School of CS newsletter

…and with it come our students. Monday was a big day for the School with around 450 new UG, PGT and PGR students being welcomed to the School. Thanks to all the staff in Recruitment and SSO and to the many academic staff involved for their hard work in making it go so smoothly. Initial guesses suggest that we will have about met the targets, more  concrete numbers should be available next week.

Eva Navarro López (http://staff.cs.manchester.ac.uk/~navarroe/) has been appointed to the BCS Women in Computing Research group, a committee of the BCS Academy of Computing. This committee is formed by prominent researchers in computing and aims to promote women in computing research.

Eva Navarro López (http://staff.cs.manchester.ac.uk/~navarroe/) will give a plenary talk entitled "Hybrid systems neuroscience" in the conference "Encuentro Nacional de Ciencias de la Computación" (ENC2015, National Congres of Computer Science) in Ensenada, Baja California, México. ENC is the most important scientific event organised by the Mexican Association of Computer Science and is supported by the Mexican Academy of Sciences. For more information, check http://smcc.mx/ponentes/

The Personal Data and Trust network aims to build and nurture a community that brings together industry, the public sector, funders, research organisations, individual researchers and innovators to support the UK in becoming the global leader in trust and responsible innovation with personal data. The network is jointly supported by the Digital Economy Theme, Innovate UK, Digital Catapult and Knowledge Transfer Network. If you are interested in getting involved, attending our events, publicising your work in the area or just want to find out more, please do consider registering here http://www.pdtn.org/.

Event: 22 Sept 2015 (12.30-4pm), Room 10.02, Harold Hankins Building

The Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS) is launching a research network in the area of Big Data. The Big Data Forum is funded for two years and its primary aim is to bring together the multitude of existing activities within MBS related to Big Data theories, techniques and applications.
 
The kick-off meeting will provide an opportunity for academic staff within and outside of AMBS to familiarise themselves with the way in which the Forum can help them, to shape the first two pilot projects supported by the network and to decide what other pilot projects should be supported.

Please click here to view the agenda. 

Deadline: 04 Oct 2015
Online briefing 05 Oct 2015
Event: 30 Nov (Eve/PM) – 01 Dec 2015 (Imperial War Museum North, Manchester)

Digital YES, funded by Research Councils UK through the Digital Economy Network, offers a valuable learning experience for teams of Digital Economy postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers to gain a general understanding of the aspects involved in commercialising an innovation or idea, and an insight into processes involved in a business start-up. Competition places (for Teams of 3) and overnight accommodation on 30 November in Manchester will be funded by the EPSRC Digital Economy Network.

Further information is available from Dr Angela Martinez-Dy, Digital YES Advocate, at angela.martinezdy@gmail.com or at http://www.den.ac.uk/dens/events/digital-yes- 2015.aspx

Event: 29 Oct 2015

This year's EMBL-EBI Open Day is ideal for early-career scientists who would like to find out more about careers and training in bioinformatics. It is free to attend but delegates must register in advance.

Come along and learn about EMBL-EBI’s:

• Comprehensive collection of bioinformatics resources;
• Cutting-edge research;
• PhD programme, Postdoc opportunities and training programme.

Full information and registration available through:http://www.ebi.ac.uk/about/events/2015/embl-ebi-open-day-2015

Deadline: 4pm 27 Oct 2015

Global Food Security interdisciplinary research programme on the ‘Resilience of the UK food system in a global context’ has launched its first call for applications. This programme (£14M) has been co-designed by BBSRC, ESRC, NERC, Defra, FSA and the Scottish Government. The programme will fund high quality research projects which integrate science areas from all of the research councils involved and address one or more of the following interlinked themes:

• Optimising the productivity, resilience and sustainability of agricultural and landscapes
• Optimising resilience of food supply chains both locally and globally
• Influencing food choice for health, sustainability and resilience at the individual and household level

For details and applications visit the call page on the BBSRC website.

Deadline: 28 Sep 15

Researcher Links Travel Grants provide financial support for early-career researchers to undertake an international research placement to strengthen links for future collaboration, build research capacity in developing economies, and enhance the researcher's career opportunities.

These grants are funded under the Newton Fund, which aims to promote the economic development and welfare of either the partner countries or, through working with the partner country, to address the problems of poor people around the world.

• Duration of visit: 1-6 months depending on the country
• Priority areas: Partner countries may specify priority areas and will only accept applications within these. Priority areas are listed in the Guidelines document (Downloads section).
• ODA requirement: All applications must meet the required relevance to economic development or social welfare (see Guidelines for further information) of the partner country. 

Researchers that reside in the UK can apply for funding to visit a university or research institution in one of the listed countries, and those residing in one of the listed countries can apply for funding to come to the UK. 

PhD student Craig Barton and Prof. Tom Thomson's work has recently been published in the Journal of Applied Physics as a featured article which made the front cover. The image shows the magnetisation reversal data for multiple thin layers of directional colbalt/ palladium. The reversibility of these systems is important for the development of future nanoscale technologies such as bit patterned media (BPM) recording and spin-torque transfer (STT) devices.

The full paper is available through: Magnetisation reversal in anisotropy graded Co/Pd multilayers

In the recently completed fifth workshop, BioCreative V, various biomedical text mining tracks were organised, including the chemical-disease relations (CDR) track, which aimed to improve the state of the art for automatic extraction of biomarker chemical-disease relations. NaCTeM participated in the Disease Named Entity Recognition and Normalisation (DNER) task of the CDR track, together with 15 other teams, and obtained the best precision (89.89%) amongst the three top-performing teams.

Of further note is the fact that NaCTeM's Web-based workbench, Argo, was one of only three text mining systems selected for presentation in BioCreative V's User Interactive Track. Argo's ability to facilitate the curation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) phenotypes was demonstrated and evaluated as part of the workshop.

Below are the relevant workshop proceedings:

Batista-Navarro, R. T. B. and Ananiadou, S.(2015). Augmenting the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary with semantically rich variants to improve disease mention normalisation. Proceedings of the Fifth BioCreative Challenge Evaluation Workshop, Seville, Spain, pp. 311-316

Batista-Navarro, R. T. B., Carter, J. and Ananiadou, S. (2015). Semi-automatic curation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease phenotypes using Argo. Proceedings of the Fifth BioCreative Challenge Evaluation Workshop, Seville, Spain, pp. 403-408

A survey has found 81 percent of us are now fearful of cyber-criminals.  Dr Daniel Dresner discussed these technology problems with BBC Radio 5 Live (16th September).