The Festival opens at 11am in the Charles Wilson Building on the main campus.

Fifty of the University's best research students have been chosen to present their work at this year's Festival with presentations covering everything from the use of Roman military bases as social spaces, the search for novel biomarkers of heart failure, examining Saturn’s ‘raining rings’, to the political representation of animals.

Admission is free and everyone is welcome to attend, so book your place online now.

To learn more about our Festival presenters, you can view the presenter profiles for follow the Graduate School's Facebook page.

As the sole UK university to develop formal links with MAU, a delegation from the University of Leicester is attending the formal opening of the University by the President of India Mr Pranab Mukherjee, on 25 May.

Under the agreement, Leicester will work with MAU initially in Engineering and Computer Science.  Students will have the opportunity to complete part of their course in India and part in Leicester subject to satisfactory performance as specified by Leicester and also depending on course options followed at MAU.

Students could also be eligible for Study Abroad options leading to degrees awarded by MAU and progress onto Master’s courses at Leicester, subject to qualification.

• Press release

Abstract:

Modern filesystems are designed to satisfy many complicated requirements. As a result, implementations are beset with problems. The implementation code is extremely complex, and almost inevitably contains bugs. These bugs can and do lead to data corruption and loss. Development time is very lengthy. Testing is also very lengthy and costly, and does not guarantee to eliminate all bugs. It is often unclear to application developers what guarantees a filesystem provides, so that it becomes extremely difficult to write correct applications for a given filesystem, let alone applications that are portable across different filesystems. In this project, we aim to tackle these problems by applying formal methods techniques. The project involves theoretical aspects but is focused on applications of theory to real-world systems.

As well as highlighting opportunities for further study in the College of Science and Engineering, the College of Arts, Humanities and Law and the College of Social Science will be heavily represented. This is a great opportunity to see what these Colleges have to offer and to find out if postgraduate study is right for you.

As well as asking any questions you might have to departmental representatives and current postgraduate students, the evening will also help you to find out about financial arrangements and support available to postgraduate students.

The Open Evening will be held on Tuesday 19th March 2013 from 4.00pm – 7.00pm in the O2 Academy, Percy Gee Building (Students’ Union). The Open Evening is free and all are welcome to attend.
For more information, or to book a place, please click here. 

Four Fellowships will be awarded in 2013 to outstanding female postdoctoral scientists to assist them with their research. The Fellowships, each worth £15,000 (equivalent € for candidates in Ireland), are tenable at any UK or Irish university or research institute to support a 12-month period of research.

The fellowship money can be spent in any number of innovative ways to enable women scientists to further their careers and facilitate world class research - such as buying equipment, paying for childcare or funding travel costs to an overseas conference.

Key Dates:

Applications open: Friday 1st February
Application close: Friday 15th March
Shortlist published: Monday 3rd June
Awards ceremony: Thursday 20th June

Visit www.womeninscience.co.uk to apply

Closing date for applications is midnight (BST) Friday 15th March 2013

Further information is available from:
http://www.womeninscience.co.uk/about-the-awards.html
http://www.womeninscience.co.uk/apply.php
http://www.womeninscience.co.uk/contact-us.php
 

The school will run from Monday the 8th of April until Friday the 12th. Visit the webpage or contact Alexander Kurz for further information.

The project aims to enable school pupils (from the age of 10-18) to engage with science by giving them access to on-line facilities that enable them to learn and even to carry out their own scientific experiments.

The project is being run in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), CERN, along with a host of other universities, companies, and research institutions.

Drawing on the scientifically sound and valid methodological and technological foundation discovered in the research, the team, as part of a large scale EU research project, has helped develop a new game that is being used to teach geography to 12-14 year olds. The game allows students to travel around an inspiring virtual learning world in eighty days, enhancing their understanding of the planet by guiding an alien around Earth.

The research project has achieved great strides in integrating models of adaptive personalised learning with those of adaptive interactive storytelling. It’s also leading to the merging of virtual game environments with existing learning resources, thus reducing development costs and time. These fusions will result in an adaptive and responsive system, enabling the understanding of active learning processes within a virtual learning environment, adapting to individual needs and abilities, and therefore fully exploiting the learners’ capabilities.

As a result of the research, the team has accomplished a significant step towards successful and effective educational games and improved the understanding of the theories and methodologies underpinning digital game-based learning.

What will you discover at Leicester?

Many of our staff were nominated and praised by their students but these are the quartet who really stood out above the rest:

College of Science and Engineering – Rick Thomas

Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, Department of Computer Science

“Enthusiasm is hard to ignore and students find it easy to enjoy the material if the lecturer leads by example. Rick doesn’t use slides. No powerpoints. This man begins his course by giving you the entire course notes, compiled beautifully in written English with examples and explanations. Rick uses an overhead projector and whiteboards, drawing out examples and following the course freestyle.”

