School of CS newsletter

DASA will be visiting Manchester on 13 February for a University-wide event, open to academics from any discipline.

There will be a general briefing from Jonathan Jones, DASA Innovation Partner, who will provide an overview of how DASA finds and funds innovation from academia which can then be implemented across defence and security. This will be followed by a Q&A session and one-to-one meetings for anyone wanting to discuss a project (registration required).

For further information and to register vist: DASA briefing at the University of Manchester

27th February, 5.30pm, Lecture Theatre 1.1, Kilburn Building

Professor Simon Harper
"Behavioural Modelling for Good not Evil"

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fse-inaugural-lecture-series-professor-simon-harper-tickets-55692966161

Monitoring, modelling, and changing behaviour have been getting a bad ‘rap’ recently; but it’s not all Russian Troll farms on Facebook, Cambridge Analytica swinging Brexit, Amazon recommending things you don’t want, or a social media bubble better tailored to the views of you and your friends. Measuring behaviour has a long and deep history which is not just limited to cynical manipulation. From its simplest form tracking fitness and sports performance to deeper understandings of health and wellbeing, my work is based on the three pillars of Unobtrusive Measures, BioMedical Telemetry, and Human-Machine Symbiosis. I’ll talk about working with Blind people, Older users, people with Parkinson's Disease, and people with mental health conditions. We’ll look at different technologies and ways to understand behaviour and how we allocate meaning to that behaviour so that we can adapt ‘apps’, systems, environments and a person's behaviour to benefit them in their everyday lives. We’ll finish up with a cautionary note, elaborate what's coming up in the next 20 years, and elucidate a couple of ‘left-field’ ‘Friday night experiments’.

 

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

Twenty eight years of semantic tagging

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).

 

As part of REF - and in general for our own advertising -  we wanted to create a list of external prizes that PGR students have received. From BCS prizes to conference prizes, competition prizes - everything.

Can you send me (simon.harper@manchester.ac.uk) anything that has been won, 1st, 2nd 3rd places and the like. And keep sending them each time a new prize is won.

I need the Student Name, Supervisor Name, Prize Title, Venue, Year, and Author List (if more than student and supervisor). You can also send me the citation if you have it.

Don't wait for your supervisor, if you are a PGR student and have won - send me the details!

Looking forward to a deluge!

The RS International Exchanges 2019 Standard Programme Round 1 is now open to applications and closes at 3pm on Wednesday 13 March 2019.

The programme is designed to offer a flexible platform for UK based scientists to interact with the best scientists around the world and intended to stimulate new collaborations. Funds for a contribution towards travel, subsistence and research expenses can be requested for either a one-off short visit to explore opportunities for building lasting networks or for bilateral visits to strengthen emerging collaborations.

Duration of funding: Awards are available for either up to 3 months, 1 year or 2 years.

Value: The funding available is dependent upon the length of the visit. Applicants may request up to £3,000 for one-off travel lasting up to 3 months; up to £6,000 for multiple visits to be completed within 1 year (including a maximum of £1,000 for research expenses); up to £12,000 for multiple visits to be completed within 2 years (including a maximum of £2,000 for research expenses).

How to apply and further guidance

Emmeline’s Pantry Foodbank

February Knicker Appeal

 

 

Emmeline’s Pantry is a local foodbank and they are desperate for donations so that they can support vulnerable women and their families.

This month they are appealing for food, toiletries and donations of new underwear for women and children.

 

Items always needed

1. Tea / coffee / sugar
2. Tinned fruit, vegetables, baked beans, meats and fish
3. Biscuits /crisps (treats for families)
4. Toiletries for mums, babies, children & teens
5. Nappies (all sizes) and sanitary products
6. Clothes detergent
7. Quality used clothing / footwear for women, children and teens

 

Drop off location

 

Your local drop off location is: Kilburn room 2.03 (ACSO) with Karon

For support on collections please email wellbeing@manchester.ac.uk