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Department of CS newsletter
Published: Friday, 23 September 2022Weekly newsletter for the Department of CS
Department Newsletter - Contents
[ top ]News from Head of Department
The start of the academic year
Welcome back to a new academic year and the return of the Newsletter. I trust that you managed to take some form of a break over the summer. I really hope that this time around we will have a much more typical year with no closures, restricted access, dual delivery teaching, etc.; the first one since the 2018/2019 season.
We have fewer taught students coming in this year; perhaps as low as 344 UG students by the 1 December census and we have around 70-80 students on our masters programme this year. Nevertheless, our first year UG intake is larger than our target, but by a much smaller margin than the two previous years. We do, however, still have a lot of taught students and all the hard work across the board that keeps the whole show on the road is very much appreciated.
It is the folk of computer science that makes it such a great place, despite our travails. This is my last Newsletter piece as HoD and I really do thank everyone for their hard work over the interesting times of the past few years.
Robert.
Ruth Maddocks
[ top ]News and announcements
Welcome Back to Campus - some updates
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Room bookings
Staff now have access to request bookings for the new meeting rooms on the 2nd floor (2.41, 2.43, 2.49) on the compsci room booking tile on Resource Booker: Resource Booker (manchester.ac.uk)
- Meeting OWLs
We have purchased some meeting OWLs for departmental use. Eventually these will also be bookable via Resource Booker, but we can't get them added just at the moment - so please email CSOps to book and to collect. More information here: Home | Owl Labs
- First aid boxes
There are two green first aid boxes on the Kilburn 2nd floor- one on the corridor near 2.10 and one outside the lift - these offer access to basic first aid supplies if needed.
- Pull Printing
The printers in the 2nd floor print room (room 2.13) are now working on the pull print service
ITServices - Information on installing Xerox printers
- Water Fountains
These are still in progress and will be fitted in the next couple of weeks
- Aquaid water coolers
We need to collect the freestanding bottled water dispensers up as they will all be collected in October. Please can you complete this Kilburn Reporting form if you have a water cooler so we can coordinate collection.
Welcome to new member of the CSOps team
A warm to Sarah Millington has just joined the CSOps team as a Operations administrative assistant. She joins us at our busiest time of year, so an extra pair of hands is much appreciated!
Reporting Issues and making a Request - Reminder of process
Just a reminder to use the form below to make a request or report an issue in CS:
Department of Computer Science - Estates Issues Form for Reporting & Requesting (office.com)
We collate the responses and then can follow up on requests with the Estates helpdesk in an effort to make sure jobs are completed.
Requests - eg: Moving furniture/hardware, cleaning request (carpet/other) or need a key or swipe access enabling etc.
Reporting Issues - eg. Offices being too hot/cold, things being broken, mice issue, something is broken etc.
PhD survey
Is your work at the intersection of urban research and digital?
Digital Futures is interested in hearing from PhD students whose work connects to any of these topics; Integrated Transport, Building Management & Energy Efficiency, Water & Waste Management, Digitally Enabled Public Services, Air Quality Monitoring, Spatial Analytics and Communities & Citizen Engagement.
Share more about your research in this short survey and take part in a tailored networking event.Sarah Chatwin
[ top ]Events
Departmental coffee morning - Hosted by Andrew Stewart, Head of Department
The next coffee morning will be on Wednesday 5th October at 1100 in the staff & PGR common room. Do pop down and meet our new Head of Department in person - coffee, tea and buns provided - bring a cup so we can reduce waste where possible. We have sent out a diary invite so you can get it in your diaries.
Overleaf webinar
(on behalf of the library)
Event: 18-Oct-2022The University of Manchester provides Overleaf Professional to all staff and postgraduate researchers. Overleaf is an online collaborative writing and publishing tool, using a LaTeX/Rich Text editor for working on research projects, such as publications or theses. Find out more from the Overleaf team by signing up to our webinar.
