School of CS newsletter

Thank you all for your patience while the windows work progresses. I know it is particularly trying but we are now more than halfway through and the work is due to be finished by the end of October. We now have all our teaching labs back from the windows work, though other refurbishment work continues in some lab spaces. All the labs necessary for Welcome Week are in a fit state for habitation - thank-you to Mike Keeley, Ian Cottam, Steve Rhodes and the rest of the team who are working very hard to make sure all is in place for the start of term. We have a handful of academics without their own offices for the start of term and Tony McDonald is finding offices for these members of staff. There will be continued disruption for RA and PhD student offices and some PSS teams will be affected up until the end of the work.

As said previously, I know this is all very trying and I would like to thank Tony McDonald, James Fields and Liz Caine for coping with all the extra work that the windows project has entailed.

A few months ago I put an article into the School Newsletter about a stash of Alan Turing's letters unearthed by Jim Miles as he delves into the vaults of the School's archives. Jim has deposited the letters in the University Library where one of the University's archivists, James Peters, has curated the letters and made them available to interested parties. Jim  believes that the folder is Turing's correspondence file maintained by a secretary in the Computing Machines Laboratory. It contains incoming correspondence and carbon copies of Turing's responses throughout Turing's time in Manchester. Jim thinks that Turing would dictate or write letters that would then be typed with carbon copies, the originals would have been signed and sent out and the carbon copies kept. It was all in date order as it would have been at the time and it's possible that it has been largely untouched since Turing's death. The archive is now available and  the find has been all over the news. There's been a University story (http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/lost-turing-letters-give-unique-insight-into-his-academic-life-prior-to-death) and a front page Guardian article (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/aug/27/collection-letters-codebreaker-alan-turing-found-filing-cabinet), an interview for Today on BBC Radio Four, a feature on Sky News (see https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/902161439095373825/video/1) and several other outlets. The find was also mentioned in Nature (https://www.nature.com/news/alan-turing-s-notes-runaway-salmon-and-illegal-gold-mining-1.22518). The contents of the archive can be seen at https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/4f6c3f0c-9a70-33c5-bd03-df331fb06146 although the letters themselves can only be seen by appointment with James Peters. Once potential copyright issues have been resolved it is hoped that digital copies will be contributed to the Turing Digital Archive http://www.turingarchive.org/

We had planned to hold the School Bake-Off this Thursday 14th September. However since lots of people are away and everyone is very busy with Welcome Week preparations, we have decided to postpone this for now. A new date will be arranged in due course.