Department of CS newsletter

Dear All

 I'm sure that many of you will have seen the message on Staffnet about Voluntary  Severance and other voluntary measures to cut staff costs. You can find this message at

 https://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/voluntary-measures-for-staff/

We'll have a meeting of staff Friday 22nd may at 2 p.m. on Zoom to talk about these measures. I'll say some words, but most of the meeting will be  an opportunity to ask questions.

Robert.

Topic: Staff meeting

Time: May 22, 2020 02:00 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting

https://zoom.us/j/99673602601

Library Update

Although the Library is physically closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak, we are digitally open and available to support your teaching and research.

How do I access resources?

The Library provides access to one of the most extensive collections of digital resources in the UK, which are available from any location and device. Staff and students can search and access our electronic content using Library Search and/or install our browser extensions which will help ease access to our subscribed e-content. You may need to re-install browser extensions if you are using a different device whilst you are working from home. If the Library does not hold electronic copies of the books that you need for your research, please use the Order a book service and we will get them for you, where available. The Order an article service is also open to all staff and students. If the Library does not hold an electronic copy of the article that you need, complete the order form and we will get it for you.

We are also working closely with publishers to provide access to additional e-resources, including e-books, during the period of the COVID-19 outbreak on a temporary basis.

What support is there for online teaching?

To manage your reading lists and order content for online teaching you can use Reading Lists Online. If you have a print reading list item that you would like to provide electronically, contact the Reading Lists team uml.readinglists@manchester.ac.uk who will investigate available options. All reading list items in Reading Lists Online for current teaching are being made available electronically wherever possible, including access to a growing list of 70+ free eTextbooks which can be accessed here or within your relevant reading lists.

Full details of how to access Library resources and services while our sites are closed can be found on our Service availability page, which is being updated regularly.

Any queries, then please contact your Academic Engagement Librarian, Gemma Smith. Email: gemma.smith-3@manchester.ac.uk

Recording the challenges faced by our diverse community

The Faculty of Science and Engineering's Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee would like to understand the range of challenges different groups and individuals are facing in order to have a better understanding of how the decisions we all make affect others. The University has launched a form to collate the different challenges we are all facing during this period – plus any suggestions for mitigating these. 

Championed by the Faculty’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee it is hoped that by recording these challenges we can better understand the impacts of decisions, and in particular can try to identify and share solutions. 

Mark Hughes, Associate Dean for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility for the Faculty of Science and Engineering, said: “At the moment, our most pressing issue is the different impacts this crisis is having on our staff and students; including, but not confined, to those infected by Covid-19 and their families, the bereaved, to those who are shielding, mental health implications, those with additional caring responsibilities, those who are home schooling, those who are ill, those with disabilities, etc. 

“As we all try our best to support each other through this crisis, it is more important than ever that we better understand these different challenges. Therefore I encourage you all to complete the form."

Our PGRs are doing interesting work that we might all be able to build on in the future.  The Mercury Seminar Series invites final year PGRs to discuss and disseminate their work in just the same way as the Departmental Atlas Seminars. This is your opportunity to understand the breadth of work undertaken in the Department and discuss ideas with our early career researchers. This first session of zoom seminars will occur every other week until the beginning of August.

Zoom Meeting ID:970 6036 3613 .  Here are details of the scheduled talks:

Wed 27th May  - 2pm - Viktor Schlegel - Title: Evaluating the Evaluation of Machine Reading Comprehension

Abstract:  NLP research, particularly the processing of unstructured text, is advancing at an unprecedented rate. Deep neural models optimised on large corpora and the broad availability of large task-specific datasets result in systems that surpass humans on various benchmarks when answering questions over text passages. Recent developments, however, cast doubt on this superb performance. Those benchmarks appear to exhibit superficial cues that deep models learn to exploit, thus bypassing the required natural language understanding capabilities. This raises the following questions: to what extent are state-of-the-art reading comprehension benchmarks suitable to evaluate various capabilities required for the understanding of natural language and how can reading comprehension systems be evaluated with regard to those capabilities. This talk will present methods, their applications and report results of a fine-grained evaluation of state of the art machine reading comprehension benchmarks and corresponding systems.

Wed 10th June - 2pm - Ahmed Bhayat - Title: Recent Developments in automated Theorem proving in Higher-Order Logic

Abstract: Higher-order logic is the natural language for many areas of mathematics. As such, it would be useful to have strong automation for higher-order reasoning. Unfortunately, automation for higher-order logic has lagged behind that for first-order logic. The Vampire theorem prover, developed in Manchester, along with other leading first-order theorem provers are based on the superposition calculus. Superposition is essentially a brute force search through the set of all conclusions from given axioms. However, it adds powerful simplification techniques that allow the deletion of redundant conclusion thus keeping the search space manageable. For many years it was an open question whether superposition could be extended to higher-order logic. In this presentation, I provide details on recent research extending superposition to higher-order logic. This has been done in two ways, one of which has been implemented in Vampire.

