School of CS newsletter

A pre-exams"pub quiz" for all will be hosted by CSSoc, held in the Staff Common Room and Atlas 1&2.  This will be a ticketed event (£3 per person) but for that price you get pizza and beer, as we usually do in the Christmas party.  CSSoc will be selling tickets in Byte Cafe from 12pm-2pm every day this week.  Get a team of 3-5 people together, and get your tickets!  Not to be missed!

The 2016 Karen Spärck Jones Lecture will be "Mind the many skills gaps: why we keep creating unworkable security" by Professor M. Angela Sasse FREng (University College London). It will be at 6pm 25th May 2016 in the BCS Headquarters, Southampton Street, London.

This is the 6th Karen Spärck Jones Lecture, an evening event, honouring women in computing research. Prof Sasse is the Professor of Human-Centred Technology at UCL, and Director of the UK Research Institute in Science of Cyber Security (RISCS).

The event is free but you must book via the BCS website: http://academy.bcs.org/ksj

The Modularity Conference (formerly known as the International Conference on Aspect Oriented Software Development) was first held in April 2002, and AOSA has recently been making an annual award for the best submitted paper for the current conference, plus an award for the most influential paper that was published in the conference that was held ten years prior to the current conference. The 15^th conference in the series was held recently in Malaga, where this year's Most Influential Paper Award was given to Bruno Harbulot and John Gurd for their paper “A join point for loops in AspectJ” that was published at the 5^th Conference in Bonn in 2006. The award stated "This is an influential paper hat explored and solved a limitation of AOP and that inspired the designs of many other aspect oriented languages. Nowadays this paper continues to stimulate new work". Congratulations in particular to Bruno, whose PhD work has received such well-deserved recognition.

Congratulations again to all the students involved in winning the Major League Hacking (MLH) award for the 2nd time last autumn. The trophy was finally presented to students in School of Computer Science last Wednesday. The new trophy sits proudly in the cabinet next to Byte Cafe, next to the previous one.

The University recently joined the Vision 2020 Network.

Vision 2020 is a European networking platform launched in 2013 and was set up to enable universities, SMEs and corporates to collaborate through Horizon 2020.    It was launched to foster business-university collaboration across Europe for organisations that wanted to engage with the Horizon 2020 programme building bridges between excellent research organisations and innovating companies.

The research organisation members of Vision2020 are a select group of excellent institutions that are highly active in European research & innovation. Membership for small and medium sized companies is open to any innovating business seeking Horizon 2020 funding. 

The list of Vision 2020 members can be found here

The Vision 2020 Helixes

Vision2020 currently hosts eight active communities of researchers and companies that work together in "Helixes" focused on a particular Horizon 2020 research area.

The Current Helixes are:

• Digital Health
• Health
• Manufacturing
• Energy
• Climate
• Security
• NMP
• Prosperity and Resilience

More Helixes will be launched in the coming months, so please check the Vision 2020 Twitter feed and events page for regular updates.

Vision2020 also hosts a selected group of Experts that provide members with tailored services that are specific to Horizon 2020.

If you are interested in engaging with Vision 2020 please email:

Liz.Fay@manchester.ac.uk

Claire.Faichnie@manchester.ac.uk

Where: Kilburn L.T. 1.4

Time: 14:00 - 15:00

Speaker:  Dr. David White (University of Glasgow)

Host: Caroline Jay

Abstract:

Genetic Improvement (GI) is the application of search methods to improve existing source code, most notably in the areas of bug fixing and execution time optimisation. Much work in GI employs search over large spaces of unconstrained program transformations, which makes it a potentially powerful tool but also places heavy emphasis on testing to validate results. As a consequence, GI is often a controversial topic! In this talk I will explain how GI is usually applied, how it compares to related work in program synthesis, and outline some of the achievements and controversies of recent GI research.

 

​​In its capacity as UK National Contact Point for the European Research Council (ERC), the UK Research Office, in partnership with the hosting institutions, is holding two events for researchers who are interested in applying to the 2016 ERC Advanced Grant call. The events are scheduled as follows:

• University​ of Leeds, Tuesday 7 June 2016, 10:45-13:45
• Natural History Museum, London, Thursday 9 June 2016, 10.30-12.45

Further information and registration are available at the links to the events given above.

