Your weekly round-up of undergraduate life in The University of Manchester Department of Computer Science from Paul Nutter, Director of Undergraduate Studies.

LATEST | UG | Y1 | Y2 | Y3 | Y4 | Courses | Timetables |
2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 all

Week 1 • Monday 25 September 2023 • #23.02

Paul pic

Good morning UG! It’s Monday 25th September 2023, and it’s the first week of teaching this academic year. It was good to see so many around the campus last week, and to see such a great turnout at the welcome talks. If you have just joined us, then I hope you have settled into life in Manchester and have managed to get out and explore the campus and all the sights that Manchester has to offer. I’m sure it will soon feel like home.

Please make sure you are familiar with your teaching timetable and, more importantly, where teaching activities are scheduled, as these can take place at different locations across the campus. Check out the University’s interactive map if you are not sure where buildings are located. Those who are familiar with Monday Mail will notice that I’ve started to include news items about research that is happening in the department, including publications, research awards etc., this is because I’d like you to know what’s going on with regards to research, and also to highlight the successes of current and past UG students when it comes to engaging in research.

Today there’s a welcome return of Gareth’s puzzle corner, with your weekly mix of brain teasers for you to attempt in your spare time.

I hope this week goes well, on with today’s news …

Paul
Undergraduate Programme Director

SUPPORT SERVICE SPOTLIGHT:

The Disability Advisory and Support Service (DASS) is a specialist service supporting students with any condition that has a significant, adverse and long term effect on normal day to day activities. DASS helps students with a range of conditions which includes but is not limited to dyslexia and other learning difficulties, autism spectrum condition, mental health difficulties such as anxiety and depression, mobility and sensory impairments, unseen disabilities like epilepsy, HIV, AIDS, chronic fatigue, IBS and Crohn's. DASS can help students access exams, study and specialist support but only if you register with them. You can make an appointment with DASS at any time. Make an appointment and register. For help and advice you can always talk to the School wellbeing team. Late registration may impact your ability to receive support during the January exam period.

THE STUDENT SUPPORT HUB.

The Student Support Hub is here to provide you with help and guidance, whether you need career advice, wellbeing support or help with course information, the team will be able to point you in the right direction. The Student Support Hub can be found in Room 1A.042, first floor, core 2, Engineering Building A, and is open from 9.00am to 5.00 pm, Monday to Friday (closed Wednesday 9am to 10am). Outside of non-teaching time, it is open 10am to 4pm, Monday to Friday. You can contact the Student Hub via email: soe.hub@manchester.ac.uk, or by telephone +44 161 529 3691, Monday to Friday, 9am-5pm, excluding University closure periods. The Student Support Hub can provide support in a number of ways:

Wellbeing or issues affecting your studies, including mitigating circumstances, interruptions or attendance (Telephone option 1).
Queries relating to course unit selection, programme changes, placements or timetables (Telephone option 2).
Assessment queries (Telephone option 3).
Appeals queries (Telephone option 4).
For document requests, to speak to someone on the Student Support Hub, or for any other query then use option 6 by telephone.

As the phone system is new, then please be patient whilst the teams adapt to the new system.

WELFARE WEEKLY - FIND YOUR TRIBE.

This from Ben Herbert, Student Support and Wellbeing: Over the next few weeks, I will share with you some top tips for surviving University from my seven years working in Student Support. Hopefully I can share some ideas and insight to help you stay healthy, motivated, engaged with your studies, and out of my office.

A very common conversation I have with new students in the first week or two of the year is about them struggling to settle in. The chances that you have been put into halls with your future BFFs is probably low. But don’t be disheartened. Feeling down, overwhelmed, lonely and homesick are totally normal. It’s a huge change. My advice is to take steps to find people you can connect with now, before your workload starts to build.

Your first weeks of university may lead you to feel the only way to socialise is to go out drinking and if you don't do that you will miss out. But there is so much more! Join a society through the Student's Union, sign up to a class, take up a sport or start a hobby. Joining a society, sports team or other activity allows you to get to know the people with the same interests, values, culture, or background as you. Building a network of friends is especially if you are a long way from home. This will have a direct impact on your wellbeing and that in turn will have a direct effect on your university work. Research has shown that students who participate in extracurricular activities are more motivated and tend to do better in their course. If you haven’t done so already, this week take steps to join at least one society or club. Get out there and find your tribe! Check out the SU’s Tips here. Find more ideas for helping you find your tribe here.

YEAR TUTOR OPEN HOURS.