Wed 24th June - 2pm - Yuan Chai - Title: Routing design in wireless mesh network

Abstract: Due to the features of low cost, high robustness and reliability, wireless mesh network (WMN) is an essential architecture in next generation of communication network. The self-construction and self-configuration peculiarities can dramatically reduce the complexity of network deployment and maintenance. Multiple hops can extend the coverage area. Because of these strengths, WMN can be used in military and emergency communication, etc. There are two types of mesh nodes in WMN: mesh routers and mesh clients. Mesh routers are always equipped with multiple radio interfaces connected with multiple wireless channels, while mesh clients have a single radio interface.
Routing design which is adaptive for the network features is very important in network design, because an effective routing can greatly improve the whole network performance. Bad path selections will cause congestion, high interference, long delay, and so on. Thus, designing an effective routing method considering link quality in WMN is essential. Nowadays, more and more communication services require little delay and energy consumption, so delay and energy are important factors that need to be considered in the routing design. From the view of the route establishment time, routing design can be categorized into proactive and reactive methods. In proactive routing, in order to achieve the global best network performance, the problem of routing can be formulated as a constrained optimization problem. Minimizing the delay and energy consumption can be the objectives. In reactive routing, each node can select path when needs to transmit packets. As heavy and aggregated load and interference will decrease the performance, load and interference need to be balanced. The hybrid routing combining proactive and reactive routing is effective in WMN with both static and mobile nodes. Simulation results can show the effectiveness of the designed routing methods

Wed 8th June - Dario Panada - Details to follow

Wed 22nd June - Heng Zhang - Details to follow

 

The theme this year is Kindness Matters.

Various mental health charities have produced content to provide both information and support this week.

Mind has created the #SpeakYourMind TikTok Challenge, and has also provided interactive cards on their website to encourage acts of kindness to yourself and others - Website

Heads Together organised a Mental Health Minute on all radio stations – details
They have also produced a 60 Second support series on various Covid-19 issues, such as isolation, grief, conflict and sleep - details

In addition to our Six ways to wellbeing framework, which suggests six areas you might want to focus on, we also offer the following:

Big White Wall

The Big White Wall provides staff with free online mental health and wellbeing support, any time, any day.  It is a 24/7 online community, monitored by trained clinicians and provides a safe space online to get things off your chest, have conversations, get creative and learn how to manage your mental health and wellbeing. It is totally anonymous and confidential.

Counselling service - The Counselling service offers a range of online resources and support.  Resources include Build your mental health expertise and Coping with COVID-19.

The Counselling service is now operating its full service by phone, video and email: counselling.service@manchester.ac.uk.  If you'd like contact with a counsellor, please visit the Counselling service website to complete an online questionnaire that you can then email to the service along with your staff ID number. One of the team will then get back to you.

Additional resources
·         Wellbeing lectures
·         Supporting staff with Mental Health Problems
·         Mental health foundation support during coronavirus
·         Six ways to wellbeing while staying at home
·         Coronavirus - wellbeing support

UoM Sport is taking part in the #StayInWorkOut Sport England campaign, sharing daily messages, challenges and live videos on Facebook and Instagram for #MotivationMonday! #WellbeingWednesday and #FeelGoodFriday

You can find further links mental health support videos, classes and tools here
 

As many of you will be aware, IT Services have been planning to move staff and postgraduate students to Microsoft Office 365 during 2020. What has not been communicated very clearly is that IT Services have accelerated this programme, and they are moving staff to Office 365 by the end of May because "the closure of non-essential facilities on campus has driven the wish for the rollout to be performed much quicker than anticipated."

For many staff in Computer Science, the most significant impact they will see is will be the way in which they access email, as their account will be moved from the University's on-site Exchange server to the cloud system operated by Microsoft. Individual staff are being emailed directly ahead of being moved with instructions, and staff using Outlook on staff managed desktop/laptop systems will have their settings updated automatically. However, staff accessing email from their mobile devices, and from unmanaged desktops, Mac OS or Linux systems will need to update their settings and the programs they use to access their email. In particular, any staff member currently using IMAP to access their email will not be able to do this after being moved to Office 365. Please see https://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/modernising-it/technology/office365/resources/ for more information on this, but essentially the advice is:

• On mobile devices, install the O365 app to access your email.
• If you are using Windows or Mac OS X, install Outlook for that operating system.
• If you are using Linux, install and use Evolution to access your email.

I have raised the lack of support information for Linux users in the above documentation with both IT services and the EUC partner and I am awaiting an update on that, and will distribute any information I receive.