Department of CS newsletter

The University has been recognised by The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) - part of GCHQ - as an Academic Centre of Excellence for Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/information/academic-centres-excellence-cyber-security-research). This is a five-year award coordinated with EPSRC and is important proof of our cyber security credentials for research, innovation, and partnerships both at home and abroad. The rigorous assessment process collected evidence of our significant track record in cyber research, our innovation and investment in cyber programmes and projects, and the development of researchers across the University who collectively carry our knowledge and expertise in cyber as defined by the Cyber Security Body of Knowledge (CyBOK - https://www.cybok.org/). This had to be presented in a strictly structured format to tight deadlines - over the Summer and Xmas breaks! The application highlighted work and profiled colleagues from our Advanced Processor Technologies, Autonomy and Verification, Formal Methods, and the Systems and Software Security research groups. Our application was led by Nick Lord (Criminology) and our own Mustafa Mustafa and Danny Dresner who join Nick as co-directors of the University's Centre for Digital Trust and Society (https://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/dts/).

Congratulations to everyone involved - and in particular Danny and Mustafa for putting together our successful application.

REF Reminder

Following on from our discussion at the departmental forum last week - and re-iterating Clare’s message - please do ensure that you upload your author accepted manuscripts to our open access gateway within 3 months of acceptance in order to satisfy REF Open Access requirements: https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/services/research/open-research/access/gateway/

Please share this information with your PGRs and PDRAs.

Announcing The University of Manchester Department of Computer Science Historical Images Catalogue

Many thanks for the huge amount of work undertaken by Toby Howard, Jim Miles, and Chris Page to get our Historical Images Catalogue up and running - there are still lots more images to add which will be a slow and steady job over a long period. If you type ‘all’ in the search box, you’ll see everything that’s currently in the catalogue: https://history.cs.manchester.ac.uk/

Finally, I hope you all manage to get a bit of down time over the Easter break.

Andrew

Guest Speaker Announcements! | Digital Futures PhD Network – 20 April (14:00 - 15:30)

Digital Futures is here to support UoM PhD students conducting research related to digital topics or have digital applications. We're excited to announce our guest speakers, who will streamline your academic success and take digital research one step further at our upcoming Digital Futures PhD Network event!

• Policy@Manchester: Connecting researchers with policymakers and influencers, nurturing long-term policy engagement relationships, and seeking to enhance stakeholder understanding of pressing policy challenges
• Pure Support: Showing your research and expertise and enhancing opportunities for collaboration using Pure
• Translation Manchester: Facilitating and supporting the progression of scientific discoveries towards the delivery of improved healthcare

We are also looking for PhD students to present their research at this meeting. If you would like to present your research, please contact kitty.lo@manchester.ac.uk by Tuesday 23rd April 2024, 5pm. Speaker spaces are limited, so we recommend reaching out at your earliest convenience to secure your spot.

Join the Digital Futures Network and unlock the full potential of your research and make interdisciplinary connections! Register here: http://tinyurl.com/mry2hntd

The Digital Futures network serves as a dynamic and collaborative hub exclusively designed for the community of PhD students within The University of Manchester, who are conducting research related to digital topics. The primary objective of this network is to help students to develop interdisciplinary, cross faculty relationships that can lead to new perspectives on their research.

Sami Kaski is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and at Aalto University, Helsinki. In Manchester he is the Research Director of the Christabel Pankhurst Institute for Health Technology Research and Innovation, and in Helsinki leads the Finnish Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research FCAI and ELLIS Unit Helsinki. He is also an ELLIS Fellow and Turing Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute.

Professor Kaski will give his inaugural lecture in University of Manchester’s Engineering Building A, Lecture Theatre B, where he will talk about his leading-edge research and the aims of the recently established Manchester Centre for AI Fundamentals.

Title: Collaborative Machine Learning for Research
Abstract:
I will bring together two traditionally separate lines of research: (i) probabilistic machine learning, in which we combine flexible learning from multiple sources of data with prior knowledge in the form of simulators, and (ii) user interaction, starting from interactive intent modelling in information retrieval and extending to collaborative AI. This combination enables developing new kinds of tools for research tasks, including AI-assisted design tools for design-build-test-learn cycles. When R&D processes are formulated as virtual simulation-based laboratories, the tools can be applied across fields from experimental sciences to engineering design and medicine, and further to humanities and social sciences. The university is now building significant capacity in this field with the launch of the Centre for AI Fundamentals, AI-FUN, with research groups focusing on developing machine learning principles and seeking to do that in collaboration with other fields.

