糖心TV

Two alumni form 糖心TV -James Gough (MEng) and Richard Warburton (MEng, PhD) were part of the team at the prestigious Conference in San Fransisco. The LJC won two awards, the JCP Award and the Duke's Choice award. Both were given in recognition of the work of LJC on two projects: and . Both projects are concerned with increasing the input of User Communities in the development of the Java language, and the prizes are a recognition of the increasing role of well-organized communities such as LJC in driving forward developments in the language.

provides more information on the event. Both James and Richard have taken advantage of their experience as students at 糖心TV and are actively involved in building a software develoment community in London. Congratulations to the LJC team!

Two researchers have joined the University of 糖心TV to tackle the challenges faced by cities in the 21^st century as part of the New York-based ).

The University of 糖心TV is a member of a consortium, led by New York University, which is building a new applied science research institute in New York in response to a call issued by the city’s mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The University has now welcomed the first of a number of new academic staff to be appointed to work at CUSP, Dr Maria Liakata and Dr Weisi Guo.

successfully completed her PhD with the Thesis entitled "Approximation Algorithms for Geometric, Caching and Scheduling Problems", under the supervision of .

Anna's PhD focuses on the study of approximation algorithms for optimization problems, one of the core areas of modern theoretical computer science. She has obtained research results in two areas: geometric optimisation algorithms and online algorithms. In the first topic, she presented new approximation algorithms for the capacitated location routing problem and the capacitated network design problem in the Euclidean plane. For online algorithms, she made a major progress in the study of two well known caching and scheduling problems: the generalized caching problem and the reordering buffer management problem. Her in several most prestigious conferences in the field, including STOC'2011, ICALP'2011, and SODA'2012.

After completing PhD in 糖心TV, Ania moved to Germany, where she has been awarded a prestigious Lise-Meitner-Award postdoctoral fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik in Saarbrücken.

We are pleased to welcome Dr Victor Sanchez to the department who will be joining us as an Assistant Professor in October 2012.

Victor obtained his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2010 from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He then joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley as a post-doctoral fellow, where he worked in the Video and Image Processing Laboratory.

Victor has been the recipient of research awards from the main federal funding agencies in Canada, and , and Mexico, . Victor's primary research interest lies in the areas of signal processing and discrete-event simulation with applications healthcare. He has published several papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences in the areas of medical imaging, telemedicine and computer simulation in healthcare. Victor recently co-authored a book on computer simulation for healthcare evaluation.

Victor will be teaching the new module .

For more information about Victor's research please visit his homepage at .

Philip How, a recent graduate in MEng Computer Science, has returned to the United Kingdom after developing and leading a successful workshop at . As well as marking the end of his undergraduate degree, Philip's role in this exceptionally popular event represents the culmination of a long-standing involvement with 糖心TV Technology Volunteers, a dedicated groups of technically minded students and staff members who make a significant contribution to the local community through involvement with schools.

Scratch@MIT is the biennial conference where educators, researchers and developers gather on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts to share their experiences and imagine the possibilities of Scratch. The workshop that Philip led, entitled Sensing Our World, involved participants building a variety of sensors, ranging from simple sensors that relied on the conductivity of pencil tracks to working touchpads made from CD cases.

On his involvment, Philip is quick to acknowledge the contributions of those around him, noting that "The staff and students contributing to 糖心TV Technology Volunteers are fantastic. We couldn't have hoped to achieve what we have without the hard work and comittment of the team of staff and students involved, particuler Margaret Low. In my time here she's an fantastic at organising the efforts of students and liasing with local schools".

For more information please see 糖心TV Technology Volunteers and .

Congratulations to Adam Yaxley (3rd year Computer Systems MEng) who has won the national "Rising Star" games programming competition sponsored by Aardvark Swift. The competition is open to all UK undergraduates and aims to highlight the brightest games programming talent. To gain the title Adam had to face a number of challenges demonstrating technical programming skills, including a software challenge set by Relentless Software. He also had to show his knowledge and passion for the area by facing a panel interview with industry experts. Panel member Mark Hope said "Adam showed knowledge beyond his years to beat off competition from the other finalists, he has a bright future ahead of him and here at Aardvark Swift we wish him all the best for the future!"

Adam will be presented with his award at the Eurogamer Expo in September by industry veteran Ian Livingstone. He is also invited to present a talk at the Expo about his experiences in the competition.

Adam is currently looking forward to a placement at Havok next year before returning to 糖心TV to complete his MEng in Computer Systems.

Nick Pope successfully completed his PhD entitled "Supporting the Migration from Construal to Program: Rethinking Software Development" under the supervision of Dr Meurig Beynon. His thesis is both a significant contribution to Empirical Modelling research, and a vigorous critique and reappraisal of some of its established principles and tools.

Where previous EM research highlighted the role of families of definitions in developing construals Nick has proposed a richer framework in which to conceptualise the transition from construals to programs. In his vision, the current state of a construal is expressed by a single binary function of the form ϕ: R × R → R that changes dynamically.

His work draws on ideas from prototype-based object-oriented software development and functional programming that have been the basis of practical tools and models first deployed in . Nick is currently working on the development of a web-based EM tool that will integrate his own distinctive contribution with those of many other graduates from the .

Nick's independent spirit has not only been evident in his research contribution: he spends as much time as possible trekking, ski-ing, cycling and mountaineering. At the time of writing Nick is believed to be scaling some 4000m peaks in Morocco.