Department of CS newsletter

Many thanks to Danny Dresner for organising the great DSIT Cyber Security Policy Engagement Conference last week. This conference brought together many delegates from across the University sector, government, and industry for a day focused on cyber security activity. All the feedback I’ve seen has been exceptionally positive.
 

Manchester 2035 Workshops Reminder
I know many of us have already engaged with the Manchester 2035 series of workshops to help shape our University’s strategy. However, if you have not had the chance yet to attend one of these, please do sign up for any that might be of interest here: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/manchester-2035/. You can also submit comments/thoughts/suggestions via the web form at the same link.

Congratulations to Jun'ichi Tsujii
Many congratulations to Jun'ichi Tsujii, NaCTeM Scientific Advisor, who has been selected as a Person of Cultural Merit in Japan for his contributions in NLP and AI. This is an official Japanese recognition and honour awarded annually to select people who have made outstanding cultural contributions. This year there were only 20 such awards so very well done, Junichi. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20241025/k10014618741000.html

Public Engagement in Computer Science Event
The University of Birmingham is hosting a free online event around Public Engagement in Computer Science, on Monday 16th Dec 10:00 – 16:00. Funded by the EPSRC Public Engagement ICT Champion Grant, this event is designed to support and encourage more engagement in the ICT community, and will include:

- Training opportunities
- Rep from EPSRC sharing tips and info about funding, grants and engagement
- Case studies from successful academics across the UK
- Workshops
- Networking

For more info about the agenda and to sign up, head to: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/public-engagement-x-computer-science-symposium-tickets-1046747438767

The event is open to anyone who is working in the ICT community (academics, tech, industry, teachers etc).

Upcoming Research seminars
Finally, a reminder that the next research seminars in our series are on Multimodal Tabular Transactions on Wednesday, 13th November at 1400 in Kilburn_TH 1.3 to be delivered by Natraj Raman, Research Director at JPMorgan AI Research. And then on the 20th, again at 1400 in Kilburn_TH 1.3, we will have our inaugural staff seminar of the year on Advanced Atomistic Models of Magnetic Materials to be delivered by Mara Ruta-Strungaru. I hope to see many of you there.

Andrew

A regular drop-in session for academic staff, PDRAs and PGRs to discuss any aspect of research (non-academic) impact with Suzanne (DCS Impact Lead) and (when available) Kerry Wilkins (Faculty Research Support Officer for Impact) and Noriko Griffiths (Project Officer).

Next sessions will be

13^th November 15.30-16.00 (Room2.105 and Teams)

29^th November 11.00-11.30 (Room 2.105 and Teams)

11^th December 15.30-16.00 (Room2.105 and Teams)

Come to talk about:

• Ways to get the word out about the impact you are current having
• Finding support to increase the impact of your current research
• What kinds of impact to focus on
• Including impact in your research grants and promotion applications

We won't have all the answers ourselves, but we'll be able to connect you with other teams around the University who can help.

We'll invite relevant staff from within and beyond the University will also join for selected sessions, including staff from Research Support, Business Engagement, Policy@Manchester, MEC, the Innovation Academy and the Innovation Factory. If you know in advance what you'd like to discuss, let us know and we can try to set up a meeting with the most useful people.

Suzanne, Kerry and Noriko

The Faculty calendar is an invaluable tool that provides you with a one-stop shop for key events, meetings, deadlines and timelines for our processes. It also provides useful links to information such as committee membership and terms of reference to help you understand meetings structures and where decisions are made. You can find out how to navigate the calendar, including filtering content to help you access the information you need easily, by watching this video. 

The calendar is regularly updated by the Planning, Compliance and Special Projects team in collaboration with School Operations. However, if you notice any issues, please contact Liya Broadbent. 

You are invited to the Department of Computer Science Christmas Party!

Join us for festive cheer with pizza, drinks, music, and a festive tipple in the CompSci Staff & PGR common room.

