Computer Science News

On the last Wednesday of term about 250 6th formers, teachers and employers converged on the Department of Computer Science at Warwick for a conference Computing Your Future. The purpose was to inspire school students with the astonishing possibilities and challenges that computing now offers and to inform them about the great variety of computing degrees and also the excitement of the numerous career paths that can follow after such degrees. The conference was one of about a dozen similar events across the country during National Science Week sponsored by the Computing At School (CAS) movement and the British Computer Society. Lunch at the event was very generously sponsored by the local branch of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Further support was provided from the British Computer Society and CAS.

The day began, and ended, with plenary sessions addressed by staff from both Warwick and Coventry universities including a remarkably inspiring final talk from Peter Dickman – an Engineering Manager at the Google Zurich Office. The main work of the day went on in a series of Workshops which participants attended in small groups. There were 17 of these in parallel ranging from Haptic Interaction with Virtual Scenes to First Steps with Greenfoot, and from A Day in the Life of a Video Game Programmer to Ethical Hacking and Network Security. Several Computer Science students (as well as staff) from both Warwick and Coventry Universities helped to lead these workshops. There were also a wide variety of employers – both recent graduates and experienced managers – giving a detailed and practical insight into the huge range of jobs that are calling out for computing-qualified graduates.

The lead organiser of the event, Steve Russ of Computer Science at Warwick, was assisted by staff from Warwick Manufacturing Group and Coventry University as well as the Coventry and Warwickshire LEA. The success of the day depended in large measure on a team of 32 Warwick students who enthusiastically welcomed and guided groups around the numerous venues and helped to run workshops. There were 15 local schools represented and we hope a new CAS Hub can be formed soon which will help to support and share resources among ICT/Computing teachers on a regular on-going basis.

ACM has named Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard University the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory and to the broader theory of computer science. Valiant brought together machine learning and computational complexity, leading to advances in artificial intelligence as well as computing practices such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition, and computer vision. He also launched several subfields of theoretical computer science, and developed models for parallel computing. The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing," is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The award carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc. Les Valiant received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Warwick in 1974. His PhD supervisor was Professor Mike Paterson.

Dr Abd-Nacer Bouchekhima joined the department as a Research Fellow after obtaining his PhD in 2009 from the MOAC DTC and then holding an appointment as Assistant Professor in KFUPM (Saudi Arabia). He will work together with Dr Yulia Timofeeva on a project funded by the BBSRC that aims to investigate the role of calcium dynamics in neuronal computation underlying important brain functions.

Steve Russ and Meurig Beynon hosted a visit to Computer Science from the cohort of students in Education who are on the ICT initial teacher training course (PGCE). Their lecturer (Mick Hammond) had asked if we could show them something of our 'alternative' approach to computing. Most of the time they were working through part of a workshop that Meurig used at the Constructionism 2010 conference in Paris last August. They were a lively group (about 15 of them came along including Mick himself) and from several discussions it was clear what a very wide-ranging and challenging task an ICT teacher has in today's schools. Some of these budding teachers had worked in the software industry, almost all had a first degree which contained significant programming work. They were just off to do another six weeks of teaching practice in local schools. Whether there would be opportunity, or support, for teaching any programming in their schools, or in their first jobs, appeared to be very uncertain - indeed the desirability and relative importance of such teaching was clearly problematic to many of them. The issues are truly complicated with many stakeholders all pulling in different directions and the Government currently reviewing ICT in a fashion which some feel will weaken support for it further. In such a climate it is clearly very important for the discipline of computing (if there is such a thing) that we can clearly distinguish ICT and computing, and that pupils, parents, teachers and politicians all understand the distinction. The Computing at School movement is working hard to achieve this (among many other worthy aims). They are sponsoring our 6th form conference coming up in March.

In recent years IBM have regularly invited a group of Warwick computer science students to an 'open day' event held at
their research centre at Hursley. A couple of weeks ago a coach-full of our students (from 1st years to 4th years) attended this year's event. One of those attending, Alex Wilson, picks up the story ...

"After arriving in Hursley we were shown around the beautiful grounds of Hursley House before being introduced to IBM staff and facilities. The Galileo Centre, where we spent most of the day, was filled with interesting exhibitions and demonstrations of technology such as facial profiling and uses of RFID tags. The staff gave us presentations on current technologies and uses, such as in the SMARTer planet scheme – including one employee who had integrated public monitoring with his house through Twitter! During lunch we were able to have personal chats with IBM’s Master Innovators, the people who design the new innovations in technology.

The last part of the day was splitting into groups and working on our own “innovations” – we gave a presentation on uses and how we’d implement it to the rest of the students who came and IBM’s own panel of judges. The winning team received iPods as prizes. The entire day was very fun, interesting, and well worth doing again. A big thank you to IBM for their time and hospitality!"

(Outside Image credit Simon Greig, release under Creative Commons)

Last week (17th January 2011) saw the publication by Birkhäuser of the Proceedings of a major conference held in 2009 in Potsdam and Szczecin in honour of Hermann Grassmann. The major organiser was Hans-Joachim Petsche (Potsdam) but Steve Russ was a co-organiser, along with Jörg Liesen (Berlin), Albert C. Lewis (Austin, Texas) and Franco Ferrari (Szczecin, Poland). In November 2010 the conference was the first-time winner of a prize awarded by the Brandenburg state for 'Innovative and/or exceptional events'.

Hermann Grassmann was author of a work 'Extension Theory' (1844 and 1862) which contained much of the theory of vector spaces and linear algebra in a remarkably abstract and modern form which was a forerunner and direct influence for the vector and tensor calculus developed later by Gibbs, Heaviside and others, on Clifford algebras and on the differential forms of E. Cartan. Several papers at the conference testified to the continuing influence and fruitfulness of Grassmann's ideas for mathematics and computing, especially for the visualisation of crystallographic structure and to geometric algebra computing.

The conference saw the publication of an English translation of Petsche's biography of Grassmann for which Steve Russ was a consultant. Steve was a co-editor of the Proceedings volume to which he also contributed a paper 'Concepts and contrasts: Hermann Grassmann and Bernard Bolzano'.

The Mathematical Association of America has awarded its 2011 David Robbins Prize for the two papers: “Overhang” by Mike Paterson and Uri Zwick (Tel Aviv) and “Maximum Overhang” by Mike Paterson, Yuval Peres (Microsoft), Peter Winkler (Dartmouth), Mikkel Thorup (AT&T) and Uri Zwick.

The prize, presented on 7 January 2011 at the AMS-MAA Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans, is given every three years for papers reporting on novel research in algebra, combinatorics, or discrete mathematics. Both papers appeared in 2009 in the American Mathematical Monthly. (The first of these had already won a 2010 Lester Ford Award of the MAA.)