In the Department we have year tutors who are responsible for looking after the different cohorts in each year group. They are here to provide you with help and support if you need it, so feel free to contact your year tutor by email. They also run a weekly open hour where you can pop in for a chat during the teaching period:

Year 1 (not CM): Gareth Henshall. Open hour: Thursday 14:00 - 15:00, Kilburn 2.82
Year 2 (not CM): Ahmed Saeed. Open hour: Tuesdays 11:00 - 12:00, Kilburn 2.80
Year 3/4 (not CM): Tim Morris. Open hour: Tuesday 11:00 - 12:00, Kilburn 2.107
CM (all years): Andrea Schalk. Open hour: Tuesday 11:00 - 12:00, 2.103
UG Director: Paul Nutter. Open hour: Tuesday 10:00 - 11:00, IT119.

PASS1.

The PASS1 team (Max Beck-Jones (Y3, CS4), Luke Sanderson (Y3, CS), Sarah Saad (Y3, AI4), Nicolo Micheletti (Y3, CS), and Rosie Halsall (Y3, CS4)) write: Congratulations on surviving welcome week! We had a wonderful turnout for our PASS introduction lecture and scavenger hunt with 61 people finishing using the form. Thanks to everyone who took part and uploaded pictures! Should anyone want a PDF copy of the scavenger hunt for future reference, please email Max. While there are no PASS1 sessions for 1st years scheduled this week, PASS leaders must attend the Meet Your Team session this Wednesday at 13:00; details are in the emails sent to you by Tom Carroll. Attendance in this session is mandatory without a proper excuse. Additionally, an email has been sent with a form for you to request specific co-leaders. It may not be possible to honour every request, but we will try our best.

PASS2.

The PASS2 team (See Jia Tong (Y3, CS), Salma Aljama (Y3, AI) and Divya Radhakrishnan Nair (Y3, CS)) write: Our next session will look at choosing the right modules, so the aim of this session is to guide you through the choices available. We do not have a time and place as yet, but we will let you know when this is confirmed

GOOGLE DEVELOPER STUDENT CLUBS.

This from the GDSC team: Thanks to everyone who joined us at the societies' fair and communities’ fair last week. We are absolutely thrilled by the overwhelming response! We've got a lineup of captivating workshops and social events for the year ahead. Stay tuned through our social media channels.

RESEARCH SUCCESS.

Well done to a past UG student, John Alistair Kressel, who graduated in 2022, and is currently completing an MPhil with a view to starting a PhD under the supervision of Pierre Olivier. John had his first paper accepted for presentation at the Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems in 2023: John Alistair Kressel, Hugo Lefeuvre, and Pierre Olivier, “Software Compartmentalization Trade-Offs with Hardware Capabilities”, 12th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS), 2023. In this paper, we investigate the security, performance, engineering effort, and scalability trade-offs of hardware extensions enabling software compartmentalisation on the ARM Morello architecture. Well done Alistair!

PUBLICATION SUCCESS.

Vlad-Radu Schiller (graduated in 2023) has had a paper accepted for a prestigious systems software conference in 2024 based on his 3rd year project under the supervision of Pierre Olivier: Hugo Lefeuvre, Gaulthier Gain, Vlad Bădoiu, Daniel Dinca, Vlad-Radu Schiller, Costin Raiciu, Felipe Huici, and Pierre Olivier, “Loupe: Driving the Development of OS Compatibility Layers”, 29th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2024. In this paper, we propose a novel method for guiding the development of compatibility layers allowing a custom/research operating system to run applications compiled for a commodity operating system such as Linux. Well done Vlad!

PUBLICATION SUCCESS.

Congratulations to Yiannis Charalambous (graduated in 2023) who has had a paper submitted to a major ACM Journal on Software Engineering and Methodology based on a tool he developed as part of his coursework for the MSC course unit on Software Security, taught by Lucas Corderio and Youcheng Sun. The work focuses on software security in the era of large language models. After the course unit finished, Yiannis continued to develop his tool while completing a summer internship with the Systems and Software Security (S3) group in the Department. He is now applying for a PhD at the University. Excellent work Yiannis!

REGISTRATION.

Remember that you need to register with the University before the 30th September 2023 (this Saturday) and collect your student card.You can find more information on the University “Become a Student” webpage. Any fee queries should be submitted using the Student Services Enquiry Form.

GITLAB MAINTENANCE.

Chris Page writes: On Wednesday 27th September the Department of Computer Science GitLab system will be taken offline to perform essential maintenance and upgrades. Work on the system will start at 14:00 and may take until 17:00, although we will attempt to minimise the time that GitLab is unavailable. A notice banner is currently shown on GitLab pages as a reminder for this work, and it will be removed when the work on the server is completed.

COMPUTERS IN KILBURN.

Just a reminder that the computers in the Kilburn clusters/laboratories need to be left switched on after use so that any updates can be applied overnight. Please remember to just log out, and not shut down a computer, when you have used it. Don’t worry, the machines do go into standby mode to save the planet (to some degree!).