To find our more, please contact ai-fun@manchester.ac.uk or ellis@manchester.ac.uk.

Click here to register for the event. For catering purposes please register if you intend to attend.

Inaugural seminar for Dr. Louise Dennis

Please see title and abstract below, this event will take place on 10^th April in Kilburn building Lecture Theatre 1.3.

Title: Verifiable Autonomous Systems

Abstract: How can we provide guarantees of behaviour for autonomous systems? In this talk I will explain how autonomous systems can be programmed in ways that make them amenable to formal verification. I will discuss how cognitive agent programming can be used to provide a transparent and verifiable decision-making core and show how properties of the system can then be checked – including properties related to ethical behaviour.

Please use the link below to join the seminar on Zoom if you are unable to join us in-person:

https://zoom.us/j/92119121061

Meeting ID: 921 1912 1061

Passcode: 023687

Centre for Digital Trust and Society Seed Corn Showcase | 16^th May (14:30 - 17:00)

Centre for Digital Trust and Society (CDTS) Seed Corn Funding awards funding to cutting-edge proposals that further our research and understanding of digital trust and society. Come along and see how you can get involved with this initiative and explore the successes and learnings of our previously funded projects. Register here: https://tinyurl.com/2wyptwb5

Featured Projects:

• Demanding justice in the Cloud: An analysis of punitive attitudes in social media for traditional and cyber-enabled crime | Dr Nicholas Trajtenberg Pareja & Mr Pablo Ezquerra Silva
• Rebuilding Democratic Discourse: Online Harms and Trust | Dr Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, Dr Justina Berskyte, Prof Graham Stevens
• Defining the acceptability of ‘safe’ data linkage to identify women at risk of postnatal complication in Greater Manchester | Dr Victoria Palin, Prof Niels Peek, Prof Jenny Myers, Dr Anthony Wilson, Mr Bradley Quinn
• Modern slavery and digitisation in ‘fast-fashion’ supply networks |Dr Jonathan Davies, Prof Rose Broad, Dr Amy Benstead

The Centre for Digital Trust and Society leads and delivers activity for the Digital Trust and Security theme within The University’s Digital Futures Research Platform.

Event: 10-Jun-2024, 10am-12pm
Indicative opening date: 29-May-2024
Indicative deadline: 29-Aug-2024

Registration is required through: ERC 2024 Advanced Grant: Call Information Webinar 1 of 2 – UKRO

UKRO, in its capacity as UK NCP for the European Research Council, will hold a webinar on the ERC 2024 Advanced Grant call. There are yearly calls for these prestigious Advanced Grants for senior researchers. Up to € 2.5 million for a period of 5 years. (pro rata for projects of shorter duration). However, an additional € 1 million can be made available to cover eligible “start-up” costs for researchers moving from a third country to the EU or an associated country and/or the purchase of major equipment and/or access to large facilities and/or other major experimental and field work costs.

The webinar is a good chance to find out more.

In CS Angelo Cangelosi holds an ERC Adv Grant.

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[from Liz Fay]

EU Update - ERC sets out rationale for evaluation changes

The ERC Scientific Council has implemented changes to the evaluation processes and application forms for 2024 research proposals, following recent debates on research assessment.  In a dedicated report, entitled “Evaluation of research proposals: the why and what of the ERC’s recent changes” ERC President Maria Leptin gives an overview of the changes and the reasoning behind them.

The changes, explains Professor Leptin, address the issue that current assessment systems often use narrow methods to evaluate research quality, performance, and impact.

The main changes (as previously reported by UKRO) include the following:

• The description of required ‘profiles’ of ERC PIs has been removed from the Work Programme.
• In the application form, the CV and track record, previously two separate documents, are now combined as a single template.

 

In a recent Interview ERC President Maria Leptin set out the rationale for evaluation changes

“High-risk, high-gain” was confusing for applicants

The European Research Council has explained recent changes to its project proposal evaluation strategy, including why it no longer bills itself as a “high-risk, high-gain” funder.  Established in 2007, the ERC has become the EU’s flagship funder of basic research, and has a 2024 budget of about €2.22 billion to support single researchers at all career stages as well as teams of leading principal investigators.  For its 2024 calls, the funder changed how it evaluates proposals, both in terms of the information it seeks from applicants and how information is considered.

