School of CS newsletter

On 3 May I have one of my regular meetings with Sally Horridge, the School’s IT Services Relationship Manager. If you have an IT Services related topic you’d like me to raise then do send it to me by the end of this week. Delays in procurement of IT equipment is already on my list.

Many Thanks, Robert.

Research Finance Officer (RFO) Terry Williams will be leaving the team at the end of this week to join the Procurement Hub in Central Finance as an Operational Buyer.

Thanks to Terry for all of his work over the last few months. Details of another RFO will be available in due course.

Title: The new history display in the Kilburn Building

Some of you will have noticed a new display in the Kilburn Building, on the first floor. This covers the work of Desmond Henry [1921-2004] (see http://www.desmondhenry.com) who was an artist, philosopher and pioneer in computer art. He used wartime analogue computing devices to create artworks, and was a member of the Philosophy Department here. He discussed morphogenesis with Alan Turing and received an award from L.S. Lowry. Desmond's daughter, who keeps his archive, gave us an illustrated talk about her father's work several years ago. Desmond Henry was a very interesting character and a highly accomplished artist as well as an engineer and philosopher.

We will be holding an “opening ceremony” at the display: Friday 5th May at 3pm, when the artist’s family and associates will attend. Do come along.

Please contact Dr. David Rydeheard with any queries: david.e.rydeheard@manchester.ac.uk

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS - Deadline: 08 May 17
Event: 27 June (Whitworth Hall)

www.psrs.manchester.ac.uk

Win up to £200!

This year’s Postgraduate Summer Research Showcase includes poster, image and research film competitions, with postgraduate student researchers from across the four university faculties.

Posters are a brilliant way to foster individual discussions and exchange of ideas. For help and support with your poster design, sign up to a workshop: www.psrs.manchester.ac.uk/posters/posterguidance

The Exhibition gives postgraduate researchers a supportive environment in which they can practise their presentation skills and gain invaluable feedback from both academic and non-academic judges. You can enter anytime with a title, three keywords and a short abstract of 150 words - via the website http://www.psrs.manchester.ac.uk/participate The poster is needed on Monday 26th June the day before the event.

EoI deadline: 28 April 17
Event: 8 June 17

https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/calls/tipsworkshopeoi/

The one day workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to engage in discussion, identify research challenges and initiate new collaborative working partnerships around TIPS. The outputs of this workshop will be used to develop the scope of a targeted call for research projects, which will be published in summer 2017.

Please contact Miriam Dowle (miriam.dowle@epsrc.ac.uk ) if you have any questions about the workshop.

Remember that the School can cover the costs of attendance to funder events, where attendees then feedback on the event to the rest of the School. Please contact Gavin Brown for more information.
 

Event: 11 May 2017, 12:00-16:00 (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)

The aim of the event is to explore the potential for building a strong Cyber Security community at the University.

Cyber Security is a very important area for growth in Greater Manchester and the University has prioritised Cyber Security as a focus for engagement with the City. The University already has strengths in many of the research areas identified by the RCUK and PACCS programme as important to Cyber Security (e.g Threats and Intrusion, Distributed Systems and Networking, Verification, Cryptography and Data Analytics) as well as Policy Aspects such as Data Security and Privacy and in Human Factors.

This event will provide an opportunity to hear from Cyber Security researchers at UoM, to network with researchers from a wider range of disciplines and to discuss the potential for the University to establish itself as a leader in interdisciplinary Cyber Security research and teaching.

Event: 04 May 17, 13:00 - 15:00 (KB Atlas 1&2)

Manchester Informatics in partnership with the Manchester Urban Institute would like to invite you to the second event in a series of events aimed at exploring the University's work on Smart Cities.

The ability to visualise data about a city is essential in order to make it smart, Richard Kingston, Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Manchester will be giving a talk on the work of the Spatial Policy and Analysis Laboratory at the University, where spatial data analysis is used to support all forms of the planning and development process. Examples include CommuteFlow - geodemographic classification of commuting flows for England and Wales to enable better transport infrastructure planning and Climate Just, which shows the geography of England’s vulnerability to climate change at a neighbourhood scale.

Ordnance Survey, one of the partners in the CityVerve project, is at the heart of Smart activity applying geospatial expertise to bring Smart Cities to life all over the world. Simon Navin, Smart Cities Projects Lead at Ordnance Survey, will be giving a demonstration of OS’s data visualisation and mapping work on CityVerve and beyond.

HoS deadline: 22 May 17 

There will be three or four of Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw Fellowships awarded in any subject area across the faculty. These fellowships are aimed at outstanding scientists and engineers at an early stage in their academic careers - that is, within five years of the award of a first Ph.D., with the usual exceptions for maternity, paternity and career breaks. The fellowships are for five years and the expectation is that these will be awarded annually and lead to a permanent appointment (with the usual caveats).

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AYQ109/dame-kathleen-ollerenshaw-research-fellowships/

Only two applications are allowed from each School and must be accompanied by a supporting statement from the Head of School. This year, however, Chemistry, Materials and Physics and Astronomy are not taking part in this scheme. Competition for these fellowships will still be strong and so only the strongest candidates that want an academic career should apply. Proposals need to be "eye-catching", seeking to do exciting, transformatory research.

If you know of strong candidates, either within this University or others, then do encourage them to think about applying. All people thinking of applying must talk to the Head of School.

Institutional Links

Deadline: 13 Jun 17

The British Council has provided details of the next round of its Institutional Links Grants and Workshop Grants. The Institutional Links covering Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines and Thailand. The Workshop Grants cover Brazil, India, Kenya, Malaysia, South Africa, Thailand and Vietnam.

Newton Prize

An annual Newton Prize has been established from this year and will be awarded to current or previous Newton Fund grants awardees. Each year, five Newton partnerships will be awarded £200k to advance the work of their existing Newton Fund awards. The 2017 cycle will focus focusing on partnerships with India, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam in the area of public health and wellbeing. More information available at the end of the month.

Berry N, Lobban F, Belousov M, Emsley R, Nenadic G, Bucci S: #WhyWeTweetMH: Understanding Why People Use Twitter to Discuss Mental Health Problems, J Med Internet Res 2017;19(4):e107

http://www.jmir.org/2017/4/e107/

The paper presents a methodology and results of tweets analyzed thematically to understand the key reasons for discussing mental health using the Twitter platform.

Professor Uli Sattler has co-authored the book An Introduction to Description Logic (Cambridge University Press), which was published on 20 April 2017 across UK and Europe.
www.cambridge.org/9780521695428

A reminder that the University (i.e. IT Services) supports Dropbox Business for researchers and PGR graduate students. Dropbox's new web site design shows how many of us are signed-up; at the time of writing it is 1,026.