FIRST YEAR BOOT-UP LABS.

Ahmed Saeed writes: If you are a 1st year student and you haven’t completed the boot-up labs, then we will be running a catchup session on Wednesday 14:00 - 16:00 in 1.8/1.10. Please make sure you complete the activity as it exposes you to Linux which is the operating system you will be using for the majority of your time in the Department. It is vital that you complete lab 3, as this introduces you to Git and helps you to set up Git in your home file store, which you will need for several course units this year (and future years).

COMP10120 WELCOME WEEK WORKSHOPS.

Last week, we ran the Welcome Week Workshops for 1st year students where they had to solve some challenging task (you may remember this from your first year): each team built a gantry to carry a cow! This year’s students impressed the COMP10120 team with their innovative and clever designs - and with their good planning and budgeting skills! They showed great team spirit and amazing engagement throughout. We are looking forward to see more from this new cohort!

COURSE UNIT SELECTION.

You have until 15:30 Friday 6th October 2023 to finalise your Semester 1 course unit choices. After that deadline your course selections freeze, and changes for Semester 1 will no longer be possible. Please ensure you are also enrolled on to your Semester 2 choices by this date (120 credits in total). Course unit selection will reopen in February for you to make changes to your Semester 2 course unit choices. Please note: 1st years have no choice in the 1st semester. If you are a 4th Year MEng student then deadline has passed to select your course units.

PERSONAL TIMETABLES.

Your personal timetable should now be updated. However, please keep an eye on it as activities could change over the next week as the timetable is finalised. You can view your timetable on my.manchester.

UPDATE ON HOME DIRECTORIES FOR NEW STUDENTS.

As you may be aware, during Welcome Week we encountered some serious login issues for new students. Around midday on Friday last week, IT Services took the step of recreating all new student home directories and this has fixed the login issues. However, if you are a new student and you created or changed any files in your home directory during Welcome Week, those will no longer be present in your recreated home directory. Backups were taken before the new home directories were created, so if you need to recover a file, please send an email to support@cs.manchester.ac.uk stating your university username and the file(s) you would like to be recovered from the backup, and we will pass this information on to IT Services to restore your requested files.

EXTENSION REQUESTS.

If you are an existing student, you may be aware that the Department used to have late flag request system where you could request the removal of a late flag for a submitted piece of work in cases where issues that prevented you from submitting on time. This facility is no longer available due to a change in the mitigating circumstances regulations. Instead, you may request a short extension of a maximum of up to one week prior to the deadline if you are facing circumstances or issues that have or are impacting your ability to submit coursework on time. You should apply for this no-later than the deadline. You can find more information on the Department Mitigating Circumstances page. Any request made after the deadline will need to be made through the mitigating circumstances process, where evidence will be required to support your claim.

UNICS ICE-BREAKER EVENTS.

Join us for our first socials of the year this week! We will be hosting a fun evening of games, networking and free pizza on Wednesday 27th of September from 6pm onwards at Kilburn. Come along as well on Friday 29th September (from 7pm onwards) for a Pub Crawl, starting at Wetherspoons (Ford Maddox) - 7pm, Turing Tap - 8pm, 532(SU) - 9pm and Hatch - 10pm. Take this chance to meet other members of the society, let loose and just have fun! Don't forget to either bring a White T-shirt or buy one for £3 on our SU page! Your friends will turn it into a masterpiece using markers provided by us, so don't bring your favourite one!

GREATUNIHACK 2023.

Get ready for the biggest Hackathon of the year, the GreatUniHack! We are pleased to announce that this years’ Hackathon will take place in person at the MMU Business School, on the 28th and 29th of October. It is a fantastic opportunity to socialise and collaborate with like-minded students. There will be a chance to win prizes, get some experience and enjoy free food over a weekend of intense coding and other activities. Register your interest. You can also sign up to be a volunteer at the GreatUniHack.

UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING VOLUNTEERS OPPORTUNITY.

Andrea Schalk writes: Are you interested in supporting other students' learning? If you are a student in Years 3 or 4, we may have an opportunity for you to do so. After successful pilot schemes, we are inviting students to let us know if they would like to act as an Undergraduate Teaching Volunteer on a Year 1 or Year 2 course unit. We are not yet able to confirm for which units this opportunity exists, so please list all units you are potentially interested in when filling in the form by 08:00 am, Monday 2nd October. You'll help for a maximum of 2-3 hours per week on average, so you can only act on one course unit. You will be in a practical session such as labs or examples classes together with the course unit staff and/or graduate teaching assistants, so you don't have to worry about not being able to answer all questions. We won't ask you to be involved in marking (nor do we want you to tell students how exactly how to carry out assignments), but we do want you to help students understand anything that is puzzling them using your experience and knowledge of the material. We have found that students are typically closer to our learners, and can be really good at finding an explanation that works for somebody new to an area. Previous volunteers have found this activity satisfying, and it also looks good on your CV. We are also looking into providing training for those interested in becoming an Associate Fellow of Advance HE (see the Advance-HE website for details), the UK's professional membership scheme promoting excellence in higher education. If you have further specific questions, please email me.

