School of CS newsletter

The Main Library is undergoing a major redevelopment as part of the University’s Campus Masterplan. Building work will begin in the Summer of 2016 and is scheduled to be completed in the Summer of 2019. Once the work is completed the library will offer a more comfortable and richer variety of study spaces together with easier navigation and access to books. While the work is underway the library will have less space available and so those books that have not been borrowed in the last 7 years will be temporarily moved to the Library store. Books will be moved out in number order from September 2015 until June 2016. Books in the library store will still be visible in the catalogue and can still be used but will not be instantly available. 

Further details connected to the project are available via the Library Redevelopment pages.

A message from David Rydeheard:

You may not be aware but the School has an extensive Hardware Library of computing equipment which may be borrowed and reserved online:


http://studentnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/hardware/


The library is run by Stephen Rhodes (rhodes@cs.man.ac.uk). 

 

 

We already have a great variety of equipment, for example: aerial drones (quadcopters), virtual reality headsets, robots and robotic arms, Arduino boards and Raspberry Pis, encephalographs (headgear sensing brain activity), a 3-D printer, motion detectors, a collection of high-performance laptops, game controllers, Makey-Makey kits, a variety of physical sensors, etc. The library is expanding, being reorganised and the online system upgraded over the summer. If there is equipment you want but is not in the library, let Stephen know. 


Use it!

This equipment is for internal use, so may be borrowed by staff and students and can be used, for example, for experiments and for student projects. It is also available for our outreach activities to schools and to the general public. A considerable number of activities with schools use this equipment in workshops developed by our student volunteers. The library is a great enabler - making possible what would otherwise be difficult or impossible. Do use it!


Computing equipment around the School:

With  the library in existence, we need to consolidate the equipment we have around the School. We know that staff hold quite a lot of equipment which isn’t known to others. This leads to duplication and a poor use of equipment. If you hold equipment of any sort (other than standard desktops/laptops/tablets) can you let Stephen know (rhodes@cs.man.ac.uk)? This doesn’t mean you lose control of it, but it does mean that it is visible to others. You can still control its use if you wish, or allow it to be borrowed with your permission.

14:00, 26 June 2015, Lecture Theatre 1.4, Kilburn building

Speaker: Dr. Anni-Yasmin Turhan, Dresden University of Technology

Host: Professor Uli Sattler

In Description Logics (DL) ontologies, information is typically captured by clear-cut concepts. For many applications querying the knowledge base only by crisp concepts is too restrictive---precision of the query may be traded for a larger selection of answers. Concept similarity measures, which assess the similarity of two concepts by a number, can offer a controlled way of gradually relaxing a query concept within a user-specified limit.

In this talk we recapitulate the basics of Description Logics and investigate the task of instance query answering for DL ontologies using concepts relaxed by concept similarity measures. We identify relevant properties for the similarity measure and investigate computation algorithms for the description logic EL---regarding whether unfoldable or general TBoxes are used. For the case of general TBoxes we define a new family of concept similarity measures that take the full TBox information into account, when assessing the similarity of concepts.

http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/our-research/seminars/

Webinar: 06 July 2015

Call deadline: 29 September 2015

Under Horizon 2020, FET (Future Emerging Technologies) Open continues its mission to support early-stage joint science and technology research around new ideas for radically new future technologies. FET Open covers now ALL technological areas. FET Open calls for early-stage joint science and technology research towards radically new future technologies. Being entirely non-prescriptive with regards to the nature or purpose of the technologies that are envisaged, this call targets the unexpected. It is open to collaborative research that satisfies the FET-Open 'gatekeepers': long-term vision, ambition of the scientific and technological breakthrough, foundational character, novelty, high-risk and deep synergistic interdisciplinary approach. FET-Open aspires to be an early detector of new and promising ideas, but also of the new high-potential actors in research and innovation (such as young researchers and high-tech SMEs) that may become the scientific and industrial leaders of the future.

Reducing Energy Demand in the Transport Sector

• EoI closing date: 31 July 2015
• Closing date: 16:00, 19 August 2015

EPSRC, as part of its contribution to the Research Councils UK Energy Programme, is looking to support interdisciplinary collaborative research in order to reduce energy demand in the transport sector. In particular we are seeking proposals with innovation in engineering, physical sciences or ICT together with an application, business and economic modelling and considering behavioural aspects of transport systems. Up to £4M is available from EPSRC for this call, and we expect to fund 2 projects for a period of 3 yrs.
 

Resource Allocation Panel (RAP): Top-up of ARCHER resource on EPSRC grants (Summer 2015)

Closing Date: 21 September 2015 at 16:00

Applicants to this call can request ARCHER compute resource - only to facilitate the remainder of their existing EPSRC grant.
 

Resource Allocation Panel (RAP): Access to ARCHER (Summer 2015) 

Closing Date: 21 September 2015 at 16:00

EPSRC offers access to ARCHER through calls for proposals to the Resource Allocation Panel (RAP). Users can request significant amounts (>1,000kAUs or >66,667 ARCHER core hours) of computing resource over a maximum one-year period. The aim of this call is to provide access to our national state-of-the-art high performance computing facility for proposals of high scientific quality that would benefit from ARCHER.

A non-exclusive list of eligible projects include:

• Short computational projects that do not warrant a full grant application
• UK led collaborative projects with international and/or industry partners
• Joint applications from students (as Co-I) with proven HPC experience (e.g. a successfully completed instant access project) and their PIs
• Projects that link consecutive standard grant applications or that aid the preparation of a grant or fellowship application
• Extended feasibility studies and trialling application developments at scale

 

Call for ARCHER Leadership Projects

Closing Date: 21 September 2015 at 16:00

This is a call for applications for direct access to the UK's national supercomputing facility for computationally intensive individual projects (>100,000 kAU or 6666667 core-hours on ARCHER) for a maximum of 24 months, from academic and non-academic research groups. The resource is for pre-competitive research only and the research area must lie within the remit of either the EPSRC) or NERC. This call is for compute resource only, including core Computational Science and Engineering support as provided by the ARCHER Service to all users. However, no additional support for staff or consumables can be applied for. Thus applicants must demonstrate substantial high performance computing expertise within their team in order to be considered for funding.

A non-exclusive list of eligible projects include:

• Leadership calculations that push the boundaries of scientific HPC, for example whole systems approaches, multi-scale modelling, etc.
• Calculations that require a large number of processing cores (1,500 - 118,080 cores)
• High-risk, high-reward projects that rely heavily on high performance compute resource and have significant potential for large future impact.
• Substantial computational projects by experienced teams that need large compute resources, but do not rely on additional support by EPSRC or NERC.
• Pre-competitive computational production runs by non-academic research groups within sectors related to the remits of the ARCHER partner research councils.