-
Department of CS newsletter
Published: Wednesday, 01 June 2022Weekly newsletter for the Department of CS
Department Newsletter - Contents
[ top ]News from Head of Department
Jubilee Public Holidays
A reminder that Thursday 2 June and Friday 3 June are public holidays and that the buildings will be closed. Extended hours passes for staff and PGR will still work.
Robert.
Marion Morris
Staff Promotions
Congratulations to the following members of staff who have been promoted this year:
Riza Batista-Navarro, promoted to Senior Lecturer (Teaching and Research).
Mustafa Mustafa, promoted to Senior Lecturer (Research).
Stewart Blakeway promoted to Lecturer (Grade 7) (teaching Focused)
Gareth Henshall, promoted to Lecturer (Grade 7) (Teaching Focused).
I am sure you will all join me in offering all four your congratulations.
Robert.
Two members of CS staff elected to Senate
Congratulations to Simon Harper and Bijan Parsia who have been elected to the university's Senate, Simon for a second term. you can see all the results here
Robert.
Ruth Maddocks
Prize for Junichi Tsujii
Congratulations to professor Junichi Tsujii who has been awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon. You can find out about this award here
This award is the third among the six classes of award. A translation of the award's details are as follows:
"Junichi Tsujii, Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo, was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon on April 29, 2022. After graduating from Kyoto University Graduate School, Professor Tsujii worked at Kyoto University, Manchester University, and Microsoft Research. From 1995 to 2011, he was engaged in education and research at the Department of Computer Science, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo. Professor Tsujii is widely known worldwide for his original research in major fields of natural language processing and computational linguistics such as machine translation, linguistic analysis, and text mining for life science. He was President of the Association of Computational Linguistics. (ACL), and International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT), and is the current chairman of the International Committee for Computational Linguistics (ICCL). He has been a leader in natural language processing and computational linguistics in Japan as well as in the world. He is actively engaged in research as a Fellow and Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Centre of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST ) as well as a Professor of the University of Manchester in the Department of Computer Science. Yusuke Miyao, Head of the Department of Computer Science, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, said "Professor Tsujii has been engaged in advanced research of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics since the dawn of natural language processing, and is one of the pioneers of text mining for life science. We, students of Professor Tsujii, are very pleased for him to receive the award. On behalf of his students, I would like to express heartful congratulations."
I too, add my congratulations to Junichi for this prestigious award.
Robert.
Welcome to three new members of academic staff
Welcome to Dr Wei Pan
Before that, he was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Cognitive Robotics, Delft University of Technology. Before coming to the Netherlands, he was a Project Leader in machine learning at DJI, China, after receiving a PhD degree from Imperial College London in 2016. He is the recipient of Dorothy Hodgkin’s Postgraduate Awards, Microsoft Research PhD. Scholarship and Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad. He is on the editorial board of CoRL, ICRA, IROS, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He has a broad interest in robot dynamics using Bayesian machine learning and the principles of dynamic control.
Welcome to Mauricio A. Álvarez
Mauricio A. Álvarez received the B.Eng. degree (Hons.) in Electronics Engineering from Universidad Nacional de Colombia, in 2004, the M.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira, Colombia, in 2006, and the PhD degree in Computer Science from The University of Manchester in 2011. After finishing his PhD, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira, where he was an Associate Professor until December 2016. From January 2017 to March 2022, he was appointed as a Lecturer and later on Senior Lecturer in Machine Learning with the Department of Computer Science, The University of Sheffield. In April 2022, he joined the Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, where he is currently a Senior Lecturer in Machine Learning. Mauricio's research interests include probabilistic models, kernel methods, and stochastic processes. He works on the development of new probabilistic models and their application in different engineering and scientific areas that include Neuroscience, Neural Engineering, Systems biology, and Humanoid Robotics. More recently he has been working on physics-inspired machine learning and transfer learning in problems with structured datasets. Webpage
Welcome to Bernardo Magri
Since December ’21, I’m a Senior Lecturer in cryptography in the Systems and Software Security group at the Computer Science department of the University of Manchester. I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at Sapienza University of Rome in February 2017, where I worked mainly on backdoors in cryptographic primitives and Blockchain. My research focus is on all aspects of cryptography, including but not limited to subversion-resilient cryptography, foundations of Blockchain, key-exchange, cryptography from noisy sources, and secure multi-party computation. I’m also interested in computational complexity theory and distributed systems in general.