NOMINATE YOURSELF TO BE A STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE.

This from Tom Carroll, Chair of the UG Student-Staff Liaison Committee (SSLC): Are you interested in making a change, developing your programme and working with staff to close the feedback loop? Sign up or to be a Course Representative today! If you are already a rep and want to continue the role, please also use the sign-up form. Reps are student leaders who gather feedback & work with staff to make positive change in their programme. Within the Department, Student reps have helped to bring about several positive changes, such as:

The Turing Lounge with Table Tennis
Kilburn LF with the Kitchen, Bean Bags and Study Space
New Lab Space
New furniture on the Lower First floor

The role counts towards the STELLIFY award “step up and lead” and you’ll gain great experience through attending meetings, gathering feedback from your course mates & working on projects to enact change. Interested? To sign up, head to this form and input your details by Thursday 28 September, 12 noon. After this we’ll get back in touch with the next steps! Please contact me if you have any questions.

KILBURN BUILDING OPENING HOURS.

The normal opening hours of the Kilburn building are 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday. The building is closed at all other times, including weekends, bank holidays and over any university closure periods. The John Rylands Main Library and the Alan Gilbert Learning Commons are open outside of these times.

DEPARTMENT RESEARCH FUNDING SUCCESS.

Congratulations to John Goodacre, Lucas Cordeiro and Bernardo Magri who have received research funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for their research project SECCOM: Securing Composable Hardware Platforms, a collaborative effort between the Advanced Processor Technology Research Group and the Systems and Software Security Research Group. SECCOM is dedicated to addressing critical security challenges when constructing hardware platforms through composable hardware systems. Our primary objective is to explore and mitigate security concerns within the diverse landscape of composable hardware platforms. Specifically, SECCOM aims to conceptualise and evaluate various design options to determine if key security properties and threat models can be extracted. This exploration will enable us to construct a robust security model to validate composable hardware platform security. Furthermore, recognizing the dynamic nature of composed hardware, our research will explore the feasibility of implementing dynamic verification mechanisms. These mechanisms will empower composed hardware to assert security policies in real time. You can find more information about the project on the EPSRC website.

STRIKE ACTION.

There will be strike action by members of the University and College Union (UCU) this week that may impact some of the teaching taking place.

Welcome to Gareth’s Puzzle Corner, this is your weekly fix of brain teasers and logic puzzles. You are given four different puzzles to tackle: one is an easier Sudoku, the second is a more challenging Sudoku, the third is a different form of logic puzzle and finally we have a chess puzzle for you. I hope you enjoy the puzzles and if you have any puzzles you wish to feature or ideas for Puzzle Corner then please get in touch.

Easier Sudoku - Classic Sudoku by sudoku.com

Normal sudoku rules apply.

Challenging Sudoku - Pi V Square Snake by Tulrak

Normal sudoku rules apply. The cage shows its sum. A clue outside the grid shows the sum of the indicated diagonals. Digits joined by V must sum to 5. All possible V clues are given. Draw a 25-cell-long 1-cell wide ‘snake’ made of orthogonally connected cells, that does not touch itself, not even diagonally. The snake contains the first 25 digits of pi in the correct order going from snake's head to tail, ignoring the decimal point.

Pencil Puzzle - Nonogram by Yilmaz Ekici

Tint the gray boxes of the chart black or white. The black fields form a field wide stripes, the number, order and length of which is defined by the number sequences at the top and left edge. Each number represents the length of a strip of black squares in the corresponding row or column. Two strips are separated from each other by at least one white field.

Chess Puzzle - Stanley Vs. Zerega

Drag and drop the White pieces to win the match.

Answers to the Puzzles

The answers to this week’s puzzles will be available in next week’s Monday Mail!

