i++ Departmental Newsletter

Week commencing Monday, 8th October 2007

Previous Newsletters

Student News

William Allen and George Ward, undergraduates reading Computer Science gained invaluable work experience at Active Web Solutions this summer. AWS is a multi-award winning company that has the coveted IT award from the British Computing Society for its innovative satellite communication system that is saving lives amongst people braving the unforgiving storm conditions at sea.

Working at AWS the students got to put to use the arsenal of skills they’ve learnt at university in a working environment. They learnt many new skills and this has put them in good stead for their final year, where some of the modules are focused on the languages and development practices they’ve acquired during the placement.

Many students gain great technical ability whilst at university, but employers don’t solely want this, and are now currently focusing on softer skills such as communication, team-working and group problem solving. The students took part in many activities that helped them develop these important skills which are overlooked by many students. These included giving presentations and simple white board work, where the ability to express your ideas and knowledge to your peers and managers is crucial. Whilst uncommon, changing deadlines are a fact of life within the industry, the problem being that they only get later, never earlier. A dramatic change from the sheltered experience at university, but it’s a fact that all students will have to deal with once they leave university.

Both students were very positive about the summer placement and would definitely recommend it to any student wishing to further their education and employability. “AWS has an excellent work ethic and culture. It has really allowed me to develop myself further than I potentially would at university. I now feel a lot more confident and excited about working within the computing industry” George commented.

Will added: “Before working at AWS my knowledge of the computer industry was very limited but after working at AWS, I have gained enough skills and confidence to hopefully excel myself further in the future. The AWS placement was an extremely worthwhile experience and I would suggest that any future students try for a placement as the experience is irreplaceable.”

Rob Blackwell, R&D Director at AWS, said “The AWS summer placements were a great success. We really enjoyed working with George and Will over the summer. They made a positive contribution to a number of our customer projects and it was good to see their enthusiasm and creative thinking.”

Papers Accepted

Shirin Ghanbari, John C Woods, Hamid R Rabiee and Simon M Lucas, 'Wavelet Domain Binary Partition Trees for Semantic Object Extraction' Electronic letters to appear.

Riccardo Poli, Department of Computing and Electronic Systems, University of Essex, UK, William B. Langdon, Departments of Biological and Mathematical Sciences, University of Essex, UK, Nicholas F. McPhee, Division of Science and Mathematics, University of Minnesota, Morris, USA, John R. Koza, Stanford University, Stanford, California, Genetic Programming: An Introductory Tutorial and a Survey of Techniques and Applications CES-475.

Staff News

Congratulations to Dr. Klaus McDonald-Maier, Dr S Karl Heeks, Andrew Hopkins and Richard Scottow - UltraSoC has been announced as one of the ten finalists for Running the Gauntlet.

Francisco Sepulveda, leader of the Brain-Computer Interfaces group, will be giving an invited talk at the Dana Centre in London on 24th October as part of the evening on 'The Computational Brain'. The title of his talk is "Reading the brain: Are we there yet?".

All are welcome to attend. Visit the link to book a place:

Francisco Sepulveda was a keynote speakers at the IET Irish Signals and Systems Conference last month. The title of his talk was "Brain-computer interfaces: A difficult dawn".

Seminars

October 19th: Prof. Roberto Battiti, University di Trento (Italy)
Title – Reactive Search

Full list see http://www.essex.ac.uk/csee/research/seminars/seminars.aspx

Computing and Electronic Systems Seminars - they are all open to the public and will all take place in room 1N1.4.1 on Fridays from 3.00-4.00pm.

Videos

The Colchester Evening Gazette video of our opening event is available here.