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School of CS newsletter
Published: Tuesday, 24 November 2015Weekly newsletter for the School of CS
[ top ]News and announcements
Library: Book ordering, the student experience & access to recommended reading - your opinion
Staff involvement is central to helping the Library to find the best ways of ensuring that we have the right material, in the right number and format when our students need it.
Please share your views via our short questionnaire and help the Books Right Here Right Now project to improve:
• The way in which academics can place Library requests for books and digitised readings for taught courses
• The student experience with regard to accessing their recommended readings via the Library.
We would really appreciate your help in encouraging additional colleagues to complete this survey, so please distribute as you see appropriate.
https://www.snapsurveys.com/wh/s.asp?k=144559248776
Nick Campbell - Academic Engagement Librarian – The School Of Computer Science
Bryony C Quick
Academic Support Office change of email address
The Academic Support Office is in the process of moving to a new email address which is compsci-acso@listserv.manchester.ac.uk. Please use this for all correspondence with our office in future where previously you may have used catering@cs.man.ac.uk or rooms@cs.man.ac.uk for example. We are in the process of updating all links online to the old email addresses.
In order for us to filter our emails and manage our workload can you please use meaningful titles for your email subjects? For example ‘Catering request: etc…’ or ‘Travel request: etc…’? Thank you.
The newsletter and timetable aliases remain active, this change only applies to the list below:
acso@cs.man.ac.uk
catering@cs.man.ac.uk
rooms@cs.man.ac.uk
travel@cs.man.ac.uk
printing@cs.man.ac.uk
Help to encourage talented local sixth form (Year 12) students
The Manchester Access Programme (MAP) is now recruiting for academic tutors for 2016, here is their invitation to staff and PhD students:
This is a fantastic opportunity for you to contribute to the social responsibility goals of the University whilst also further developing your one-to-one tutoring skills and earning some money at the same time.
MAP is the University’s flagship widening participation scheme, supporting the progression of talented local sixth form (Year 12) students into The University of Manchester or another research intensive university. You can find out more about MAP on our website. There will be over 600 students on the programme this year, all of whom will have attended state school and have no history of higher education in their family. We are looking for both academic members of staff and PhD students to tutor these students.
In order to successfully complete the programme and earn a two grade reduction towards an admissions offer from The University of Manchester and a scholarship, each MAP student must complete an academic assignment. The academic assignment is 1,500 words on a topic of their choice and will help them to develop the essential research and academic writing skills needed to be a successful university student.
Being a MAP Academic Tutor involves tutoring 1- 6 MAP students during their time on the scheme, and overseeing the production of their academic assignment. Communication with the student will be via email and the tutoring process includes two 45 minute one-to-one meetings with each student and the marking of their draft and final assignment. Payment is £60 per student you tutor.
Tutoring would begin in April 2016 but there would be some training required before that.
If you are interested can you please complete this application. Please note that, although we would hope to offer as many colleagues as possible the chance to work with us, we cannot guarantee that by completing this survey you will be able to tutor on the programme next year. As we are still recruiting students for 2016, we are not yet sure of their subject demands, which means that we cannot say for certain how many tutors we will need for each discipline. However, by competing this survey you will highlight your interest in working with us, and we may be able to offer you tutoring work on other projects in 2016.
If you complete the above application, we will be in touch in the new year regarding your interest in working on MAP. Please do not hesitate to contact Map@manchester.ac.uk if you have any questions.
Best wishes,
The MAP Team
Jim Miles
Alan Turing Fellowships
This is a unique opportunity for early career researchers to join The Alan Turing Institute. The Alan Turing Institute is the UK’s new national data science institute, established to bring together world-leading expertise to provide leadership in the emerging field of data science. The Institute has been founded by the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL and Warwick and EPSRC.
Fellowships are available for 3 years with the potential for an additional 2 years of support following interim review. Fellows will pursue research based at the Institute hub in the British Library, London. Fellowships will be awarded to individual candidates and fellows will be employed by a joint venture partner university (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL or Warwick).
Key requirements: Successful candidates are expected to have i) a PhD in a data science (or adjacent) subject (or to have submitted their doctorate before taking up the post), ii) an excellent publication record and/or demonstrated excellent research potential such as via preprints, iii) a novel and challenging research agenda that will advance the strategic objectives of the Institute, and iv) leadership potential. Fellowships are open to all qualified applicants regardless of background.