Welcome Week • Monday 18 September 2023 • #23.01

Paul pic

Good morning UG! It’s Monday 18th September 2023 and the start of a new academic year. This week is Welcome Week. If you are a new student joining us then welcome to the Department of Computer Science, my name is Paul Nutter and I’m the Undergraduate Programme Director, which basically means I’m responsible for the day-to-day running of the undergraduate degree programmes in the Department. If you are a returning student, then welcome back! I hope you had a good summer and, hopefully, found some time to relax and recharge the batteries ready for another exciting academic year. Monday Mail is our weekly undergraduate newsletter, which is sent to all undergraduate students every Monday morning (hence the name) during the teaching and exam periods. The goal of Monday Mail is to keep you up-to-date with what’s happening in the Department, as well as publicising all the great things you are involved with, for example University societies (such as UniCS), PASS, competitions and hackathons, whatever it may be. It would be great for you to share your successes with the rest of the UG cohort, so if you have anything you’d like to share via Monday Mail, then please just get in touch. We have a great community in the Kilburn Building, in particular the lower first floor, so please think of it as your home during your time in the Department. If you are a 1st year student, then don’t forget to attend the “Meet Your Tutor” lunch on Wednesday (see your timetable) where you will get to meet your personal tutor, as well as the other members of your tutorial group who you will be working closely with over the year. There’s also pizza for you to enjoy!

Have a great week, I'll hopefully see you around. On with today’s news …

Paul
Undergraduate Programme Director

THE STUDENT SUPPORT HUB.

Wellbeing or issues affecting your studies, including mitigating circumstances, interruptions or attendance (Telephone option 1).
Queries relating to course unit selection, programme changes, placements or timetables (Telephone option 2).
Assessment queries (Telephone option 3).
Appeals queries (Telephone option 4).
For document requests, to speak to someone on the Student Support Hub, or for any other query then use option 6 by telephone.

As the phone system is new, then please be patient whilst the teams adapt to the new system.

WELFARE WEEKLY.

This from Ben Herbert, Student Support and Wellbeing: Welcome (back) to the University of Manchester. I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce the Student Support Wellbeing team at the School of Engineering. You can find us every weekday from 9am (10am on Wednesdays) to 5pm in the Student Support Hub on the first floor of Engineering Building A or by emailing us on soe.wellbeing@manchester.ac.uk. The student support webpage provides links to detailed help and support in the University. The team members for Computer Science support are Ben, Maria and Aisling, but you can speak to any member of the team, or contact us through the email address above. The Support and Wellbeing team can assist you with any queries or concerns you may have about your wellbeing, personal or study struggles. We can answer any questions you have relating to mitigation of assessments and point you in the right direction for getting help from DASS or the Counselling Service etc. The Student Support Hub acts as your one stop shop to access information and support for personal as well as academic and (almost) all university related issues, so do stop by. For academic queries we also recommend speaking to your academic tutor or year tutor. Our hope is that you won't need to use the support and wellbeing team. For the majority, everything will go smoothly for you and you will leave with a degree you are happy with. But don't forget we are here if you need us. In future instalments of Welfare Weekly I hope to cover topics that will help you keep your mind and body healthy and your studies on track. Next week, top tips on surviving semester one! Before I go, let me link you to some useful podcasts about settling into University life, hosted by University of Manchester students, for you to listen to on your down time.

Students Maansi, Khadijat and our host Georgia, discuss the things you need to think about before coming to university. How easy is it to make friends? What is the step-up like? What's it like coming from abroad?
Freshers week - arguably the most anticipated week of university life. In this episode, Jodie and Jacob bust some myths about what can be an exciting yet daunting week. They chat about clubbing, flat parties, freshers fairs and the first few days of university.

STUDENT SUPPORT HUB CONTACT EMAILS.

If you need to contact a member of the Teaching, Learning and Student Experience teams in the School then a range of emails are available. Please use the email suitable for your enquiry:

soe.hub@manchester.ac.uk: general queries; advice on University policies and services.
soe.programmes@manchester.ac.uk: student record queries; registration advice and guidance; timetable queries/clashes; ATAS/Visa advice; extension to study period; project topics, allocation and supervisors; change of programme; return to study; professional accreditation
soe.assessment@manchester.ac.uk: assessment submission queries (including DASS adjustments)
soe.studentexperience@manchester.ac.uk: student societies support; SSLC/student rep support; employability; graduation; PASS; academic advising; communications; summer internship programme; surveys (course unit and NSS).
soe.wellbeing@manchester.ac.uk: mitigating circumstances; interruptions; disability coordinator support; general wellbeing support (appointments and helping you access the support you need).
soe.attendance@manchester.ac.uk: attendance and engagement monitoring.
soe.courseunits@manchester.ac.uk: course unit selection.
soe.placements@manchester.ac.uk: placement support and coordination.
soe.appealsandconduct@manchester.ac.uk: academic appeals; malpractice and student complaints.

If you are unsure which email to use then use soe.hub@manchester.ac.uk for general queries.

YEAR TUTOR OPEN HOURS.

