School of CS newsletter

Congratulations to Mikel Lujan who has been promoted to Professor of Computer Systems and to Caroline Jay who has been promoted to Senior Lecturer.

Open access publishing of research articles increases the visibility of those articles. Open access to publications is also a necessary condition for inclusion in the next REF. It's easy to do via the university's open Access Gateway which may be found at http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/services-and-support/staff/research/services/open-access-at-manchester/gateway/.

It is easy to use. To be eligible for REF, papers must be deposited within three months of acceptance.

The following papers were deposited into the new University Pure system from the School of Computer Science during April:

"Argo: Enabling the development of bespoke workflows and services for disease annotation" (Pure ID 31781946) was deposited by Riza Batista-Navarro.

"Automatic vs Manual Provenance Abstractions: Mind the Gap" (Pure ID 33719815) was deposited by Pinar Alper.

"Finding Finite Models in Multi-Sorted First-Order Logic?"  (Pure ID 31673998) was deposited by Giles Reger.

A significant hazard was brought to my attention recently - the banisters on the main stairs up to the 2nd floor are too far apart and a young person visiting the School could fall through. This is being addressed by Estates, but in the meantime please can I remind you that while young children are not banned from entering the Kilburn Building it is a place of work and any minors brought into the building must be continually supervised by responsible adults.

This demonstrates that risks and hazards can easily go unnoticed and we can only eliminate them by everybody reporting anything that they observe where they believe that there is a risk that could be reasonably removed.

Please take a look around the building and your working area. If you spot anything that you think creates a needless or avoidable risk or hazard please inform Tony McDonald. Don't assume that somebody else will spot the problem and report it.

The Faculty is encouraging all staff to check and, if necessary, update their equality monitoring data through MyView. This equality monitoring data is used anonymously for a wide variety of activities and achievements including the Athena SWAN Awards which are reliant on the analysis of equality data relating to gender. The information you give the University is used anonymously and only through your help by checking and updating your information can we make our working practices more inclusive and accessible. Read more.

We are all looking forward to the 2nd Annual Computer Science Bake-off in the 2nd floor common room at 3pm.

We have lots of lovely delicious entries for the Bake-off…come with a cuppa and some pennies.

Bijan, our winner from last year is entering again – let’s get baking!

Judging starts at 3pm and cakes are available for eating with a donation made to our two chosen charities once the winner has been announced.

See you there!

Several calls have been announced for the Newton Fund, details of which can be found here.

These include potential for collaborations with Malaysia, China, South Africa, Indonesia and Turkey. If you have existing research links in these countries or any of the Newton Partnering Countries, I would strongly suggest you consider applying. 

Applications to the Newton Fund that meet the ODA criteria have a very high likelihood of being awarded.

Please contact the Research Office if you wish to apply researchsupportcsm@manchester.ac.uk

Continuing the School's run of success with IAA applications, John Keane has been awarded a £60,000 Concept & Feasibility grant with software consultancy firm MDSAS Ltd.

"Haemtrack is a highly successful online national system for Haemophilia patients who, due to treatment advances, largely treat themselves outside hospital.

Haemtrack, developed by MDSAS, allows patients to record their therapy; if a patient uses treatments in response to an injury or spontaneous bleed, Haemtrack will collect detailed information specific to this. Healthcare professionals can view this information in real-time and use it to monitor the health of patients outside hospital and also to review with patients during clinics.

The aim of this project is to assess the feasibility of developing and incorporating advanced and innovative data analysis and decision support techniques, termed here Evidence-Based Decision Support (EB-DS), into Haemtrack. The EB-DS technology will monitor patient treatments and provide personalised dosing recommendations to healthcare professionals that monitor those patients."