News 2005

November 2005

Two books have recently been by published by Springer, Dr Ulrich Nehmzow's book "Scientific Methods in Mobile Robotics":

"Mobile robotics is a cutting-edge research topic, which until recently has primarily focused on issues such as the design of controllers and robot hardware. The field is now ready to embrace theoretical methods from dynamical systems theory, statistics and system identification to produce quantitative analyses and computer models of robot-environment interaction."

Visit the Springer Verlag page for more information.

Udo Kruschwitz's book, "Intelligent Document Retrieval":

"Collections of digital documents can nowadays be found everywhere in institutions, universities or companies. Examples are Web sites or intranets. But searching them for information can still be painful.

Searches often return either large numbers of matches or no suitable matches at all.

Such document collections can vary a lot in size and how much structure they carry. What they have in common is that they typically do have some structure and that they cover a limited range of topics. The second point is significantly different from documents on the Web in general.

The type of search system that we propose in this book can suggest ways of refining or relaxing the query to assist a user in the search process. In order to suggest sensible query modifications we would need to know what the documents are about. Explicit knowledge about the document collection encoded in some electronic form is what we need.

However, typically such knowledge is not available.

This book describes how that knowledge can be constructed automatically."

October 2005

THz Research News

 September 2005
 

Julian Togelius won the award for best student paper at the 2005 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation in Edinburgh. The award was presented at the conference banquet, with over 400 delegates in attendance.

Julian Togelius and Simon M. Lucas,
 Evolving Controllers for Simulated Car Racing, Congress on Evolutionary Computation (2005)

August 2005

Robotic Fish at the London Aquarium
 

Professor Huosheng Hu recently announced that his robotic fishes are part of the attractions as the London Aquarium. It has been a very successful exhibition and visitors are amazed by such wonderful fish-like movements.

 Here are some video clips for you to view:
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
BBC News

More information

June 2005

Boost for IT Job Prospects
 The Computing and Information Technology industries are forecast to be major areas of growth in employment over the coming decade.

"IT has been identified by the HEFCE, according to its new report on "strategically important and vulnerable subjects" published this week, as one of the strategic subjects in which a strong knowledge base and a supply of highly skilled workers are of particular national importance.

 Forecasts by e-skills UK, Gartner and Experian suggest that the IT workforce must grow over the coming decade as the IT sector itself expands, and as other sectors seek competitive advantage through investment in technology. Occupations such as IT strategy and planning professionals, software professionals and IT managers, the vast majority of whom require graduate-level subject skills, are expected to need especially high numbers of recruits. In addition, a considerable demand for 'advanced' and 'high' levels of IT user skills is foreseen"

British Computer Society Press Release, June 2005.

The full text of the BCS press release can be seen at: http://www.bcs.org/BCS/News/PressReleases/2005/june/hefce.htm

 Further confirmation of the increasing industrial requirement was given by Bill Gates at the recent Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2005. In an extended interview he expressed concern at the shortage of good computer science graduates: "Microsoft is trying to hire every great college graduate who has basic computer science skills and we think is highly talented. When I sit down and review projects here inside the company, the topic that always comes up is how is the hiring going..."

National Teaching Fellowship Awarded to Maria Fasli

The National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) is part of an national programme to 'raise the status of learning and teaching in Higher Education'. It celebrates excellence in teaching by recognising individuals who are "outstanding as teachers and promoters of learning".

 There are 50 Fellowships awarded each year and three categories: experienced staff who have been teaching for more than six years, rising stars who are relatively new to teaching, and for learning support staff. Each award is worth £50,000 to the individual, to be used for the benefit of learning and teaching in Higher Education.

 Maria was the University's nomination - so this is an honour to be celebrated at the level of the institution. This is the first NTFS award the University has received.

 More information on the scheme is here http://www.ntfs.ac.uk/

 Huge congratulations to Maria - this has required a lot of work and dedication.

More information

March 2005

In order to further the aim of promoting the innovation of Information and Communication Technology at universities in East Anglia, the British Computer Society (East Anglia Branch) awarded four prizes across the region in 2003-04. The prizes were awarded to the best second year Computer Science students on the basis of academic achievement.
 Matthew Hunt, now in his final year, is pictured receiving his prize - a cheque for £125 plus a BCS student annual membership voucher - from Ms Kuldeep Kaur, BCS Market Development Manager, and Professor Martin Henson, Head of Department.

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