In the Department we have year tutors who are responsible for looking after the different cohorts in each year. They are here to provide you with help and support if you need it, so feel free to contact your year tutor by email. They also run a weekly open hour where you can pop in for a chat starting from Week 1 of teaching (next week):

Year 1 (not CM): Gareth Henshall. Open hour: Thursday 14:00 - 15:00, Kilburn 2.82
Year 2 (not CM): Ahmed Saeed. Open hour: Tuesdays 11:00 - 12:00, Kilburn 2.80
Year 3/4 (not CM): Tim Morris. Open hour: Tuesday 11:00 - 12:00, Kilburn 2.107
CM (all years): Andrea Schalk. Open hour: Tuesday 11:00 - 12:00, 2.103
UG Director: Paul Nutter. Open hour: Tuesday 11:00 - 12:00, IT119.

PASS1.

The PASS1 team (Max Beck-Jones (Y3, CS4), Luke Sanderson (Y3, CS), Sarah Saad (Y3, AI4), Nicolo Micheletti (Y3, CS), and Rosie Halsall (Y3, CS4)) write: Hello and welcome to everyone joining us this year! We are your PASS1 coordination team. We all hope you are settling in Manchester well and are excited to begin your studies. PASS stands for Peer Assisted Study Sessions and provides a relaxed, informal environment for you to receive support with your studies. There is a PASS Introduction Lecture for you to attend this Wednesday at 15:00 in Roscoe Lecture Theatre A. In this session we will briefly introduce ourselves and the PASS scheme, giving you an idea of what to expect during your weekly sessions.

PASS2.

The PASS2 team (See Jia Tong (Y3, CS), Salma Aljama (Y3, AI) and Divya Radhakrishnan Nair (Y3, CS)) write: Welcome back! We hope you had a refreshing summer vacation and are recharged for the exciting year ahead. As we dive into this new academic year, we're thrilled to introduce you to PASS2 - an extension of our Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) scheme. We've created a short Google form with just two questions. So, please take a few minutes to fill in the form and let us know your thoughts. Let's make this year memorable, productive, and full of growth. Here's to new beginnings with PASS2!

IMECHE FORMULA STUDENT UK 2023 WINNER.

Congratulations to Mike Fahey (Y2, CS) who won the overall Craig Dawson Most Valued Team Member Award at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) Formula Student Competition 2023 at Silverstone in July. The award is presented to a student participant, nominated by their fellow teammates, who has gone above and beyond to make their car a reality. Dr Theo Heath (Lecturer, EEE), who organised the University entry to the competition, says “Mike is a competent and diligent member of the team who has been willing to learn and support areas outside of his technical expertise. We would not have made it to the competition without him.” Congratulations Mike, it’s clear your teammates very much valued your contribution to the development of their car!

UNICS NEWS.

UniCS is the Computer Science Society at the University of Manchester. We are a big community with a passion for technology and creating innovative solutions for everyone. Join us for an exciting lineup of events this academic year! Visit us at the Societies’ Fair on 21st September from 10 am - 4 pm at Manchester Academy to learn about our teams and how to get involved. Plus, an Arcade Machine awaits, with fantastic prizes up for grabs! Be sure not to miss out on our first event of the year, the Tech Showcase, on the 21st of September from 3 pm - 5 pm. It's an opportunity to witness some amazing projects created by our talented students. For more updates on all our upcoming events, follow us on Instagram @unicsmcr, and read on more to find out about our annual hackathon, GreatUniHack! "

GOOGLE SCHOLARSHIP SUCCESS.

Congratulations to Dhruv Sharma (AIwIE, On Placement) who has been awarded a Google Scholarship. The scholarships are awarded annually by Google in two categories: Generation Scholarship, which are designed to help aspiring students pursuing computer science or gaming degrees excel in technology and becomes leaders in the field and is specifically aimed at women, and Google Europe Students with Disabilities Scholarship, which is to assist students with disabilities while they pursue education and promising careers in computer science and related fields across Europe. The scholarship offers a 7000 Euro bursary to the winning students. You can find out more information on the Build Your Future with Google webpage. Dhruv is currently on placement at Visa in Belfast. Congratulations Dhruv on your reward!

PUBLICATION SUCCESS.

