School of CS newsletter

We are now in the first week of teaching proper after a very busy week 0. Student numbers are beginning to settle down - there are currently 271 first years. The good news is that a shade over 24% of our new first year are women; this is very pleasing to see as getting more women into computer science at all levels has been a long-standing goal of the School and the discipline more widely. Many thanks to all of those staff and students that have made the various contributions that will have made this possible. I hope that the proportion of women doing computer science will continue to grow.

This week's Monday Mail from Toby had lots of photos of our new undergraduates and our prize-winning undergraduates from previous years.

Faculty World-Leading Papers
You may remember sometime ago there was a call for world-leading papers to be publicised at Faculty level. This exercise is to promote our research more broadly. After some delay the webpage showing the selected papers has gone live: http://www.se.manchester.ac.uk/our-research/in-abstract/. Five of the 25 papers come from Computer Science, which is very pleasing to see. More of these promotion exercises will follow, so keep those world-class papers coming. Many thanks to Gavin Brown for seeing this through to completion.

References
This is a time of year when many of us are asked to write references for students and staff. When writing references please pay attention to the University guidance that contains a lot of useful information about writing references in an appropriately-worded manner. The guidance for student references can be found at: http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=1921 and the policy for writing staff references at: http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=15719 

Disability Coordinator
Gill Lester will taking over from Ning Zhang as School Disability Coordinator (DC) from the 2016/17 academic year. The primary role of the DC is to receive notifications from the Disability Advisory and Support Service (DASS) that students' support plans have been either created or updated.  The DC is then responsible for informing all staff in the School who have a need to know about that student's support. This is an important role in supporting our students with disabilities and I would like to thank both Ning for undertaking this role over the past few years and Gill for taking this on from the new academic year. 

Retirement Party
We will be having a retirement party for John Gurd and Graham Gough. This will be in the common room, Tuesday 27th September at 4pm.

UG Open Days will be held this Saturday 1 October and next Saturday 8 October.

As always, we’d really appreciate any support you can give, particularly with the Schuster Building CS stand on both days. If you can spare time for even just one session below, it’d be an enormous help.

Saturday 1 October (Schuster Building, CS Stand)
-9:30-11:30
-11:30-13:30
-13:30-15:30

Saturday 8 October (Schuster Building, CS Stand)
-9:30-11:30
-11:30-13:30
-13:30-15:30

If you are able to help please contact Jez Lloyd

Alliance Manchester Business School are hosting their Big Data Forum on the 28th of September.  The Big Data Forum is a cross-disciplinary network that brings together researchers with interests in the field of Big Data.

This event will be an opportunity to hear more from both academics and practitioners with an interest in the business value of big data.  For a full agenda and to register for this free event please visit http://bigdataforum-sepevent.eventbrite.co.uk

macOS Sierra (or 10.12 if you prefer) is available now from the Apple app store. I have installed it on three Macs without any problems so far.

What I did and recommend: 1) If you use Dropbox, take their advice and make sure you have the latest version; and if you have your dropbox in a non-default location (home directory), use the Dropbox Preferences option to move it there. You must do the move this way – rather than say manually – or it will break. 2) During macOS setup I turned off iCloud's new features of auto sync (and in some cases it can even remove local file copies!). If you really want this feature, you can turn bits back on later. 3) I also turned off Siri voice control, but, again, some of you may find that useful.