School of CS newsletter

July Graduation is at 10.00 hrs on Thursday 21st July 2016 with a reception for Graduates and parents in the Kilburn Building after the event. If you have been involved with the graduating students please try to find the time to come to the reception to speak to graduates and their parents.

I encourage academic staff and research staff who have taught the students to take part in the ceremony itself, if you would like to do so the deadline for registration is Friday 24th June (this week). The details and registration form are available on Staffnet here.             

Prof. Furber has a blog post featured on the Huffington Post, in which he discusses whether artificial intelligence will ever supersede the human brain and the huge potential benefits that progress in this field could offer humanity.

The Software Sustainability Institute are running a Research Data Visualisation Workshop on 28th July 2016 at the University of Manchester. If you create data visualisations and plan to visualise new data sets or would like to know about data visualisation toolings and uses then this is the workshop for you. We will bring together a small but focused group of people to show the state of the art in data visualisation practices and tools in different areas and provide help for you to create your own visualisations during the hands-on session.

For further details, please visit: http://software.ac.uk/rdvw 

To attend please register at: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/research-data-visualisation-workshop-rdvw-tickets-25927808774

The University’s National Women in Engineering event will take place on Thursday 23rd June from 1.00pm to 4.00pm in the Kanaris Theatre at the Manchester Museum. Speakers include: Elaine Beason, Engineering Project Management Lead, Rolls Royce and Prof Cinzia Casiraghi, School of Chemistry, The University of Manchester. 

For more details and to register please visit: http://bit.do/NWED2016 

National Women in Engineering Day: http://www.nwed.org.uk/

Deadline: 24th June 2016

The University of Manchester has been allocated £400,000 by EPSRC to enable the UK engineering and physical sciences research community to establish a portfolio of ODA activity under the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). All areas of engineering and physical sciences research can be included as long as the topic is compatible with ODA guidelines. Multidisciplinary projects may be supported as long as the majority of the work proposed is within the EPSRC remit and they comply with ODA guidelines. Business case and proposal writing activities are not within the scope of this funding. It is expected that approximately 8-10 projects with a maximum value of £50,000 will be supported under this call. 

Funded projects must have an end date of 31 March 2017 and the bulk of the funding (75%) is required to be spent in this calendar year, i.e. by 31 December 2016.  The grant funds may not be used for capital expenditure, i.e. no single items of equipment above the £10k threshold are permitted. There is no requirement that matched funding or effort should be attracted from international research partners, but international collaboration with partners in ODA-eligible countries is encouraged to maximise the impact of the funding and to ensure the research is ODA compliant. Applications are sought for:

• Accelerating existing ODA compliant research (including delivery of research)
• Feasibility projects to demonstrate potential ODA compliant research activity
• Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) activity that is ODA compliant

Funding for IAA activities should be based on previously funded EPSRC research. A proportion of the funding awarded may be used to build partnerships with appropriate stakeholders, including overseas research institutions in developing countries.

Please contact researchsupportcsm@manchester.ac.uk as soon as possible if you wish to apply. Applications should be emailed to james.evans@manchester.ac.uk no later than 24^th June 2016.

Gavin Brown has recently received an award from AstaZeneca for a project which will apply machine learning techniques to analysis of clinical trials data.

The Bio-Pharmaceuticals company, one of the University's Strategic Partners, have awarded £99,000 for an 18m project.

The University - via IT Services' budget - still plan to release Dropbox for Business to all staff later this year. Some trials with a subset of users have been a little delayed because the University wishes to run a CASB alongside Dropbox. CASB is short for Cloud Access Security Broker. These are proxy servers that allow you to specify the security classification of certain files. When set High the CASB may, for example, encrypt the data. A number of such solutions are currently being evaluated by IT Services and they hope to procure one soon.

Until then, and unless, like me, you pay for your own Dropbox account, here are a couple of alternative ways to share very large files with collaborators anywhere in the world.

1. The University runs the Southampton University provided ZendTo system: https://zendto.manchester.ac.uk. Files up to around 20GB can be stored and then picked-up using this service. Collaborators can drop off files for you this way, as well as vice versa. Notification is via email.

2. Whether you use it or not, everyone at UoM has a personal web site. It is on your P: drive under the folder public_html. You can put a large file in there and email a collaborator its corresponding URL for download. To save space here, ask ian.cottam@manchester.ac.uk for details of how to use this service from any operating system.