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School of CS newsletter
Published: Monday, 13 April 2015Weekly newsletter for the School of CS
[ top ]News from Head of School
President’s visit – 22nd April
The President's annual visit to the School will be on 22nd April. There will be an open meeting for students (no staff) in 2.19 at 3:00 - 3:30 and an open meeting for staff in 2.19 at 3:30 - 4:00. In previous staff meetings Nancy has made a brief statement to staff but the bulk of the time has been available for open questions or statements from staff about any concerns that they have, so please come along ready to raise any issues that you feel are important for the School and/or the University.
Jim Miles
Staff Survey - deadline 20th April
If you haven't had a chance to complete the staff survey yet please try to find time before it closes on April 20th.
The survey is run by Capita, an external provider, and is completely confidential. You should have been emailed a link to your survey by Capita. If there are any problems please contact satnam.kaur@manchester.ac.uk
A donation of £1 is made to charity for every completed survey that is submitted, and you will be entered into a weekly prize draw to win an iPad.
Once The University has the results of the survey the School will be required to formulate an action plan addressing the issues raised.
More information can be found here: http://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/staff-survey-2015/
Audit of printers: Tuesday and Wednesday
On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week an audit of our printer infrastructure will be taking place in the Kilburn and IT building. This is part of an audit that is being carried out by IT Services across the whole University. .
The audit will require access to all rooms within the Kilburn and IT buildings to audit all the printers, multifunction machines, photocopiers etc that are being used by the school. An auditor, Mark Whalley, will need access and each print audit will take approximately 5-10 minutes and will cause minimum disruption. Mark will be being accompanied by Otto (CSIS staff member). You will not need to be in their office at the time of the audit, but if you have any key times that need to be avoided over Tuesday or Wednesday for any reason please can you let Lynn Howarth know and she will inform the auditor.
[ top ]News and announcements
Open call for projects - CDT in Regenerative Medicine
Deadline for proposals: 29 May 2015
The CDT is currently looking for innovative project proposals across the full multidisciplinary field of regenerative medicine. All proposals should be submitted to jenefer.cockitt@manchester.ac.uk using the project proposal form (contact sarah.chatwin@manchester.ac.uk for forms).
Eligibility
All projects must be cross-Faculty, with a main supervisor and a co-supervisor - and fit within the topic themes outlined on the project proposal form. Industry-linked projects are highly encouraged, with the industry partner acting as a co-supervisor. Potential supervisors do not need to have been named on the original CDT application. They must however meet the following requirements:
- must have successfully supervised a student to completion within 4y;
- must have external grant income (1yr minimum);
- must not be main supervisor to a Regenerative Medicine CDT student in the previous year;
Project selection
The CDT students will undertake six months of formal (taught) training, before starting their projects on 1 April 2016. They will have chosen their projects by the end of semester 1 (January 2016).
Lab experience placements
Each proposal must contain at least one lab experience placement and CDT students will have opportunities for industry and international placements once their PhD project is underway, as well as continued professional development activities and training as part of the CDT. Further information about the CDT can be found at: http://www.regenmedcdt.manchester.ac.uk/
If you have any questions about submitting a proposal, please do not hesitate to contact matthew.j.hardman@manchester.ac.uk
Sarah Chatwin
[ top ]Events
Proof Complexity of Quantified Boolean Formulas
14:00, 15 April 2015, Kilburn Lecture Theatre 1.4.
Dr. Olaf Beyersdorff, University of Leeds
Host: Dr Renate Schmidthttp://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/our-research/seminars/
Bryony C Quick
Launch event: MRC Proximity to Discovery - Industry Engagement Fund
Launch Event: 12.00 to 13.30 20 April 2015, Room 2.329, Jean McFarlane Building
Proposal deadline: 12:00 9 June 2015
The Business Engagement Team have been awarded £200k from the Medical Research Council to deliver the MRC Proximity to Discovery (P2D) Industry Engagement Fund. The fund aims to overcome the bottleneck to the establishment of new collaborations by supporting early interactions and knowledge exchange between industry and academic researchers. Successful proposals will:
- Enhance academic understanding of industry or vice versa in order to foster biomedical research collaborations
- Showcase biomedical research to highlight the opportunities they provide for potential industry partners
- Allow an exchange of skills or knowledge which will enable new collaborative projects to develop
The competition is structured around two schemes, Relationship Incubator and Industry Secondment, and will invite application from across the biomedical space, including but not exclusive to:
- Therapeutics
- Medical Devices
- Diagnostics
- Digital Health
The launch event will include an overview of the funding schemes and guidance for developing proposals. The meeting will end with lunch and opportunity for networking and getting advice on your P2D proposal ideas from panel members, business engagement and research support services.
To register for the event please click here.
Guidance notes for applicants:
Please contact Naomi Chandler, Business Engagement Officer (0161 306 0554) for more information.
CS KTP lunch event
Are you interested in working with companies through Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs)? Want to find out more about this funding?
