i++ School Newsletter

Week commencing 16 February 2009

Previous Newsletters

Third Annual BCS East Anglian PhD Competition

The Third Annual British Computer Society (BCS) East Anglian PhD Competition took place on the 19 February and was hosted by the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex. The competition is organised by the local BCS branch and involves a presentation from one PhD computer science student from each of the leading three universities in the region (Essex, UEA, Cambridge). Competitors are usually in their second or third year of study and they must present a 30 minute talk about their research suitable for a general computer science audience.  An independent panel awards a prize of £200 to the best presentation. Last year the competition was at UEA, the year before at Cambridge.

This year's participants were (from left to right):

Mr Matthew Benedict Stocks (UEA), title: Haptic Rendering Techniques for the study of Protein Structure and Dynamics

Mr Oliver Woodman (Cambridge University), title: Pedestrian Localisation for Indoor Environments

Mr Navin Gupta Cota (Essex), title: Brain Biometrics-The next generation High Security Technology

The judges commented that the standard of presentations this year was particularly high and it made the job of judging extremely hard. The audience were also given the opportunity to express their views and these were taken into account by the judges.

The winner of the Third BCS Annual PhD competition was Mr Oliver Benedict Woodman from the University of Cambridge who was congratulated by Mr Tony Hainsworth, Chairman of the East Anglian BCS Branch (left).

CSEE Student Presenting at SET for Britain

Christopher Stolz has been selected to present a poster at the SET for Britain 2009 event  at the House of Commons on 9 March. Christopher’s poster will be on the topic “Chaotic lasers for secure communication”. His research is supported by an EPSRC grant under the supervision of Mike Adams, Rodney Loudon and Nick Zakhleniuk.

PhD Awards

Aimin Zhou

Aimin Zhou passed his viva with minor corrections on Friday 13 February.  The External Examiner was Professor David Corne of Heriot-Watt University and the Internal was Dr Simon Lucas.
 
Aimin’s PhD work, sponsored by the Honda Research Institute of Europe, was on estimation of distribution algorithms for continuous multi-objective optimization. During his doctoral studies he published more than ten papers including one in IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, the flagship journal in his research area. He was co-supervised by Dr Qingfu Zhang and Professor Edward Tsang.
 
Aimin has been offered a lectureship at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China.

Besnik Kajtazi

Besnik Kajtazi has also passed his PhD. The oral examination was a few weeks ago – and he has been attending to minor corrections in the meantime; all now completed successfully.

The thesis title is “Specification Refinement and Program Development in nuZ” and explores a wide-spectrum specification logic I developed in 2004. His internal examiner was Prof Ray Turner and his external Prof Steve Reeves of the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

Besnik co-published several papers along the way, including a definitive account of nuZ in the “Formal Aspects of Computing Journal”.

He is now working for Praxis, one of the few companies that use formal methods aggressively. They can demonstrate massive productivity benefits of their approach, and quality standards (essentially bug-free software) that are second to none. Praxis is currently involved in a massive safety-critical project concerning air-traffic control. Unfortunately they use Z rather than nuZ.

Congratulations to Besnik, who came to us from Kosova as an undergraduate several years ago.

Computer Society News

25 February 2009, 1.00 -2.00pm, Room 4N.2.3

Speaker: Dr James Coomer (Lead HPC Architect, Sun Microsystems UK)

High Performance Computing (HPC) and Lustre

Abstract - Sun manufactures, designs and implements High Performance Computing systems that scale up to the largest systems in the world using standardised technologies and open-source software. This talk shows Sun's approach and concentrates on one critical component - the parallel file system: Lustre. A parallel file system that scales must implement novel methods for coping with massive IO rates, vast numbers of clients and servers as well as handling the range of failures that occur regularly in very large hardware deployments. This talk overviews Sun's approach and looks at some of the  methods implemented in the file system to cope with massive scale.

Please register for the event here.

Refreshments and freebies are provided.

Contact Jenya Kovalchuk yvkova@essex.ac.uk for further details.

Forthcoming Seminars

27 February 2009, 3.00 - 4.00pm, Room 1N1.4.1

Speaker: Dr. Alan McGuire, BT (hosted by Dr David Hunter)

Managing Uncertainty in Networks

Abstract – We live in an uncertain world. One of the few things we do know is that when we make a forecast of what will happen it will inevitably be wrong. This talk considers uncertainty as part of the network planning process where traffic volumes, traffic mixes and distribution all impact the design of networks. We look at some of the tools and techniques that could be employed to manage uncertainty and in doing so revisit some of the ideas of the physicists Boltzmann and Newton.

13 March 2009, 3.00 - 4.00pm, Room 1N1.4.1

Speaker: Dr. Martin Kuball, Bristol University (hosted by Professor Naci Balkan)

Temperature, Stress and Hot Phonons in GaN Electronics and its Interfaces

Abstract - GaN power electronics has great potential for future radar and communication applications. Huge advances in their performance have made this new material system superior to GaAs and Si in particular in terms of power performance. However, there are still large reliability challenges which need to be addressed, often related to high device temperature and large stresses in the devices. Those are very challenging to assess as these are present only in sub-micron device regions typically located near the gate of an HEMT. I report on our work of the development of Raman thermography, to assess temperature, stress as well as hot phonon effects in AlGaN/GaN but also GaAs pHEMTs to address reliability challenges in power electronics. The techniques developed enable temperature and stress measurement in devices with submicron spatial and nanosecond time resolution. Effects of thermal cross-talk, but also heat transfer across interfaces in the devices will be discussed, together with hot-phonon effects.