Congratulations to Lukas Rimkas (Graduated 2023, CS), Jonas Verbickas (Graduated 2023, CS), Phoebe Pinney (Graduated 2023, CS), Nadine Abdelhalim (Graduated 2023, CS), Ingy Abdelhalim (Graduated 2023, CS), Darius Feher (Graduated 2023, CSwIE) and Faridz Ibrahim (Graduated 2023, CS), who had work from the their student projects, under the supervision of Riza Batista-Navarro, published or presented at conferences last academic year. Having work published/presented is a real success and demonstrates that the projects we can offer can have real impact. The publications are as follows:

Abdelhalim, N., Abdelhalim, I., & Batista-Navarro, R. (2023). Training Models on Oversampled Data and a Novel Multi-class Annotation Scheme for Dementia Detection. In Proceedings of the 5th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop co-located with The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, Canada. In this paper, Nadine and Ingy describe their proposed deep learning-based method and multi-class annotation scheme for detecting dementia based on transcripts of doctor-patient conversations.
Pinney, P.A. & Batista-Navarro, R. (2023). English2BSL: A Rule-Based System for Translating English into British Sign Language. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (LT-EDI 2023) co-located with the 2023 Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2023), Varna, Bulgaria. Phoebe presents her work on developing a learning tool that translates English sentences to British Sign Language (available here).
Feher, D., Ibrahim, F., Cheng, Z., Schlegel, V., Maidment, T., Bagshaw, J., & Batista-Navarro, R. (2023). Few-shot entity linking of food names. Information Processing & Management, 60(5), 103463. This paper presents a new approach - a hybrid of string similarity-based and machine learning-based models - that was proposed by Darius to support the automatic linking/disambiguation of food names, as well as a food knowledge base implemented by Faridz and Zhuyan Cheng.
Rimkus, L., Verbickas, J., & Batista-Navarro, R. (To appear). Reviewer 2 Must Be Stopped: Transformer-based Approaches for Predicting Paper Acceptance. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Information Management and Big Data (SIMBig 2023), Mexico City, Mexico. Lukas and Jonas investigate the extent to which state-of-the-art transformer models can predict whether a conference paper will be accepted or not, and compare them with traditional machine learning-based approaches.

UNICS NEWS.

Introducing the UniCS committee for 2023/24:

Co-chairs: Sarah Saad (Y3, AI4) and Minahil Tariq (Y2, CS)
Treasurer: Luke Sanderson (Y3, AI4)
Secretary: Kayley Lam (Y2, CSwIE)
Inclusions Officer: Adwik Roshan (Y2, CM)
Procurement: Pallavi Nair (Y2, CSwIE)
PR: Yashika Gandhi (Y2, CS) and Kavya Jain (Y2, CSwIE)
Sponsorships: Diya Chutani (Y2, CSwIE)
Graphics: Hanzila Hussain (Y2, CSwIE)
Events: Anulome Kishore (Y2, CSwIE), Saurav Maheshkar (Y2, CS), Anisha Sahu (Y2) and Nayan Suresh (Y2, CS)
Dev: Rose Halsall (Y3, CS4)
GameDev: Abubakar Tafida (Y2, CS)
Hackathons: Asma Ali (Y3, CSwIE) and Asma Alshebli (Y3, AI)

Our contact details can be found on our website.

GOOGLE DEVELOPER STUDENT CLUBS.

This from the GDSC team: Google Developer Student Clubs are community groups for college and university students interested in Google developer technologies. Google Developer Student Clubs is a program supported by Google Developers. Our aim is to make learning fun and interesting for all students. We have planned a bunch of workshops for learning beyond classroom teaching and prepare students for the Solution Challenges and build a community of developers who learn and grow together. These are our events happening this week:

Dive into Zapp with Russell Wheatley! Join us for an insightful talk exploring Zapp's architecture and its incredible features, the Flutter application code sandbox! Register now through this link. Refreshments will be provided!|
Date: Tue, Sep 19
Time: 18:30 PM - 20:00 PM
Venue: University Place, Room 2.218
Meet the GDSC team at the Freshers' Fair and the Community Fair! Get to know about the exciting events and activities we've planned for this year. Don't miss out! See you there!
Freshers’ Fair:
Date: Wednesday, September 20th
Time: 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Location: Manchester Academy 1
Community Fair
Date: Friday, September 22nd
Time: 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: Table 22, Engineering Building

Follow us on Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter | Discord to get updated. Visit our website and follow us for the latest events.

REGISTRATION.

You need to register with the University before the 30th September 2023 and collect your student card.You can find more information on the University “Become a Student” webpage. Any fee queries should be submitted using the Student Services Enquiry Form.

WELCOME WEEK ACTIVITIES.

There are a number of activities scheduled for Welcome Week. You can find out more in the CS UG Community Blackboard space. There are welcome talks scheduled as follows:

Year 1: Monday 18th September, 3 - 5pm Roscoe A (building 53 on the interactive campus map), Thursday 21st September, 2 - 4pm, Engineering Building A, Lecture Theatre A (building 24 on the campus map).
Year 2: Tuesday 19th September 2 - 4pm, Engineering Building A, Lecture Theatre A (building 24 on the campus map)
Year 3: Tuesday 19th September, 12 - 2pm, University Place Lecture Theatre B (building 37 on the campus map)
Year 4: Thursday 21st September, 10am - 12pm, Engineering Building B, Room 2.B.026 (building 25 on the campus map)

First years also have the “Meet Your Tutor” lunch on Wednesday 20th September. There will be other activities scheduled throughout the week, for example 1st year Intro Labs and COMP10120 Workshops, and some activities arranged specifically for students on the CM degree programme, so please check your personal timetable to find out which activities you are scheduled to attend.

