School of CS newsletter

On February 24^th at 2pm, Paul Marks-Jones, an Equality and Diversity Advisor from the Directorate of Human Resources, will give a short talk on bullying and harassment where he explains what these are and what kind of support the University has in place to prevent them in the first place, and to deal with cases should they nevertheless arise. This will be followed by a Q&A session and then by a more informal chat in the common room - with coffee, tea, and cake!

The 2016 Karen Spärck Jones Lecture will be given by Professor M. Angela Sasse FREng from University College London (UCL). This is the 6th Karen Spärck Jones Lecture, an evening event, honouring women in computing research that will follow the London Hopper at the BCS Headquarters. Prof Sasse is the Professor of Human-Centred Technology at UCL, and Director of the UK Research Institute in Science of Cyber Security (RISCS).

University College London and BCS Academy will be presenting the 12^th London Hopper Colloquium on Wednesday, 25 May 2016 at the BCS headquarters in London. This 1-day event will feature women speakers talking about their research, a spotlight competition open to postgraduate students, and lots of opportunities to network with other new researchers in computing. Please check http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/events_listing/ for more details.

Both of these events are free but you must book. Booking will be available via the BCS website (in March).

The first James Elson Studentship has been announced on the School’s website. Two studentships have been made available as a result of a bequest from James Elson, a former MEng student who sadly passed away in 2012 after a long battle with cancer.

Professor Lin Li is Associate Dean for EPS Business Engagement and Innovation. The Business Engagement Team have provided a range of information showing what they do and how to contact them.

Every year, the University of Manchester hosts sixth formers participating in the Nuffield Research Placement scheme (www.nuffieldfoundation.org/nuffield-research-placements). For the past two years, we are proud to have hosted more students than any other institution in the UK. In 2015 more than half of these opportunities were offered to students who met the scheme's widening participation criteria.

Nuffield Research Placements are a fantastic way of working with talented young people from local schools and colleges who have a strong interest in Science, Technology, Engineering or Maths and giving them an insight into research as a career. There are more details below.

We are now looking for staff who would be willing to host a Nuffield Research Placement in summer 2016.

If you are interested in offering a project for 2016 or would like more information on how it works, please e-mail roz.webster@manchester.ac.uk who will put you in touch with the Regional Coordinator, Sarah Fenton.

Uli Sattler (PI) along with Bijan Parsia and Sean Bechhofer of the Information Management group have recently received funding to deliver a new Impact Acceleration Account project with partner company d-Wise. 

"Data related to clinical trials is big, complex, and comes with massive amounts of constantly
changing background knowledge. Accessing this data in a flexible, transparent, and reliable way
is crucial for companies in life sciences and healthcare. Ontologies promise to capture rich
background knowledge, and related Semantic Web (SW) technologies promise to provide the
above mentioned access to this data.
In this project, we plan to explore the potential opportunities, cost and benefits of ontologies and
SW technologies for capturing and accessing clinical trials data. In particular, we plan to identify
suitable use cases with d-Wise, including tasks and success criteria, for this exploration, and
provide some workshops related to SW technologies to improve our common understanding and
planning."