating with Professor Volkan Kursun from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, with a focus on how to design memory cells.

End-users desire high density memories at low cost and only those types of memory which managed to satisfy this need survived. Thus, new means to increase density without raising the manufacturing cost is an important element for the memory manufacturers.

3-D monolithic integration is a highly potent technology to surmount the bottleneck associated with the physical scaling of the devices within the memory cells. In addition, the present infrastructure within the semiconductors industry can be employed (for the most part) for this technology keeping the cost at reasonable levels. Stacking or folding of the memory cell could double the memory density extending the memory evolution path for a few technology generations, an exciting prospect that will be pursued during this collaboration.