COURSE UNIT SELECTION.

ATTENDANCE MONITORING.

We will be monitoring your attendance for wellbeing reasons as well as compliance with UKVI for students holding a study visa. We’ll be using multiple sources of data and will contact you if we have concerns about your attendance. You should be attending all scheduled activities. Further information about attendance monitoring for students with a visa will be sent out by the SSC in the next few weeks.

TEACHING TIMETABLES.

Your personal timetable will be updated by the end of Welcome Week to show your scheduled activities each week. You can view your timetable on my.manchester.

PASS1 SCAVENGER HUNT.

Following the PASS1 talk on Wednesday 20th September (see above), the PASS1 team have also organised a scavenger hunt throughout the main campus, ending in your home: the Kilburn Building! Not only is this a fantastic opportunity to familiarise yourself with the university campus and make some friends with others on your course, but we also have a plentiful supply of sweets for everyone at the end. We look forward to seeing you all then!

GREATUNIHACK 2023.

This from Sahar Rahman (Y2, CMwIE): Our student-led annual hackathon event, the GreatUniHack, is back! The event is scheduled to take place in person at the MMU Business School, on the 28th and 29th of October 2023. It is a fantastic opportunity for coding enthusiasts to enhance their technical and soft skills in a fun environment where they can socialise and collaborate with other like-minded students. Participants also have the chance to win exciting prizes, enjoy free food, and add a great project to their portfolios. To register for the event, students will simply need to visit the online registration page and sign up before the deadline on 29 September 2023. Students are encouraged to register early to guarantee an opportunity to participate and allow for sufficient time for those interested in forming teams. Interested students can follow our Instagram page, @greatunihack_, to stay updated. A list of FAQs regarding the event can be found at the GreatUniHack webpage. Any further questions should be emailed to hackathons@unicsmcr.com or messaged to our Instagram page, @greatunihack_.

DIGITAL TRUST AND SECURITY SEMINAR SERIES.

An Arms Race in Intellectual Property Protection of Deep Learning Models, Youcheng Sun. Youcheng Sun will give a seminar titled 'An Arms Race in Intellectual Property Protection of Deep Learning Models', followed by a Q&A and networking.
Date & Time: Tuesday 10th October 2023 | 14.00-15.30 (UK)
Venue: DiSH, Heron House, 47 Lloyd Street, Manchester, M2 5LE
Sign up for the event for free via Eventbrite

DIGITAL TRUST AND SECURITY SEMINAR SERIES.

Online Ads Against Cybercrime, Asier Moneva. Dr Asier Moneva will discuss an applied line of research developed in collaboration with the Cyber Offender Prevention Squad (COPS) of the Netherlands police. Researchers and police jointly develop online ad campaigns targeting potential cybercriminals and then evaluate their performance.
Date & Time: Wednesday 8th November 2023 | 14.30-16.00 (UK)
Venue: Manchester Tech Incubator, Circle Square, Oxford Rd, Manchester, M1 7ED
Sign up for the event for free via Eventbrite

DIGITAL TRUST AND SECURITY SEMINAR SERIES.

Omotolani Olowosule and Iretioluwa Akerele. Join us for a special edition of the Digital Trust and Security Seminar Series where we will host two of the co-founders of CyBlack: Omotolani Olowosule and Iretioluwa Akerele. CyBlack is a black community for Cyber security students in the UK, which currently has over 500 students. In this seminar, our speakers will discuss the outcomes of their research. Omotolani's research focuses on Mindfulness in Cloud Security, whereas Iretioluwa's research looks at Information Security Controls Integration and Implementation.
Date & Time: Monday 4th December 2023 | 14.00-16.00 (UK)
Venue: DiSH Manchester, Heron House, 47 Lloyd Street, Manchester M2 5LE
Sign up for the event for free via Eventbrite

NOMINATE YOURSELF TO BE A STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE.

This from Tom Carroll, Chair of the UG Student-Staff Liaison Committee (SSLC): Want to change something about your course? Want to represent your peers? Recruitment is now open to become an Academic Course Representative (or rep) for the 2023-24 academic year! Academic Reps are student leaders who work with the Students’ Union and University of Manchester and gather feedback & work with staff to make positive change in their programme. This opportunity is open to students of all years - and it does not matter if you have been a rep in the past, or if this will be your first time as a rep! