Department of CS newsletter

This newsletter is something of an end of Summer Special. It's been a sufficiently strange year that I almost didn't notice the end of the academic year - everything has carried on at a very intense level. It's been a tough 2020 so far and the Department has risen to the challenge, with lots of people going the extra mile and continuing to do so. There are hard times ahead, with lots of new teaching and a whole cohort of new students arriving who, like us, will be experiencing a new style of university teaching.

I know I can rely on the department to rally together to deliver fab teaching and research. Do stay in contact with friends and colleagues, and do ask for help as necessary. There's lots of information on our Staff Wiki https://wiki.cs.manchester.ac.uk/staff/index.php/Main_Page and there's a Blended Learning part of the Wiki at https://wiki.cs.manchester.ac.uk/staff/index.php/Blended_Learning_in_AY20-21.

Robert.

As mentioned at the Departmental Fora, we have also had some new appointments made prior to the shut down, all in autonomy and verification:

 Dr. Louise Dennis  

Louise joins the University of Manchester as a Senior Lecturer. Her expertise is in the development and verification of autonomous systems with interests in model-checking (specifically program model-checking for Java), rational agent programming languages, verifiable architectures for autonomous systems, and AI ethics. She is a member of the IEEE Standards working group for Transparency for Autonomous Systems (P7001) and co-investigator on two EPSRC Hubs for Robotics in Extreme and Challenging Environments: Future AI and Robotics for Space (FAIR-SPACE) and Robotics and AI for Nuclear (RAIN). Before the pandemic she did a great deal of public understanding work taking Lego Robots into schools.

 Professor Clare Dixon

I am interested in verification, in particular for robotics and autonomous systems, and automated reasoning for non-classical logics. I am an investigator for two of the ISCF/EPSRC Robotics and AI Hubs: RAIN (nuclear) and FAIR-SPACE (space) and the EPSRC programme grant Science of Sensor Systems Software. I am a member of the BSI standards committee for Robotics (AMT/10) and a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College. I have been PC chair for the Frontiers of Combining Systems Symposium (FroCoS), the Towards Autonomous Robotics Systems (TAROS), and the International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (TIME). I serve on the Steering committee for FroCoS and recently stepped down as a Steering Committee member of the TIME Symposium series.  

After my first degree I taught mathematics at a high school abroad for a couple of years and then worked as a software engineer for a couple of years. Returning to study in 1990 I did an MSc and a PhD at the University of Manchester. From 1995 I worked as a postdoctoral researcher and then a research lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. I moved to the University of Liverpool in 2001. I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and have taught several different modules at UG and PGT level. I am external examiner for MSc programmes in Computing at the University of Dundee. I led the Robotics research group for several years and have held roles as Department, School and Faculty Director of Postgraduate Research.

  Professor Michael Fisher

I joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Manchester in 1980 (yes, that’s 40 years ago!) proceeding through undergraduate (BSc Mathematics & CS), postgraduate (MSc, PhD) and post-doc roles. In 1993 I moved to the Computing Department at the Manchester Metropolitan University, to set up the Logic and Computation group and then, in January 2001, I moved to the Computer Science Department at the University of Liverpool where I have been until July 2020. At Liverpool, I led both the Autonomy & Verification Lab and the university-wide Centre for Autonomous Systems Technology.

I hold a 10-year Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies and my research centres on autonomous systems, particularly verification, software engineering, ethics and trustworthiness, and I am investigator on three large EPSRC Robotics and AI Hubs (across Nuclear, Offshore, Space) and the Science of Sensor Systems Software Programme grant. I am also involved in policy, standards, and public engagement activities: I co-chair the IEEE Technical Committee on “Verification of Autonomous Systems”; sit on BSI/IEEE standards committees concerning Robotics, Robot Ethics, AI, and Autonomous Systems; have spoken at international policy bodies (e.g: the Global Forum on AI for Humanity and the International Committee of the Red Cross); and am a member of EPSRC’s Strategic Advisory Team for ICT.

Daisy Towers

New intern in SSO team

Senior Leadership Team Summaries

Summary of the work of the Team over the last month. I should be updating this page following the last SLT meeting each month.

https://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/fse/school-engineering/leadership-team-summary/

Head of School Open Meetings

Recordings of the Alice, Chris and Rachael’s Open meetings. These are usually updated within 24 hours of the meeting taking place.

https://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/fse/faculty-leadership/flt/open-meetings/

School Board

All docs and recordings will be available via this link – hopefully within a week of the meeting happening (depending on how quickly the Chair checks and approves the minutes for circulating)

https://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/fse/school-engineering/school-board-summary/

Please be aware that submission pending fee will be waived for all PGR students with original programme / funding end date between 1 March 2020 and 31 March 2021.

PGR FAQ have been updated accordingly as below:

Will I still need to pay a submission pending fee if my submission pending application is approved?

The University will waive the submission pending fee for any PGR with an original programme / funding end date between 1 March 2020 and 31 March 2021 (before any COVID-related extension may have been applied), regardless of their funding source. If you meet the end date criteria and your submission pending application is approved then the fee will be waived automatically. If you have any questions please first contact your supervisor or local PGR support team.

2 July 2020 saw the second outing for our Save the World (Wide Web) exercise which we devised with the Philip Barker Centre for Creative Learning (at the University of Chester). This is where school children, teachers, and professionals from across the police and intelligence services with academics and industry experts deliver emotional inoculations to the dangers of on-line harms. This year we tackled the challenge of online grooming into sexual exploitation and the fake news of conspiracy cults.

We ran the exercise from the newly-opened GCHQ Manchester – their first public engagement in the new centre  – and we were sponsored by BAE Systems Applied Intelligence. Staff from both GCHQ and BAE Systems joined forces with the two universities to design two scenarios of children under threat. Participants– including pupils from 4 schools – were supplied with (sometimes misleading) intelligence and they had to analyse the situation and guide the threatened children to safety. Two parallel scenarios ran (with one facilitated by Professor Emma Barrett, director of UoM’s Digital Trust and Security programme).

The challenge, of course, was to run a sequence of plenary sessions and facilitated workshops in an engaging, on-line environment. Finding a suitable application – and running it across a myriad of devices and platforms (and flaky broadband) was no mean feat. Enter Rozita Karami of the Youth Federation (https://youthfed.org.uk/) and ACS MSc graduate. Roz evaluated and tested several platforms, helped us to select the best match, and then calmly orchestrated the on-line activities as people came on- and (inevitably dropped off sometimes) line for an afternoon of intense activity.

The risk of the simulation becoming real for a young person who may have suffered – but not disclosed – the horrors that may be experienced on-line, was something that we were concerned about from the early planning stages. Imagine the need to counsel a child who has held back from crying for help about on-line child sexual exploitation until such an exercise. So…part of the innovation for the day came from Tink Palmer of the Marie Collins Foundation (MCF – https://www.mariecollinsfoundation.org.uk/). Not only did MCF draw up a policy for supporting young people throughout the day, Tink and her team laid out a plan for young people to seek help after the exercise too whether that’s in the short, medium, or long term. On the day, young people could go to a ‘safe room’ where a therapeutic counsellor (Rachel Dresner) was ready to help them.

At the heart of the event, we were blessed to have Dr Victoria Baines (visiting fellow at Bournemouth, Oxford, Stanford, and Cyber Warrior Princess (https://soundcloud.com/cyberwarriorprincess) More than just chairing the day, Victoria was at the heart of the design and coordination, drawing on experience in law enforcement and a stint at Facebook.

The Save the World (Wide Web) concept is the work of Professor Danny Dresner (University of Manchester) and Nick Ponsillo (University of Chester) under the patronage of Sir Edmund Burton (chair of the Philip Barker Charity).

Save the World (Wide Web) is now firmly established as a highlight of the North West’s cyber ecosystem with the Manchester city region at its heart. This new, on-line manifestation can now be run publicly or targeted for schools and other institutions that are challenged with keeping young people safe on-line. It’s a unique day of multidisciplinary, age-agnostic collaboration, where adults are most likely – as we saw again – to learn from the children.

Please find a podcast about the event below:

https://soundcloud.com/cyberwarriorprincess/cwp-18-120720-saving-the-world-wide-web

Danny Dresner

Gavin Brown and co have had a paper that has made the front cover of Nature Electronics - out today :

https://www.nature.com/natelectron/volumes/3/issues/7

Gavin says: Results of a collaboration between Manchester’s MLO group at Arm Research has been published as the cover article for Nature Electronics. The research developed a new resource-efficient machine learning algorithm, and fabricated it with commercial grade sub-micron metal oxide thin film transistor technology. The system was evaluated as a flexible processing engine for an odour recognition application. The classifier uses just 1,000 logic gates and has a gate density per area that is 20–45 times higher than other digital integrated circuits built with conventional fabrication.

Robert.