MRC Strategic Delivery Plan 2022-25 Publication and Webinar registration
Deadline for registration: 10-Oct-2022, 5pm
Webinar: 17-Oct-2022, 2-3pmIn September 2022, MRC published their strategic delivery plan 2022-25 setting out our key priorities across the next 3 years, in coordination with our fellow UKRI Councils. Here's an invitation to register and attend a webinar at 2-3pm on 17th October, which will involve a presentation on the delivery plan followed by a panel Q&A session (see below for further information).
MRC Strategic Delivery Plan 2022-25: https://www.ukri.org/publications/mrc-strategic-delivery-plan/Atlas Talk - 5th Oct 2-4pm - Formal Methods for Software Verification at Arm
We would like to invite you to the second ATLAS seminar of this academic year, taking place on 5th October.
Date, time: Wednesday 5th October, 2pm – 4pm
Location: Lecture Theatre 1.3 Kilburn Building
Speaker: Christina Burge, Arm.
Title of the talk:
Formal Methods for Software Verification at ArmFormal methods have long been used to verify program specification in academic and research contexts, as well as in safety-critical applications in industry. However, adoption by software groups has lagged considerably, despite the potential benefits of integrating formal verification into the development process. In this talk I will look at possible methods we could adopt in the development solutions group at Arm, and how they could be used. I also give a tour of current formal methods work around Arm in general.
Bio: Christina graduated from University of Manchester with a degree in Physics with Astrophysics, after which she obtained her PhD in Solar Physics from the University of Glasgow. She spent several years as a postdoc in astronomy and space science, chiefly at the University of Leeds. She has worked at Arm for a little over five years, in the architecture and future technologies group, a role which mainly involves researching new ways of working and improvements to Arm's current software.
[ top ]PGR News
PGR Welcome (Pizza & Drinks) Friday 23rd September at 5 pm
A big welcome to all new and returning students and academics. We will be hosting our first event of the year where we hope you can all join us in welcoming the new PhD students! The event will take place on Friday 23rd September at 5 pm in the PGR common room where we will serve pizza and drinks. Meat, vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free pizzas are available along with alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. We also have some fun activities planned for you all to enjoy
We look forward to spending the new academic year with everyone!
Simon Harper
PGR Handbook Updated for 2022/23
https://studentnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/pgr/handbook/
Changes to v2022.0:
Version: gb8a1119 (Update: 1) dated Sep 12, 2022.
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Submission Pending Attendance (Tier 4 Visa Holders) Updated (Visa Status During Submission Pending).
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Funding Updates (Funding (RTSGs), Papers, Conferences, & Export Controls).
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Laptop Peripheral Ordering Added (Computer Equipment).
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Removal of some COVID related information.
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Notes Sections Added across Chapters.
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Conference Travel update (Conference, Workshop, Summer School Travel).
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Publications information (Publications).
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Addition of Export Controls information (Export Controls).
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Additional Training Updates (Training & Engagement).
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Additional MVPhD Updates (Minimum Viable PhD).
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Updates to CSOPs Procedures (CS Operations Guide).
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TL;DR updated (TL;DR).
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PGR Consultative Committee Updates (Quick Guide).
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Room Allocation Updates (Rooms).
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Department Awards Updated (Departmental Prizes Awards and Medals).
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External Awards Updated (External Sponsorships, Prizes and Awards).
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University Policies Refreshed (University Policies and Code of Practice).
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Symposium Guidance Updated (PGR Symposium).
[ top ]Research News
Open Access funding options
The Research Services team in the Library have asked that following message detailing the OA funding options available to unfunded authors be disseminated to researchers and PGRs in your department.
Open Access (OA) for Unfunded Authors
The University supports the principles of Open Access and the efforts of its researchers to disseminate their research findings as widely as possible. The Library is committed to making the process of achieving Open Access as easy as possible for researchers.
It’s often possible to share work Open Access without paying a fee, but where payment is required, there are a number of options for unfunded authors.
