Last Friday we held this summer’s graduation ceremony. Should you wish to see the recording it may be viewed via

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/key-dates/graduation/live/

Due to the courtyard works we held the post ceremony bash in the university organised marquee. This seemed to work very well and we had a good showing of staff around to meet students together their friends and family. It’s a fine thing to come along and acknowledge our students’ successes.

Richard Neville is leaving the School on 31 July this year. Richard joined UMIST in 2000 and then the School of Computer Science after Project Unity. I thank him for his service to the School. There is a leaving card to be signed in ACSO. I hope you’ll all join me in wishing Richard all the best for the future.

The BBC is working on new ideas for their popular Horizon series and would like our researchers and academics to submit their ideas. In particular they are looking for an insight in to the topics that are currently of interest to scientists. At this stage they only require a brief outline of topics and areas of research. Additionally they are looking to find new experts that are interested in television presenting. If you would like to find out more or get involved, please contact Jordan Kenny - jordan.kenny@manchester.ac.uk

Computer Science team back from Malawi The outreach team has returned from a pilot project in Malawi, teaching computing in schools in the north of the country. It was a great experience all round, for the staff, CS students and teachers on the team, and for the schools, where we met real enthusiasm from the teachers and from the schoolchildren too, who engaged well with the subject despite never having touched a computer, or even a keyboard before! They requested we taught throughout the weekends as well, which we did. The message for next year is “bigger and better”, and planning has already begun. There is a report on the project at http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/david.e.rydeheard/Malawi-report.pdf There will be a School seminar in which we will show what was done, discuss the experience, and debate the value of such an intervention in a very unequal world: 2pm, Wednesday 27th September, LT 1.5. David Rydeheard David Rydeheard

biochem4j: Integrated and extensible biochemical knowledge through graph databases

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0179130

Analysis of grain size in FePt films fabricated using remote plasma deposition, D Huskisson, S Zygridou, S J Haigh, C W Barton, P W >> Nutter and T Thomson, Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials, accepted 2017, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmmm.2017.07.057