The 2016 Advanced Grant call will open on 24 May 2016 and close on 1 September 2016. Applicants are expected to be active researchers and to have a track record of significant research achievements in the last ten years. The scheme is designed to support Principal Investigators (PIs) at the career stage at which they are already established research leaders with a recognised track record of research achievements.

Deadline for submissions: 15th May 2016

The Siemens Process Industries and Drives Process Automation (PD PA) has recently posted technical challenges and is looking for innovative business partners.

The main goal of PD DA is to find business partners who can solve the technical challenges with mature products and services. As some of the challenges are complex Siemens would be interested university start-ups or research centers that may offer potential solutions. Further information can be found at https://ninesights.ninesigma.com/web/siemens-gallery.

Requests include:

Programmable Logic Controllers:

Non-volatile working or backup memory for PLC

Data Analysis and Transmission:

Predictive maintenance for electronic components

Alternative technology for data transmission in monorail applications

Mechanical Housing:

Explosion proof enclosure from Aluminum die cast by optimized casting process

Maintenance-free cooling of PLC modules

Other Innovations in Sensors, Data Analysis and Visualisation, and Housing:

Other Innovations in Sensors, Data Analysis and Visualisation, and Housing

PD DA kindly invites innovative business partners to submit ideas online on the Siemens NineSights gallery until May 15^th, 2016.

The best submissions will be invited to present at PD DA’s supplier innovation day on June 6th, 2016 in Karlsruhe, Germany. For more information, click here.

If you wish to be nominated please let me know as soon as possible (thomas.wise@manchester.ac.uk). 

​The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions​ (MSCA) Individual Fellowships 2016 call is now formally open and the guide for applicants has now been published.  

The call deadline is 17:00 Brussels time (16:00 UK time) on 14 September 2016.

Please distribute this to any suitable applicants you may have in mind. If you know of or are sponsoring any applications to this call, please inform the Research Office as soon as possible (researchsupportcsm@manchester.ac.uk)

The University of Manchester is leading a new project to collect and analyse patient feedback to make it more useful for improving NHS services.

The work is a joint two-year £500k project with Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust and Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust and is funded by the NIHR’s Health Service and Delivery Research programme. As part of the project, a team from the School of Computer Science (led by Goran Nenadic, CI) will explore how patient comments and stories can be analysed quickly and effectively through text analytics, and look at how patients’ views can best be presented to staff alongside other information the NHS collects on quality, safety and symptoms of patients.

Your Tech Support Team continue to work on upgrading projection facilities in rooms that have not been looked at for some time.

If you find a somewhat upgraded facility in a room, please don't think that we have finished; we are working in phases to both avoid lengthy periods of room closures and also factoring what work we can do and what requires Estates to schedule their time to help us.

Atlas 1 and IT401 now both have new, higher quality projectors. These two rooms also have wifi projection capability as well as traditional wires (Atlas 1 will get wired HDMI in its next phase of work). IT401 is due to have the projection equipment ceiling-mounted by Estates any day now. Mercury is likely to be the next target for a new projector / wifi.

We also have a couple of pop-up or on demand wifi projection facilities. The first is with a TV on a trolley that Prof Uli Sattler and colleagues will trial in the MSc Lab. The other one was a pop-up in the Mac Lab that was successfully used by students, just the other day for the first iOS Workshop, where the content was wirelessly transmitted to both TVs in the Lab simultaneously. Workshops are currently infrequent in the Mac Lab so we have not left the wifi equipment in there permanently.

All modern Apple mobile and laptop devices can just connect with built-in AirPlay (Bluetooth should also be on to act as a channel for finding what facilities are available in the area). Windows devices can use AirParrot2, for which we have some licences, and all details are in Atlas 1 and IT401. Non-Apple devices (or some older Apple ones) also need to use the wifi hotspot "IDC". 

Contact Ian Cottam x61851 with any questions.