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  • Research School Irregular

    Published: Monday, 13 May 2019

    A newsletter for PGR

    Research School Irregular - Contents

    [ top ]Research School Irregular

    Last 5 Days of PRES

    Unless the University extends it, the data collection phase of the Postgraduate Research Survey ends on Friday, May 17th.

    If you haven't heard about this, it's not for lack of our trying!

    We're closing in on a 90% response rate!

    We're now in the final days of the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (the PRES). The PRES is a sector wide survey conduct at Manchester every other year. It is our only aggregative view of what things are like for our PGR students. The school uses PRES data to try to make systematic changes for your collective benefit. If your voice isn’t included then we might miss something that’s important to you!

    A few fun PRES facts:

    1. It’s completely anonymous. No personal data is associated with your answers. When you hit “submit” all we learn about you is that you completed the PRES.
    2. It’s completely voluntary. There is no requirement for you to do it and no penalty if you don’t. If you want to stop being nagged by Bijan, just send him a not saying you’re opting out. No reason needed. We’ll purge all the non-responder lists from our computers right after the PRES closes.
      • Really, it’s voluntary. We want your responses and will nag, but there is no harm and no foul if you choose not to do or just flake out.
    3. The university will donate £1 to student mental health charities for each completed PRES.
    4. Not everyone is eligible for this round of PRES!
    5. Simon will donate a very fancy pants coffee machine to the PGR common area if we hit 90% in our response rate.

    How fancy pants? It’s password protected!

    At the moment, our response rate is 78.4%, up from 53.4% in the 2017 PRES. We're second best in the University (after Maths at 81.0%! <-- WE CAN BEAT MATHS!!!!). We're well ahead of the faculty (39.4%) and university (38.5%). We're the only school whose week 6 rate is better than their 2017 final rate!

    Well done! Thanks to you all for participating.

    The PRES is not the only feedback mechanisms, of course! We welcome suggestions, feedback, and identification of issues.

    gravatar Bijan Parsia

    [ top ]Notes from the Advisors

    PGR Symposium Final Words

    Thank you to everybody who took part in the PGR Symposium. We had around 50 research talks and 70 reserach posters, showcasing more than half of the PhD projects happening in the School. The quality of posters and talks was high, well done everybody. Special thanks also go to all of those who attended the talks and poster session and supported their fellow students.

    As a reminder to those who mised the awards session, we presented the following awards:

    The Steve Furber Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in Computer Science was awarded to Henry Reeve for his thesis titled “Learning in high dimensions with asymmetric costs”. Henry also gave a great summary of his work at the Symposium.

    For the Carole Goble Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Paper in Computer Science we awarded two runner-up prizes to Damian Arellanes with for “Analysis and Classification of Service Interactions for the Scalability of the Internet of Things” and Anuj Vaishnav for “Live Migration for OpenCL FPGA Accelerators”. The medal was awarded to Alaa Alahmadi for “Evaluating the Impact of Pseudo-Colour and Coordinate System on the Detection of Medication-induced ECG Changes”.

    During the poster session a selection of staff and industrial experts reviewed the posters to pick the one they thought communicated an interesting idea most clearly. I do appreciate that we had a lot of posters this year and I apologise if footfall near your poster was low, something we will fix next year. The winner of the outstanding poster prize was Ahmed Alghamdi with his poster “Detection of Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) via Collaborative Intrusion Detection Systems (CIDS) and Machine Learning” and a runner-up prize was awarded to Ebtisam Alharbi for her poster “Understanding the Implications of Implementing FAIR Data in Life Sciences”. An honorable mention was given to Gavin Abercrombie for the most artisticly impresive poster. Winning posters will be displayed somewhere prominent.

    Finally, during the Symposium you were asked to vote on the talk you found the most engaging. We can now announce that the winner of this prize (with the most votes and the highest score) is Crystal Wu with her talk "Adaptation of Instantaneous Time Mirror from Water Waves to Electromagnetic Waves”. Congratulations Crystal.

    gravatar Giles Reger

    gravatar Bijan Parsia
Generated: Friday, 29 March 2024 10:53:40
Last change: Monday, 13 May 2019 10:51:56