Date: Wednesday,18th December 2024

Time: From 15:00PM

Please confirm your dietary requirements to Juanjuan for catering purposes by Friday, 29th November 2024.

Online Training: Engaging with Areas of Research Interests for Government Departments

Wednesday 20 November 2024, 12:30pm – 1:30pm

Join Policy@Manchester for an upcoming training webinar event on Areas of Research Interest (ARI) which are published by several government departments and agencies. The aim of this session is to provide an introduction and insight into what an ARI is, how to find ARIs relevant to your research, and how Policy@Manchester can support you with policy engagement with government departments.

Audience - This training session is aimed at academics (including ECRs and PhD students) working at The University of Manchester who are interested in finding out more about ARIs and how Policy@Manchester can help with translating your research into submissions to answer questions raised by ARIs.

Registration – This session will be taking place online. To register, please follow this link, and sign up with details of your name, faculty and job role.

Policy@Manchester drop-in rota

Our drop-ins are aimed at anyone who wishes to find out more about policy engagement and discuss how Policy@Manchester might be able to assist with generating policy impact for research. These sessions are open to any academics working at The University of Manchester, including PhD students and ECRs. You are welcome to attend the drop-in sessions at any point whilst the webinar takes place.

The drop-in sessions will allow for 121 discussions about the academic’s individual research and how we can help them interact with policymakers. The POST drop-in session will look specifically at how we might be able to work with the academic to highlight their research with POST and any current opportunities available.

Media Training: 12-Nov-2024, 2-4pm (online)

[as seen in Nov issue of Beeline]

Academic colleagues are invited to a media training session led by The Conversation, the session will explore how to consider the potential of your expertise and get advice for the best angles for turning your research and expertise into articles. Register here.

Date and time: 18 Nov 2024 | 14:00 - 16:00

Register today to explore the concepts of a proactive cyber defence strategy, through weaponising a cyber attacker’s trust and utilising deception techniques and taking tactics from other domains to create more challenging defences for our attackers to face so as to keep our networks safe.

This lecture aims to be thought provoking, amusing and, most importantly it aims to be enlightening as to how best we can bring social sciences to the front line of our cyber fight!

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/mu7f8wwt

The 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2024) was held in Sacramento, California. The ASE conference is the premier research event for Automated Software Engineering. It gathers academia and industry experts to discuss foundations, techniques, and tools for automating large software systems analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance.

It featured two presentations, including an ACM SigSoft Distinguished Paper Award from the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester members.

• Igor Wodiany, Antoniu Pop, Mikel Lujan: LeanBin: Harnessing Lifting and Recompilation to Debloat Binaries (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3691620.3695515)
• Muhammad P., Ahmed Bhayat, Lucas Cordeiro and Giles Reger: LLM-Generated Invariants for Bounded Model Checking Without Loop Unrolling (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3691620.3695512) ACM SigSoft Distinguished Paper Award (https://conf.researchr.org/info/ase-2024/awards)

Giles Roger and Muhammad Pirzada from the Formal Methods and System Software Security Groups presented the award-winning work, "LLM-Generated Invariants for Bounded Model Checking Without Loop Unrolling," at ASE 2024. For those unable to attend, you can access the slides at https://ssvlab.github.io/lucasccordeiro/talks/ase2024_slides.pdf. We look forward to advancing the integration of neural networks with symbolic reasoning to improve software system verification, testing, and repair!

Congratulations to all Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester members involved at ASE 2024.

Deadline: 10-Nov-2024

Applications are now open for the 4th cohort of Leading for Research Fellows programme, allowing Research Fellows to develop their leadership skills alongside their peers. The programme covers self-leadership, leadership styles, strategic thinking and change management.

Leading for Research Fellows is a 6 month development programme involving face-to-face events and 6 key virtual modules on a range of leadership topics relevant to the role of Research Fellows (those holding a fellowship).

Read more and apply.

FSE Research Services Sharepoint Site – access information and resources to navigate research application and award processes. You can find contact details for the RS team and lots of other useful information.