College of Social Science – James Hammil

Lecturer, Department of Politics and International Relations

“I picked my third year module of South African Politics almost purely on the fact that James Hamill was teaching it, as I remembered from second year how much effort he puts into his lectures to make them engaging and feel like he is teaching them for the first time with the same enthusiasm. … I feel like it is not just a job for him but that he genuinely wants each and every person on the course to do brilliantly, not just on the course but in life.”

College of Medicine, Biological Sciences and Psychology – Noel Davies

Senior Lecturer, Department of Cell Physiology and Pharmacology

“We can turn up at his office without an appointment and he will put down what he’s doing and spend time to explain concepts that we do not understand. He never makes us feel like we are bothering him or that we are wasting his time.”

College of Arts, Humanities and Law – Ross Parry

Academic Director, School of Museum Studies

“The most engaging, enthusiastic academic I’ve ever had the pleasure of being taught by. A gifted speaker, he goes to great lengths to thoughtfully communicate every aspect of a lecture or idea, and really values any student participation and feedback.“

Arash Farzan, Ian Munro and Rajeev Raman. Succinct Indices for Range Queries with applications to Orthogonal Range Maxima

Andrzej Murawski and Nikos Tzevelekos. Algorithmic games for full ground references

Tadeusz Litak, Dirk Pattinson, Katsuhiko Sano and Lutz Schröder. Coalgebraic Predicate Logic

Marco Chiesa, Giuseppe Di Battista, Thomas Erlebach and Maurizio Patrignani. Computational Complexity of Traffic Hijacking under BGP and S-BGP

These will be synchronised with the campus-based courses, but will provide more flexibility in terms of location and pace. More information is available here. 

EASST is an international non-profit organisiation which “aims to promote research, development and applications in the area of systematic and rigorous engineering of software and systems.” The election of a new President took place during the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS).

In 1984, TIME magazine quoted the chief editor of a certain software publication as saying:

"Put the right kind of software into a computer, and it will do whatever you want it to. There may be limits on what you can do with the machines themselves, but there are no limits on what you can do with software."

This talk will survey results obtained over the last 75 years by mathematicians, logicians and computer scientists, which disprove this ignorance-based statement in a sweeping and fundamental way. We shall discuss problems that are provably non-computable, as well as ones that are hopelessly time- or memory-consuming (requiring far more time than has elapsed since the Big Bang, or requiring a computer would not fit into the entire known universe). Time permitting, we will also take a somewhat more amusing look at these facts, and relate them to the (im)possibilities of true artificial intelligence.

Venue: Attenborough Basement Lecture Theatre 3

Date and time: April 18th, 3pm

On Monday 12 March, Professor Rick Thomas from our Department of Computer Science will present a public lecture entitled ‘I know the answer when I see it!’

There are problems that may be difficult to solve but, once we have found the answer, it is comparatively easy to check that our solution really is correct; examples include constructing a timetable and solving a Sudoku puzzle.

Problems of this type are actually very important and it is still an open question as to whether any such problem always has an efficient method for finding the answer (not just checking the answer once we've got it).

Discovering whether or not there do exist efficient methods for doing this could win you a million dollar prize - or possibly something even more!

Professor Thomas’ lecture takes place in the Rattray Lecture Theatre at 6.30pm.

The following day sees a double bill of half-hour public lectures organised by GENIE (Genetics Education Networking for Innovation and Excellence) based in our Department of Genetics.

Professor Martin Tobin, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and Public Health in our Department of Health Sciences will ask: ‘How can our understanding of the genetics of lung disease be used to improve health?’. After which, Dr Salvador Macip from our Department of Biochemistry will speak on ‘The multiple lives of p53: from guardian of the genome to king of ageing’

To save you a trip to Wikipedia, p53 is an important protein which suppresses mutation within the human genome, affecting the growth, repair and death of cells. Dr Macip will be able to fill you in with more detail…

The GENIE lectures take place in the Frank and Katherine May Lecture Theatre in the Henry Wellcome Building at 6.30pm.

*One of those ten-day weeks that comes along every so often.

• "Engineering Systems Requirements for Locally Sustainable Communities" will be supervised by Dr. Ruzanna Chitchyan from Computer Science and Dr. Martin Phillips from Geography.
• "Boosting Automated Reasoning by Mining Proof Strategies" will be supervised by Dr. Neil Walkinshaw and Prof. Rajeev Raman. 