Transformative Agreements
In support of aims to move towards a more open and equitable model of scholarly publishing, the University of Manchester Library has signed up to transformative agreements with a number of publishers including Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, and SAGE. Unfunded authors can benefit from these deals and publish their work Open Access free of charge.
Please visit our Transformative Agreement page for a list of our current agreements with publishers and details of which journals are covered. If you’re not sure if the journal you're submitting to is included in a transformative agreement, you can contact the Library’s Open Access Team using our Open Access Enquiry Form.
Please note, some agreements are restricted to authors funded by UKRI or the medical charities or are limited to certain journals.
University Open Access Fund
In addition, unfunded authors can also request that Article Processing Charges (APCs) for Gold OA journals not covered by existing agreements be paid from our University Open Access Fund. The University Open Access Fund is a limited fund allocated to supporting various Open Access initiatives, transformative agreements, and the payment of Gold OA APCs. For more information about this fund, please visit our Open Access Funding page.
Authors can request funding from the University Open Access Fund via the Open Access Enquiry Form. Please note, this fund cannot be used to pay APCs in subscription-based journals as per the Library’s Hybrid Open Access Statement.
Please be aware, this University Open Access Fund is finite and attracts high demand. It is allocated on a first come, first served basis meaning that, based on the level of demand, funds could be exhausted quickly and before the end of the academic year.
Congratulations!
Congratulations to Dr Viktor Schlegel & Dr Daniel Beck for their success in the first round of the MMT Research Fund for £6000 (Manchester funding) and AUD $10520 (Melbourne funding) for the short project Robust Natural Language Processing for Healthcare:
Deep learning (DL) is state-of-the-art to make data-driven predictions, even in high-stake domains such as healthcare and law. As DL-based predictive models are "black boxes", they lack correctness guarantees exhibiting harmful behaviour such as bleeding sensitive data, when supplied with adversarial inputs, or modest generalisation performance to scenarios not represented well by training data. To work on these problems, NLP and Software Security Researchers from the department, Riza Batista-Navarro, Youcheng Sun and Viktor Schlegel, are collaborating with experts on privacy-preserving and adversarially robust Machine Learning from the University of Melbourne - Daniel Beck, Jey Han Lau and Trevor Cohn.This collaboration will investigate methods that increase robustness against adversaries of DL-based natural language processing, understanding and generation systems and provide guarantees for protection of potentially confidential training data in the clinical domain, such as patient information in electronic health records. This collaboration is backed by a pump priming fund that will facilitate research visits and knowledge exchange to help grow a collaborative network between researchers of the two Universities.
Congratulations to Dr Lucas Cordeiro, Dr Richard Allmendinger, Dr André Freitas and SES Secure Ltd for their UKRI Impact Acceleration Account grant for £40k, entitled Using Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning to assess source code in Escrow.
In this 11-month project, SES and UoM are looking to develop an AI-driven source code vulnerability assessment platform to evaluate the state of uncompiled source code and produce an informative report that grades the code in terms of security. The proof-of-concept will be developed using state-of-the-art software verification, testing, and explainable neuro-symbolic methods in collaboration with SES, an established source code Escrow (Tri-party agreement) and applied at scale utilising a 3rd party Cybersecurity company with an existing client base and a vital route to market. This crucial research area lies at the intersection of software security and AI and will inform new directions for our research group and SES.
Congratulations to the Vampire team for winning three Gold medals in the FLoC Olympic games at the CADE ATP System Competition in August.Vampire is an automated theorem prover for first-order logic that also handles arithmetic, arrays, datatypes, induction, polymorphism, and higher-order extensions. It produces detailed proofs and finite models. It's fast, free to use (by anybody), and the best at what it does!
Interested, have questions? Check Vampire out on GitHub: https://github.com/vprover/vampire
This is the 20th year in a row that Vampire has won the 'main' track of CASC. Still led by Andrei Voronkov's Vampire group at the University of Manchester, Vampire has now grown into an international effort in collaboration with TU Wein and the Czech Technical University in Prague.Thanks to all who contributed to this year's submission: Andrei Voronkov, Laura Kovacs, Martin Suda, Giles Reger, Ahmed Bhayat, Bernhard Gleiss, Márton Hajdu, Petra Hozzová, Evgeny Kotelnikov, Jakob Rath, Michael Rawson, Martin Riener, and Johannes Schoisswoh.
