School of CS newsletter

A date for your diary - the next School’s Graduation Ceremony has been confirmed as Thursday 14^th December 2017 starting at 2.30 p.m.  As in previous years, this event will be shared with the Schools of Mathematics and Physics & Astronomy and is primarily for graduating PGT and PGR students.  The University will send out an invitation to participate in the procession in a couple of weeks.

The University has signed a five year Data Science Research Partnership (DSRP) with the BBC. The UoM is one of  eight UK universities in the partnership (UCL, Imperial, Bristol, Ulster, surrey, Edinburgh and QMUL). The partnership affords the UoM an opportunity to work with the BBC and the other DSRP partners  on a variety of projects using BBC data. The launch was in broadcasting House, in the BBC Radio Theatre last Thursday 19 October. A large contingent of people from across the UoM went down for the  launch. There were several demonstrations from the UoM and two from Sophia Ananiadou on "Mining the History of Medicine" and "Thalia - PubMed semantic search engine" both of which gained a lot of interest. The establishment of the DSRP for the UoM was led by Caroline Jay, John Keane and Robert Stevens.

 

Marie is leaving us after seventeen years in the Finance Office to take up a post in Humanities. There will be  a farewell refreshments and cakes in the staff Common room at 3 p.m. this Thursday 26th October. Do come along and wish her well. I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank Marie for her fine work for the School and I wish her all the best for the future.

 

Nick Filer is leaving the School on 31 October after around 33 years in the school. We are having a do for Nick in the staff common room  at 3 p.m. on 31 October; do come along and give Nick a good send off. 
 

Are you involved with or affected by Devo Manc? We are seeking FSE based Devo projects to highlight.

Devolution Manchester (Devo Manc) (https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/homepage/59/devolution) is transferring a wide range of policy and decision making powers out of central government and into our local region. Through the elected mayor the Manchester region now has much greater direct control over a range of policy issues, including the region’s transport, criminal justice and offender management, and £6B in health and social care spending. It gives researchers at the University unprecedented routes to impact as many devolution initiatives seek to embed research and innovation at their core.

To capitalise on this the University has created the Devo Hub (http://www.mui.manchester.ac.uk/devo-manc/) to bring together researchers with an interest in Devo Manc, share developments and opportunities, and highlight our work which is affecting (or is affected by) devolution. We’re now reaching out across FSE to increase engagement with the hub. If you are currently involved with Devo Manc related work, or would like to be more involved, can you contact FSE’s representative Alex Casson (alex.casson@manchester.ac.uk) and sign up to the mailing list (devo-manc@listserv.manchester.ac.uk) so we can build up a list of researchers and make sure we are as well represented as the other faculties.

Prof. Tsujii given IAMT Award of Honor On September 19th 2017, Prof. Jun'ichi Tsujii, NaCTeM Scientific Advisor, was given IAMT (International Association for Machine Translation) Award of Honor, for his outstanding contribution to the promotion and development of machine translation and to the aims and objectives of IAMT. http://aamt.info/app-def/S-102/mtsummit/2017/iamt_aoh/

Date: Monday 20 November 2017 Venue: The Royal Society, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG Time: 18.00 - 21.30 Speaker: Dr Alastair Donaldson, Imperial College, London 20th November 2017Many-core programming: How to go really fast without crashing Software must be reliable, working well enough, enough of the time. Software also needs to be efficient if it is to be useful. In some domains - robotic surgery, or self-driving cars, to name two examples - software needs to be both very efficient and very reliable. Due to the wide range of devices on which software now runs, software portability is also highly desirable.

Caroline Jay is one of the speakers at Research IT's next club meeting on the 25th October 2017. Details here https://researchitnews.org/2017/10/03/res-it-club-oct/. Caroline will be talking about work on reproducible research and executable papers.

Cordial invitations are hereby offered to hear the following guest speakers on cyber security. All take place in Kilburn 2.19.

06 November 2017, 11:00 - 13:00, Colin Williams - SBL/Visiting Professor, University of Warwick - Meat The Machine: How to Learn to ​Stop Worrying, Love Your Robot and Survive The Singularity
06 November 2017, 16:00 - 17:00, Adrian Davies, Becoming a Cyber Security Professional
07 November 2017, noon - 13:00, Jon Noel - McAfee - Malware Evolution
13 November 2017, 10:00 - 11:00, Jon Nield - Secarma/Ukfast - DDoS Mitigation Architecture
13 November 2017, 14:00 - 15:00, Alan Jenkins - IBM - Leadership in Technology
13 November 2017, 15:30 - 17:00, Tim Armit, The Post Office - Computing after really big bangs - disaster recovery and business continuity
14 November 2017, noon - 13:00, Paul Vlissidis - NCC Group - Blue pills, red pills, and penetration testing
21 November 2017, noon - 13:00, John Young - Cyfor - Digital Forensics
27 November 2017, noon - 13:00, Sarah Clarke - Infospectives - Straightforward Security in the Supply Chain
04 December 2017, noon - 13:00, Will Roebuck - E Radar - €20 million for a bug? A legal perspective
04 December 2017, 16:00 - 17:00, Ian Trump - ZoneFox - Cyber Security Fact, Fiction, and Failure

Contact Daniel Dresner for more information

Talk at the Force 2017 Research Communication and e-Scholarship Conference, Berlin

Prof. Sophia Ananiadou, director of NaCTeM, will give a talk entitled "Enhancing the real impact of scholarly publications through text and data mining" at the FORCE2017 Research Communication and e-Scholarship Conference, to be held in Berlin, Germany from 25th-27th October 2017.

The conference will bring together a diverse group of approximately 300 scientists, publishers, librarians, computer scientists, informaticians, funders, educators, citizens, patients, and more, from all sectors of the scholarly landscape, who have an interest in changing the way in which scholarly and scientific information is communicated and shared.

https://www.force2017.org/