If you’re not familiar with the legend, it runs like this. In 1991, a group of bright young things in the Cambridge University computer lab, got fed up with negotiating ancient stairs and corridors to the Trojan Room where the coffee pot sat, only to find that it was empty. So they pointed a video camera at the pot and wrote a program which would take a frame grab every few seconds which anyone in the lab could then display in the corner of their screen, enabling researchers anywhere in the building to know when there was fresh java* available.

In those days, primitive web browsers (such as they were) could only support text but a couple of years later, the Mosaic browser enabled images to display on pages and suddenly anyone in the world could see the Trojan Room coffee pot. It was arguably the world’s first ever webcam. To computer geeks of a certain age, that coffee pot has near mythic status. There is, naturally, a website all about it.

Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser

But Quentin Stafford-Fraser did far more than watch coffee brew. Over the years he has held research posts at Cambridge University, Xerox EuroPARC, Olivetti Research, and AT&T Labs. He also helped to develop the VNC software which is now installed on millions of machines worldwide.

This talk, entitled ‘Innovation and Re-innovation: building technologies and technology companies’, forms the first in a series of ‘Connected World’ public lectures organised by our IT Services. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, takes place in the Frank and Katherine May Lecture Theatre, in the Henry Wellcome Building, at 5.30pm on Wednesday 25 January 2012.

NB. If you like your astronomy as much as your computer science, you can make a double bill of it by following this with Dr John Bridges’ public lecture on Exploring Mars in the Rattray Theatre at 6.30pm.

*Coffee, not the programming language, which wasn’t invented until 1995.

José Luiz Fiadeiro and Antonia Lopes. Consistency of Service Composition, 15th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software

Engineering (FASE), Tallin, Estonia, March 2012


Alexander Kurz, Tomoyuki Suzuki and Emilio Tuosto. On nominal regular
languages with binders, 15th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures (FoSSaCS), Tallin, Estonia, March 2012


Stefan Kiefer, Andrzej Murawski, Joel Ouaknine, Bjoern Wachter and
James Worrell. On the Complexity of the Equivalence Problem for Probabilistic Automata, 15th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures (FoSSaCS), Tallin, Estonia, March 2012

Gordon Fraser, Neil Walkinshaw. Behaviourally Adequate Software Testing, The Fifth IEEE International Confence on Software Testing (ICST 2012), Montreal, Canada, April 2012.

The founders of Giving World, sisters Rama and Sujata Bhalla, are passionate about helping vulnerable people and saving the planet at the same time. Over the next six months, the recycling and distribution of unwanted surplus company stock to charities and community groups will roll out across the East Midlands, West Midlands and the Greater London area as a direct result of this ethos and the University’s marketing and computing expertise.

The Department of Computer Science's Dr Tom Ridge and the School of Management's Dr Matthew Higgins provided their assistance through two Innovation Partnerships, organised through the Enterprise and Business Development Office.

The innovative organisation has also created three new jobs having won Lottery funding to develop its work and a University contact recently led to the donation of 244 pallets of domestic cleaning products which might otherwise have gone to landfill. The two sisters said that had they not involved the University of Leicester in this way they would not be in their current position, achieving a significant impact and reducing the number of people in need.

The University is very pleased and excited about this project as well. Not only does it provide a first rate example of what can be achieved by the Higher Education, commercial and third sectors working together, but also articulates one of the University’s core values in working to a more sustainable future.

• University Press Release

BATS (Building Adequate Test Sets by Reverse Engineering) is an exciting project that will seek to develop a proof of concept for an AI-driven software testing framework.

The DSTL-funded project will last for 3.5 months (but is aiming for a longer-term extension), starting in February.

We seek a skilled and enthusiastic software developer who can turn what is currently an exciting idea into a practical, widely applicable automated software testing solution.

Alongside their experience with software development, applicants should ideally possess a good degree in a Computer Science related discipline, and an interest in Machine Learning algorithms. Applicants who might lack industrial development experience but have a recent, high-quality Computer Science degree are also encouraged to apply.

For a further particulars, please visit the following site:

http://ig5.i-grasp.com/fe/tpl_UniversityOfLeicester01.asp?newms=jj&id=72357&aid=14178

Informal enquiries are welcome and should be made to Dr Neil Walkinshaw on nw91@leicester.ac.uk or +44(0)116 252 3953.

The closing date for this post is midnight on 2nd January 2012.

We anticipate that interviews will take place on the 10th January 2012.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/279671/Security-guards-roving-eye

http://www.cs.le.ac.uk/people/npiterman/msr/index.html

The amount of the stipend follows the EPSRC rate, currently £13,590 p.a. The studentship is intended for a student with home/EU fee status, but overseas applicants can be considered if they have an offer of funding from an external source to cover the difference between home/EU fees and international fees.

http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/computer-science/news/vacancies/phd-studentship-available-for-october-2012-start