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  • School of CS newsletter

    Published: Friday, 25 January 2019

    Weekly newsletter for the School of CS

    [ top ]News and announcements

    Next HoS/HoSA coffee morning on Thursday, 7th February at 11.00 a.m. in Common Room

    Our HoS/HosA coffee morning on 7th February is a charity event with the proceeds going to Howard Barringer (ex HoS) who is taking part in the Banham Marsden March for the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity. Please follow the link to read about his story: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/howard-barringer

    Please do come. If you would like to bake a cake(S) and share it to raise money too that would be wonderful!

     

    gravatar Ian Cottam

    In memoriam: Harold Simmons

    Harold Simmons is a former member of our staff. There is an In Memoriam item in the Association for Symbolic Logic Newsletter outlining ’s career and his many contributions to Logic and Computer Science. The article is available at: http://aslonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Jan2019newsletter.pdf.

    David Rydeheard

     

    gravatar Karon Mee

    Call for PhD placements in the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation

    The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has set up the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) to advise the UK Government on how best to take advantage of data-enabled technologies. Centre aims to tackle both technical questions arising from the advent of big data and AI, along with more philosophical questions such as the ethics behind digital targeting, and problems of algorithmic bias.

    The Centre is being assisted in this work by the Open Innovation Team (OIT) in the Cabinet Office. OIT has successfully run a PhD placement programme for the past two years, and CDEI would like to use this model to invite PhD students to join their team on placement for a minimum of 3 months.

    Applications should come in the form of a CV and a short statement of no more than 300 words. It is recommended that these arrive by the end of February.

    Please see attached call for further particulars.

    -Jon Shapiro

    gravatar Karon Mee

    [ top ]Events

    Yoga In C.S restarts

    Yoga Fundamentals and Flow at Computer Science

    Starts: Friday 22nd February 2019 for 5 weeks. Finishes on 22nd March 2019

    Time: 12.05-12.50pm (45 minutes)

    Cost: £25 for 5 weeks. Pay by PayPal. https://www.paypal.me/yogawithmee/

    Numbers are limited. Please make your payment for 5 weeks via Paypal. I will confirm your place once I have received it (£25) and send you a health and wellbeing form to complete. You must complete this and return it to me prior to attending.

    Location: The new Turing Lounge in Kilburn. If you are in the foyer, facing the courtyard, the entrance is through the glass doors on your right. We are at the end in a reserved private area.

    Equipment: If you have your own yoga mat please bring it. I will have a few spare.

    General: We will continue to develop some basic yoga fundamentals and sequencing of postures which you can take away and practice by memory. Breath and yoga asana are used to deepen your awareness of your body and mind, and we begin to work with that knowledge in a positive way. Ultimately this results in tension release, more efficient movement, alignment, pleasure, and connectivity.

    If you have never tried yoga before and would like to, this is the perfect place to start. If you have practiced yoga - you will learn something else.

    Wear comfortable clothing which allows you to move.

    Any Questions (I love questions!) please get in touch.

    Karon Mee (ACSO) Karon.Mee@manchester.ac.uk

     

     

     

    gravatar Karon Mee

    C.S Seminar: Twenty eight years of semantic tagging

    Twenty eight years of semantic tagging by Dr Paul Rayson

    Wednesday 6th February 2019 at 2pm in Kilburn L.T 1.4

    In this talk, I will explain the motivation for the Natural Language Processing (NLP) task of semantic annotation, and how it can be applied widely along with Corpus Linguistics (CL) methods for content analysis, market research, political discourse analysis, metaphor analysis, topic modelling, as well as in number of forensic, legal and policing scenarios. I will provide an overview of my work spanning 28 years on the UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS) which will serve to illustrate how challenging a task it is to teach a computer to understand natural language semantics, as well as showing the changing trends in methods in NLP from knowledge-based and empirical approaches utilising vast corpora and web resources that are now available. Originally designed for British English, I will highlight experiments we've undertaken to extend the methods and linguistic resources to more than 12 languages, working with multiple teams of researchers around the world. Finally, I will describe our recent research to expand coverage over time with a much larger and historically sensitive taxonomy in the Historical Thesaurus Semantic Tagger (HTST), employ crowdsourcing, learn Welsh, and adapt USAS to specific biomedical domains in the Gene Ontology Semantic Tagger (GOST).

    gravatar Karon Mee

    [ top ]Prize and award Opportunities

    Nominations for Prizes

    Steve Furber Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in Computer Science

    This award celebrates an outstanding doctoral thesis that has been awarded since January 1st 2018. A subset of nominated submissions will be supported by the School in applying for the CPHC/BCS Distinguished Dissertations Award.

    Carole Goble Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Paper in Computer Science

    This award celebrates an outstanding paper accepted for publication since January 2018 where the doctoral student is first or main author. High quality submissions will be further considered for Faculty and University level awards.

    Please send nominations to me by February 22nd. In both cases the award is made on the merit of the evidence provided (e.g. peer reviews, letters from external reviewers, awards).

    Prizes will be awarded at the PGR Symposium taking place 23-25 April (please make sure it’s in your calendars) and will be accompanied by a physical medal and a monetary prize from our sponsors IBM.

    Further details can be found here: http://studentnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/pgr/symposium/prizes.php

    gravatar Karon Mee

    [ top ]Tech Support News

    Big TVs showing School News

    You may have noticed the wall-mounted TV in the Atlas Suite area is now showing the School news items, as per the foyer one and the one on the lower first. By the time you read this, we also hope to have brought back to life (in a similar fashion) the two wall-mounted TVs in the ground floor area near G.23. Thanks go to Stephen Rhodes and Chris Page.

    Reminder: follow this link https://wiki.cs.manchester.ac.uk/index.php/BigScreen to see how to get a news item up on the web site that the big screens display.

    gravatar Ian Cottam

    GlobalProtect and email

    After helping a user today with intermittent Apple Mail problems (only on campus), a reminder that it is key to GlobalProtect switching cleanly between off and on campus modes that you automatically pick up the University DNS servers (and don't configure your own, such as OpenDNS).

    gravatar Ian Cottam

    [ top ]Social Responsibility

    Project Malawi Fundraising event by Ainur Begalinova

    I am raising funds for the particular school in Malawi where Manchester University sends volunteers to provide computing classes for the schoolchildren.

    Why I'm doing this?

    At a meeting, once I heard the story that kids take off their shoes (!!!) before entering the new and only class with computers, I made my decision straight away. Those who appreciate machines that much deserve to be taught the right skills and knowledge, so their love of computers drives them to become the next Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg...

    Some facts : since the start of the project a small number of kids have started studying Computer Science in universities abroad.

    How I'm going to raise money?

    I'm going to run the number of road-races and marathons. The first is 10K on 27th January in Manchester.

    How can you support me on this project?

    1. Recommend me: Give my page to those who want to support the charity.

    2. Help me with sharing my page through FB.

    3. With £2, £5, £10 or £20 you can help the children to get the computing education and have a long-term impact on the society in Malawi.

    Support me here: https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/malawi-ab

    THANK YOU!

    gravatar Karon Mee

    gravatar Karon Mee
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Last change: Friday, 25 January 2019 15:57:20