[ top ]News and announcements
[ top ]Events
Atlas Talk (online) 7 June
A reminder for your diary.
You are invited to an Atlas Talk (Zoom online) with speaker Siddhartha Mishra and host Anirbit Mukherjee on Tuesday 7 June at 14:00:
Join Zoom Meeting: https://zoom.us/j/92481872736
Meeting ID: 924 8187 2736 Passcode: 818580
Title: Learning Operators.
Abstract: Operators are mappings between infinite-dimensional spaces. They arise in a variety of context, particularly in scientific computing, where the input-output map for the underlying differential equations (ordinary or partial) is an operator. Learning operators from data is challenging on account of the intrinsic infinite-dimensional nature of the underlying task. In this talk, we briefly review several different recently proposed architectures for operator learning, particularly in the context of PDEs and elucidate some of the open questions in this field.
Brief Bio: Siddhartha Mishra is the (chair) Professor for applied Mathematics at Seminar for Applied Mathematics, D-MATH, ETH Zurich. He is also the director of Computational Science Zurich and a core faculty member of the ETH AI Center. Mishra's research interests are in numerical analysis, scientific computing, computational fluid dynamics, computational astrophysics, computational climate science, machine learning and modeling and simulation of complex systems. His research has been recognized with various prizes such as ICIAM Collatz Prize, Infosys Prize, Richard von Mises prize, Jacques Louis Lions Medal, and the starting and consolidator grants of the European Research Council. He has been invited speaker at leading conferences including the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio 2018.
We hope you can join us.
Event for staff interested in setting up their own business based on research
This event is external to the University but may be of interest to any staff with an interest in setting up their own business based on their research, or looking for a way to connect into local industry in this area.
We're just getting in touch to invite you to our next Pragmatic CTO event on 16th June, the last one was so successful so we're really looking forward to putting on another event for everyone at Manchester Tech Centre.
Please see details below, and RSVP here
Pragmatic CTO Invitation, Date: 16th June, Time 6-8pm, Location: Manchester Technology Centre, Oxford Road
As current or aspiring tech leaders, or professionals whose role is closely related to technology, I'm inviting you to join us at our next Pragmatic CTO event with us at Manchester Technology Centre.
Pragmatic CTO is a space I've developed to try to get more bright local technologists to help exciting tech startups, founded on our doorstep to grow. Whether that's mentoring the future Heads of Engineering or CTOs; helping techies and founders to build productive working relationships; or advising CEOs and Investors on key aspects and perils of building a successful tech team - we hope you can find inspiration and friendly advice.
At this event we'll be hearing from Gemma McCall, founder and CEO of Culture Shift who will share her experiences and tips for building team culture for successful teams, Matt Squire CTO and co-founder Fuzzy Labs and MLOps practitioner who will introduce MLOps and how to use it as part of your ML/AI journey. We'll also have a panel session with Andrew Beacock, CTO at Guidr and Kirk Winstanley, COO at BankiFi, discussing the topics such as what's the expected from a modern CTO in a startup and scale-up world, tips for building strong teams in the remote-first workplace and if and how to succeed growing with offshore teams. We hope you can join us, please also feel free to invite any of your colleagues and team mates who may also like to attend, and don't forget we also have the Pragmatic CTO slack channel too. Website
Regards Aleksa Vukotic, CTO thestartupfactory.tech
[ top ]Health and Safety
Kilburn Building: Glazing and Fire door remedial works - June 2022
For information:
6-22 June: Remedial Fire Door works will take place in Kilburn - should be little disruption.
23 June: the replacement glazing for the lightwell in the courtyard should be fitted. The courtyard may be cordoned off due to the crane hoisting the glazing into position. Signage will be put in place if required.
[ top ]Social Responsibility
Outreach Talk on Robots
Thursday 26th May: Louise Dennis delivered three Lego Robot Programming workshops to year 5 and 6 pupils at St. Paul's C of E primary school in Withington. She talked to the children about Mars Rovers, the difficulty of communicating with robots on Mars, and simple programming of obstacle avoidance. Here are a couple of photos shared by the teacher (with permission).