Alan Turing Fellowship applications can be made in all data science research areas. The Institute’s research roadmap is available at https://turing.ac.uk/#the-vision . In addition to this open call, there are two specific fellowship programmes:
Fellowships addressing data-centric engineering
The Lloyd’s Register Foundation (LRF) / Alan Turing Institute programme to support data-centric engineering is a 5-year, £10M global programme, delivered through a partnership between LRF and the Alan Turing Institute. This programme will secure high technical standards (for example the next-generation algorithms and analytics) to enhance the safety of life and property around the major infrastructure upon which modern society relies. For further information on data-centric engineering, see LRF’s Foresight Review of Big Data. Applications for Fellowships under this call, which address the aims of the LRF/Turing programme, may also be considered for funding under the data-centric engineering programme. Fellowships awarded under this programme may vary from the conditions given above; for more details contact fellowship@turing.ac.uk.
Fellowships addressing data analytics and high-performance computing
Intel and the Alan Turing Institute will be supporting additional Fellowships in data analytics and high-performance computing. Applications for Fellowships under this call may also be considered for funding under the joint Intel-Alan Turing Institute programme. Fellowships awarded under this joint programme may vary from the conditions given above; for more details contact fellowship@turing.ac.uk.
Download full information on the Turing fellowships: https://turing.ac.uk/content/uploads/2015/06/ATI_fellows_advertfinal131115-NTv02.docx
Diversity and equality are promoted in all aspects of the recruitment and career management of our researchers. In keeping with the principles of the Institute, we especially encourage applications from female researchers.
[ top ]Events
School Seminar: From ad hoc computer engineering to collaborative and reproducible data science
Date: 25th November 2015
Time & Location: 14:00, Kilburn Lecture Theatre 1.4
Title: From ad hoc computer engineering to collaborative and reproducible data science
Speaker: Dr Grigori Fursin. dividiti, UK
Host: Mikel Lujan
Abstract
Designing novel computer systems and optimizing their software is becoming too tedious, ad hoc, time consuming and error prone due to enormous number of available design and optimization choices. Empirical autotuning combined with run-time adaptation and machine learning has been demonstrating some potential to address above challenges for several decades but is still far from the widespread production. The main reasons include unbearably long exploration and training times, ever changing tools and their interfaces, lack of a common experimental methodology, lack of diverse and representative benchmarks, and lack of unified mechanisms for knowledge building and exchange apart from publications where reproducibility and reusability of results is often not even considered.
I will present our community-driven solution to above problems based on our open-source Collective Knowledge technology (CK) that can gradually organize, exchange and reuse knowledge and experience in computer engineering. CK helps share various artifacts (benchmarks, data sets, libraries, tools) as unified, reusable and Python-based components with JSON meta description via GITHUB. Researchers can then quickly prototype and crowdsource various experimental workflows such as performance and energy autotuning, design space exploration and run-time adaptation. At the same time, CK continuously analyzes and extrapolates all collected knowledge using powerful data science techniques to automatically model computer systems' behavior, predict better optimizations or hardware configurations, and eventually enable faster, more power efficient, reliable and self-tuning software and hardware. Furthermore, CK can record any unexpected behavior in a reproducible way and expose it to an interdisciplinary community to find missing features and improve models. Live demo of our approach is available at http://cknowledge.org/repo.
Alan Turing biography: talk by Sir Dermot Turing 2nd December
Alan Turing biography: talk by Sir Dermot Turing, 2pm – 4pm Room G205 Alan Turing Building. 2nd December 2015
Sir Dermot Turing, a nephew of Alan Turing, has released a new biography.
Alan Turing was an extraordinary man who crammed into a life of only 42 years the careers of mathematician, codebreaker, computer scientist and biologist. He is widely regarded as a war hero for his codebreaking work at Bletchley Park, and considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as a pioneer of developmental biology. He spent the last 5 years of his life working at the University of Manchester, where he produced some of his most creative, but still little-known, ideas.
Turing's conviction for gross indecency in 1952, followed two years later by his untimely death, brought a terrible end to a life packed with achievement. In that context it has been hard to discover the real man behind the story.
At this event Sir Dermot Turing – Alan Turing’s nephew and author of a new biography on his uncle - will share personal insights, family stories and research from his book including interviews with Alan Turing’s contemporaries, unseen photos and material not available to previous researchers. He will focus on Alan Turing’s Manchester years and the life-long influence which Max Newman, head of his Department at the University, had on Alan Turing’s thinking and achievements.
There will be tea and cake after the event and a chance to discuss the talk more informally with Sir Dermot.
This will be a public event but registration is available to members of the Schools of CS and Mathematics until 23rd November, when it will be advertised externally.
Registration is essential: http://alan-turing-decoded.eventbrite.co.uk.