Risky business

The ERC no longer specifies that it seeks proposals for “high-risk, high-gain” projects. In the report, ERC president Maria Leptin said this phrase “was seen as potentially confusing and problematic”.  It was intended to discourage evaluation panels from being conservative, Leptin explained, adding that the funder is still not backing away from the risk that a project will produce unpredictable results.  But, she added, a researcher may have preliminary data indicating that ground-breaking work has a relatively high chance of success—and such projects would be welcome to the ERC. “We stress that the ERC continues to look for proposals that address important challenges and hope that the research funded by the ERC will lead to major advances at the frontier of knowledge,”. “However…the terms ‘ambitious’, ‘creative and original’ are better descriptors for the kinds of proposals the ERC should fund.”

Projects before people

In addition, the ERC is now putting more emphasis on projects than their proposers and no longer numerically grading proposals for both the planned work and the applicant themselves.  Leptin said this is because, under the previous method for assessment, an application for a weak project from a strong researcher could end up with a similar score in the first evaluation phase as an application for a brilliant project from “a less accomplished” researcher.  This left brilliant proposals at risk of not being funded for reasons including that the proposing researcher was based at a less well funded institution, with this impacting unjustly on the researcher themselves. She said that, nonetheless, ERC scientific council members “found it important to understand the track record and CV of the applicant to decide whether to select the application for in-depth evaluation in the second step”.  Therefore, the funder decided to evaluate projects first, and assign them a numerical grade used for ranking.  Applicants are assessed qualitatively and the two assessments are not combined into an overall score. “In this way, the evaluation should give more weight to the project than to the applicant,”.

Supervision and publication

The ERC no longer asks applicants how many other researchers they have supervised.  This is because “numbers alone are not sufficient to assess whether a principal investigator has been a good advisor”. We were unable to come up with any other reliable and fair measure for ‘good mentorship’ and thus concluded that this information should no longer be asked for,”. The ERC has also stopped steering applicants towards peer-reviewed journals when setting out their track record, Leptin said, because “some ground-breaking discoveries may only have been posted on pre-print servers, [or] been published in niche or specialist journals, while others may be in entirely different formats or platforms, and in some disciplines national publications may be the most relevant and important”.

[from Liz Fay]

During the Research & Innovation week which took place last week in Brussels, the European Commission announced the new release of the EU Funding & Tenders Portal.

The new release includes but is not limited to:

• updated interfaces, with a streamlined homepage now showcasing the Portal’s main services
• new functionalities powered by state-of-the-art technology, such as a new funding page search engine
• affinity-based recommendations of ‘calls for proposals’ for logged-in users
• a newly integrated ‘global search’ tool

The EU Funding & Tenders Portal has over 1.5 million users, including EU funding applicants, beneficiaries, tenderers, and experts. These developments have been implemented after user feedback was collected on the Portal’s services and tools, to provide users with an updated and more seamless experience.

The European Commission has released a video which showcases the Portal’s new features and provides guidance on how to navigate them.

Horizon Europe calls will be issued via the Participant Portal you will need to register to set up or view a proposal.

The University’s Participant Identification Code (PIC) remains the same as for Horizon 2020 - 999903840.

You do not need to apply for a separate/new PIC when setting up a new proposal session.

Professor Daniel Dresner appeared on ITV Evening News (no link), talking about recent problems with computer systems at Greggs, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and McDonald’s. He said that the problems were “only linked by the fact it's an expected type of coincidence” and that there is “likely a commonality in the type of software they use to make payments and had an upgrade at the same time.”

A new study from University of Manchester researchers utilises AI to address some of the world's most pressing problems. Prof. Alex Frangi's paper Unsupervised ensemble-based phenotyping enhances discoverability of genes related to left-ventricular morphology is published in Nature Machine Intelligence and uses AI to support and develop targeted therapies and interventions for those at risk of heart disease.

[from the library]

Following the launch of UKRI’s new Open Access policy for long-form outputs in January 2024, I’m just getting in touch to remind you about the Library’s dedicated webpage which staff should consult for the most up-to-date information and guidance relating to the policy.  

UKRI has made approximately £3.5 million available to support Open Access for long-form outputs via a national ring-fenced fund. UKRI-funded authors who wish to apply to access funding should do so via the Library – further information and the relevant form is available on the Library website: UKRI’s new Open Access policy: Long-form outputs. 

If you have any questions about the policy, please contact the Library’s Open Access team via libraryresearch@manchester.ac.uk  

Kilburn and IT Building need more available fire evacuation marshals (FEMs) so we have the required number to achieve an effective evacuation.

We are asking for staff volunteers to complete the training to increase the number so that we can reach sufficient level of cover.  If you are interested in volunteering then please complete the form here.

The FSE Safety team will also hold some local training after the online university level one for all FEMs to make sure everyone is aware of their expectations during an evacuation.

Thanks in advance!