Congratulations to Mary Xekalaki, Christos Kotselidis, Juan Fumero and Thanos Stratikopoulos for their paper titled "Enabling Transparent Acceleration of Big Data Frameworks using Heterogeneous Hardware", which has been accepted in VLDB and will be published in vol. 15!
https://pure.manchester.ac.uk/ws/files/78397895/preprint_draft_2501_1_.pdf
Research Support changes
Congratulations to Vanessa Menon for her new seconded role (starting October) in the Blackdackel costing team. Thank you Vanessa for all of your hard work supporting CS!
Vanessa's groups will be now supported by Sarah Watson. Sarah Watson has been working with us recently as an Research Support Administrator and is well positioned to take on her new Research Support Officer role (Congratulations Sarah!).
Reminder of staff:
- Sarah Chatwin, Research Support Manager
- Natalia Stefanovic, Research Support Officer
- Chantel Murtagh, Research Support Officer
- Sarah Watson, Research Support Officer
With recent annual leave, high workload and staff leaving there may be outstanding activities that require our attention. Please contact sarah.chatwin@manchester.ac.uk if there is anything you need progressing where you have not recently heard from your research support contact.
[ top ]Research Funding Opportunities
BBSRC ALERT 2022 / MRC Equip Round 2 (Biomedical mid-range equipment funding)
EoI deadline: 04-Oct-2022
BBSRC and MRC will soon be adding to information on this year’s mid-range equipment calls
MRC have already set a firm institutional quota of 4 applications from The University of Manchester to this call, and BBSRC wording usually suggests that we should limit ourselves to a similar number.To make the most of these opportunities strategically, we are therefore going to run a joint internal triage process through FBMH’s Research Technology Development Group, supplemented by representation from equivalents in FSE and Research Technology Professionals. Although call wording states that the funders will pay up to 100% fEC, we know from experience that panels expect significant contribution from large universities to be competitive, and this process will be essential to gaining such host commitment.
If you are interested in applying to either of these calls, please complete the attached form and send it to lorna.tittle@manchester.ac.uk by 5pm on Tuesday 4th October. Applications will be ranked at a meeting on 11th October, and applicants informed of the decision shortly after.
It should be noted that MRC in particular are placing increasing importance upon the sustainability of their infrastructure investments. This goes beyond financial sustainability beyond the end of the award, and should consider strategies to minimise the environmental impact of the equipment and detail any benefits it provides over existing techniques.
contact sarah.chatwin@manchester.ac.uk for full information and application forms
ERC Synergy Grant 2023
Deadline: 08-Nov-2022
The aim is to provide support for a small group of two to four Principal Investigators to jointly address ambitious research problems that could not be addressed by the individual Principal Investigators and their teams working alone. Synergy projects should enable substantial advances at the frontiers of knowledge, stemming, for example, from the cross-fertilization of scientific fields, from new productive lines of enquiry, or new methods and techniques, including unconventional approaches and investigations at the interface between established disciplines. The transformative research funded by Synergy Grants should have the potential of becoming a benchmark on a global scale.
Please note: the ERCEA has not communicated any change to the participation criteria, this means that only one third country can participate in any SyG proposal regardless of who funds that participation. This means that if Manchester is participating in a proposal where there is third country participant (the USA for example) then should the UK not associate before the signature of the grant agreement then Manchester will also become a Third Country and it is possible that the project would be ineligible for funding since there would be 2 third country participants. UK ERC representatives are working with the ERCEA to see if this can be amended but nothing has been agreed – this is all we know about this at this stage.PIs should be aware of this risk prior to submitting a proposal.
Please contact sarah.chatwin@manchester.ac.uk if you are interested in this call.
