School of CS newsletter

Our students have won the Fall 2014 Major League Hacking Europe competition! This is an outstanding achievement and I know you will join me in congratulating all the students involved. Our students triumphed in a massive league of over 1,500 students from almost 90 universities across Europe (see the league table => https://mlh.io/standings/f2014-uk ). Interviewed for Major League Hacking, Sami Alabed (Y1, SEwIE) who attended 6 out of the 10 hackathons said, “I believe Manchester did so well because of support from the University. The email that goes out to students and staff every Monday includes upcoming hackathons and success stories from the previous week.” See full details of our amazing win => http://goo.gl/TAo936 (Toby Howard, Monday Mail)

11:00, Monday 16 February 2015, Atlas 1, Kilburn building.

Matthew Horridge, Stanford University.

An ontology is a machine processable artefact that captures the important concepts in some domain of interest and the relationships that hold between them.  The most popular ontology language today is the Web Ontology Language, OWL, which is widely used to represent knowledge from many diverse domains but in particular biomedical knowledge.  

After a brief introduction to ontologies and OWL, I will present some work that is being carried out by the World Health Organisation, who are using OWL as a key technology for the development of the next version of the International Classification of Diseases, ICD-11.  Besides providing better opportunities for data integration and linkages to other well-known ontologies such as SNOMED-CT, one of the main promises of using this technology is that it will enable various forms of automated error checking and quality assurance.  In this talk I will explore some of these ideas. Specifically, I will present some recent work on using consistency checking to detect domain errors that arose in the development of ICD-11 and I will describe our experience of using off-the-shelf tools to identify and report problems to an expert panel of ICD-11 content model engineers.

10:00, Tuesday 17 February, Atlas 1 Kilburn building.

Dr Larisa Soldatova, Lecturer in Computing, Brunel University, London.

Semantic technologies enable efficient data and knowledge representation, integration and sharing. They empower reasoning, machine learning and text mining. Larisa will introduce several research projects she is involved with that employ semantic technologies. The meta-QSAR project funded by EPSRC aims to change the way drug-design research is done, and to make it more efficient and cost-effective. The most important deliverable of the project would be a knowledgebase about how to better apply quantitative structure activity (QSAR) methods for drug design. The meta-QSAR project relies on semantic descriptions of QSAR studies to enable meta-learning about the quality and efficiency of the learners. The Big Machine Science project funded by DARPA aims to integrate machine reading of the cancer literature with (1) probabilistic reasoning across cancer claims from that literature using custom-designed ontologies; (2) computational modelling of cancer mechanisms and pathways to automatically predict therapeutic clues; (3) automated hypothesis generation to strategically extend this knowledge, and (4) a “Robot Scientist” that performs experiments to test hypotheses and feed results back to our system. Repeated loops of text mining, modelling, experimental testing, and worldview updating will lead to increased knowledge about cancer mechanisms. The fundamental biological and clinical application involves design of drug cocktails optimized to treat patients by interrupting cancer mechanisms. The European project AdaLab will start in March 2015. This project aims to take the concept of a “Robot Scientist” to a new level. It will output an environment where robot and human scientists can work together on complex scientific tasks.

Event: 18 February 13:00, KB 2.33 (and then third Wednesday of each month)

The second BioHealthy Lunch Club is being run by Robert Stevens and Goran Nenadic. The aim  is to provide a forum for finding out what's happening in bio- and health-informatics area both locally and wider in the community, and to seed possible/further collaborations.

The lunch will include:

• News/updates about what's going on
• Show and tell enlightening talk (5 min)
• Questions, ideas and opportunities (grants, collaborations, studentships, papers, datasets, etc.)
• Grant club - testing grant ideas

• Monday 23 February 2015, 12-14:00
• Rutherford Lecture Theatre, Schuster Building [building no. 54 on the campus map  http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=6507 ]

The Faculty has recently appointed the PNO Group to support academics to get more involved in EU Funding and to improve the quality of applications.

PNO work with the public sector, SMEs and large companies and offer a range of services. Including advice for those new to EU funding seeking to identify which EU funds may be available for them, and specific support for grant applications.

What can EU funding offer me? 

To register for this event:  please email your name, job title and School to Ann Durie, ann.durie@manchester.ac.uk

Topics covered will include:

• The benefits of EU funding
• What’s in it for you?
• How to win and EU grant
• Building a consortium
• Pitfalls and errors to avoid, including case studies
• Bring your laptop and sign up to Innovation Place  to access funding information, project ideas, collaboration opportunities, search for qualified partners

Closing date: monthly

The Centre for Defence Enterprise and Defence Science and Technology Laboratory enduring challenge competition (previously known as the Open Call), has a budget of £3 million per year.

CDE typically funds proposals for proof-of-concept research in the range of £40,000 to £100,000 for work of 3 to 9 months duration in the challenge areas, including :

• Data: cyber, information, big data, management and processing, sensemaking, visualisation, delivery, interoperability

Find out more and discuss your proposal ideas by attending a CDE Innovation Network event that run regularly (generally London).

Remember... funding is available from the School to attend funder-events and feedback to the School on opprtunities and insights. Contact Robert Stevens for more details.

Closing date for feasibility studies registration : noon 11 March 2015

Closing date for receipt of applications: noon 18 March 2015

Innovate UK, Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) are to invest up to £7.5m in collaborative R&D projects, with a proportion available for feasibility studies. Proposals must be collaborative and business-led.

We are seeking proposals for innovative, commercial solutions to increase the resilience, quality of life or economic performance of urban areas by integrating environmental, social and/or economic data with data from other sources. The focus is on better defining and solving problems through new ways of combining data.

We are primarily seeking to fund collaborative research and development (industrial research), with a business partner attracting 50% public funding for their project costs (60% for SMEs). We expect collaborative R&D projects to range in size from £250k to £1m, although we may consider projects outside this range.

Up to £2.5m of the total funding will be available for smaller-scale collaborative feasibility studies. These will generally attract up to 70% public funding for their project costs (60% for medium organisations and 50% for large organisations). We expect feasibility studies projects to range in size from £50k to £200k.

Up to £0.5m is specifically for projects which use historic or new datasets collected by satellites to develop new services. Up to £2m is available from NERC and £0.5m from ESRC for research components.

Closing date: 30 April 2015
The SABMiller Royal Society Exchange Programme will provide awards of three years' duration to enable African scientists in sub-Saharan Africa to partner with UK-based institutions.

Congratulations to Sean Bechhofer and Matthew Horridge!

The project asks whether we can exploit models of human behaviour to move away from direct, unambiguous user commands, towards seamless user-device interaction? It will investigate and develop the techniques to capture 'Indicative Usage Models (IUMs), behavioural patterns or cues that precede a particular activity, and translate these into software- based 'Indicative Usage Patterns' (IUPs), to drive interaction with an app. For more information see the Winter Research Newsletter (p.7)