Event: Mon 20th April 1-2pm Atlas 1
This lunch and networking session will be a good opportunity to find out more about the KTP scheme from Caroline Stanton (Knowledge Transfer Manager) and academics who have KTPs in place. The lunch will include:
- 10/15 minute presentation and Q&As on the KTP Scheme Caroline Stanton
- Brief KTP case studies/ experiences Dr Jon Shapiro (CS), Dr Matthew Hardman (FLS http://www.ls.manchester.ac.uk/people/profile/default.aspx?alias=hardmanm&view=research)
- Sandwich lunch
Please let sarah.chatwin@manchester.ac.uk know if you would like to attend (and with any food requirements).
EPSRC Energy Team Manchester Visit
Event: 29 April 2015
The visit is intended to gather input to support EPSRC in shaping their future energy research strategy. EPSRC will also run workshops on impact for on leaders (intended for people who may be eligible for an EPSRC fellowship). It is expected that the event will be primarily of interest to academic staff and post-doctoral researchers working in areas of energy research.
Please register through Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/epsrc-energy-team-visit-tickets-16470606026
Draft programme
- 09.00 Tea and coffee
- 09.30 Welcome and introductions
- 09.40 Presentation from EPSRC
- 10.10 Presentation from Manchester about future strategy for energy research, capacity building, and current activities and plans
- 10.40 Q&A
- 11.15 Workshop to gather input on EPSRC strategy and future plans for the energy theme
- 12.30 Lunch
- 13.30 Workshop on leaders. This session is intended for potential applicants for an EPSRC fellowship, explaining the framework EPSRC operate, what opportunities there are, how the process works, and what panels are looking for in a candidate.
- 14.15 Workshop on impact. This workshop is intended for applicants/potential applicants/reviewers (essentially everyone!). This session focuses mainly on pathways to impact, and encouraging people to think like a reviewer about what should be in there and what can be included. It also includes information on the Impact Acceleration Account.
- 15.00 Drop-in sessions for anyone who’d like to ask any questions
- 15.00 In parallel a closed/invitation-only wrap up discussion with you and other senior academics about energy issues, plans and activities and feedback on the day.
- 15.30 Close
EPSRC team visiting
- Kathryn Magnay - Head of Energy
- Gavin Salisbury – impact and automotive
- Jacqui Williams – energy storage, whole energy systems
- Neil Bateman – nuclear fission
- Glenn Goodall – end use energy demand
- Justin O’Byrne – solar, networks and bioenergy, Supergen scheme
- Oliver Philps – hydrogen and fuels cells, wind and marine.
- Sam Francis – Head of Balancing Capability
[ top ]Funding Opportunities
EC Horizon Prize for Better Use of Antibiotics
Deadline ongoing until: 17 Aug 2016
The prize is a €1 million challenge prize that will be awarded for a rapid test to identify, at the point-of-care, patients with upper respiratory tract infections that can be treated safely without antibiotics. The objective is to tackle the overuse of antibiotics and do something to halt the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance. You can find out more on our website/infographic.
The prize leaves applicants total freedom to come up with a solution to the problem, be it from an established scientist in the field or from an innovative newcomer. The award criteria just require the test to be cheap, rapid, easy-to-use for healthcare providers and non- or minimally invasive for patients.
The contest is open to any single person and legal entity or groups of legal entities established in the EU or in countries associated to Horizon 2020.
Can you crack the challenge? #HorizonPrize
www.ec.europa.eu/horizonprize/antibiotics
[ top ]Featured Research Outcomes
COPIOUS: Conserving Philippine Biodiversity by Understanding Big Data
Funding: British council Newton Fund Institutional Links
Sophia Ananiadou (PI) and Riza Batista-Navarro (CI)
£114,691 (24 months)
NaCTeM is teaming up with several Biodiversity teams in the Philippines to produce an interoperable infrastructure based on Argo and a knowledge repository based on text mining the literature related with biodiversity in the Philippines. The results and software will be open to the wider community working in biodiversity
Patent filed for ARMOR
A patent application has been filed on behalf of The University of Manchester by The University of Manchester Intellectual Property (UMIP) for PhD student's Mohsen Ghasempour's research (supervised by Dr Mikel Lujan and Dr Jim Garside): “ARMOR: A Run-time Memory hot-row detector to prevent Row-Hammer data corruption in DRAMs”.
What is ARMOR?
ARMOR is a hardware-solution to prevent Row Hammer Errors in DRAMs, designed and developed in the School of Computer Science.
The main challenge to mitigate the Row-Hammer effect is to monitor the number of activations for each row in the DRAM, which imposes a significant storage overhead to the memory system. ARMOR monitors the activation stream at the memory interface level and detects which specific rows (i.e. hot rows) are at risk of being “hammered” at run-time. ARMOR is capable of detecting all the possible hot-rows in a system with a minimal storage overhead (e.g. 800 Bytes to protect 4 GB of DRAM).
Why ARMOR is a Promising Solution?
- It is capable of detecting all the possible Row Hammer errors with a high level of confidence.
- It provides precise information about the hammered rows (addresses) and the number of activations with a high level of accuracy (e.g. 99.99%).
- It does not need to know about the logical to physical mapping of DRAMs in order to mitigate Row Hammer error (ARMOR Cache Solution).
- It is scalable according to the size of memory.
- It is technology independent and can easily support future device technologies.
For more information see: http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/ARMOR/RowHammer/index.html