Turing Sandpits : Funding available
Events:
- 27 and 28 September: Data Science and AI for Translational Digital Health
- 03 and 04 October: AI-Assisted Real-Time Decision Making
Over the last two years, we have run 7 successful sandpit events, which have brought together researchers, industry, public sector and third sector participants to devise short research projects around a range of data science and AI-related topics. Previous events have covered themes as varied as Advanced Materials and Manufacturing and Digital Transformation in the Creative Sector.Digital Futures Newsletter
Digital Futures at UoM updates, research calls, news items, events and ongoing activities are all available via their newsletter. Sign up via: https://www.digitalfutures.manchester.ac.uk/contact-us/
UKRI: Establish a future communications systems early-stage federated hub
- Webinar: October 2022 (tbc)
- Intention to submit deadline: 01 November 2022
- Submission deadline: 29 November 2022
Apply for up to 3 year's funding to create a platform in a core research area in the future communications systems space. The full economic cost of your project can be up to £2.5 million. EPSRC will fund 80% of the full economic cost.
Research areas include:
- network of networks
- wireless and wired systems and spectrum
- cloud and distributed computing.
Each platform will:
- coordinate with the existing research community
- drive emergent ideas towards market
- address user-inspired challenges.
ERC Starting Grants 2023
Internal deadline: 20-Oct-2022
Deadline: 25-Oct-2022The Principal Investigators shall have successfully defended their first PhD at least 2 and up to 7 years prior to 1 January 2023. Cut-off dates: Successful defence of PhD between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2020 (inclusive). The eligibility period can be extended beyond 7 years in certain properly documented circumstances.
A competitive Starting Grant Principal Investigator must have already shown the potential for research independence and evidence of maturity, for example by having produced at least one important publication as main author or without the participation of their PhD supervisor. Applicant Principal Investigators should also be able to demonstrate a promising track record of early achievements appropriate to their research field and career stage, including, e.g. significant publications (as main author) in major international peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journals, or signitficant publications in the leading international peer-reviewed journals of their respective field, or research monographs. They may also demonstrate a record of invited presentations in well-established international conferences, granted patents, awards, prizes, or any other scientific achievements they deem relevant in relation to their research field and project.
Principal Investigators funded through the ERC Starting Grants will be expected to spend a minimum 50% of their total working time on the ERC project and a minimum of 50% of their total working time in an EU Member State or Associated Country.
Starting Grants can be up to a maximum of EUR 1 500 000 for a period of 5 years (pro rata for projects of shorter duration).
Additional funding of up to EUR 1M can be requested to cover the following: (a) "start-up" costs for PIs moving to the EU or an AC from elsewhere as a consequence of receiving the ERC grant and/or (b) the purchase of major equipment and/or (c) access to large facilities and/or (d) other major experimental and field work costs, excluding personnel costs.
Deadlines and submission
Budgets must be finalised by this date to allow sufficient time for approvals to be obtained. Applicants can continue to work on their proposals until the call deadline, however changes to the budget are not allowable after the 20th of October.
Please contact sarah.chatwin@manchester.ac.uk asap if you are interested in applying to this call.
[ top ]Tech Support News
New linux image in clusters
For the first time in many years, the Department of Computer Science has a brand-new Linux image dual-booting on all cluster PCs!
The new Ubuntu 20.04-based image has been created as part of a collaboration between the Technical Services Computing, Robotics, and AI team and IT Services. Jimmy Cullen, a member of the Computing, Robotics, and AI team, has been responsible for overcoming a series of complicated technical issues over a very short period of time, and it is safe to say that it is unlikely we would have the new image this year if not for Jimmy's technical skills and determination - thanks Jimmy!
As this is a completely new image there may be teething problems, or it may be missing programs that were included in the old image. The image includes packages captured as part of the survey sent out earlier this year, but it is possible that the survey did not capture everything needed. If you experience problems with the image, or cannot locate a program you need, please email support@cs.manchester.ac.uk to report the problem.
Christopher Page
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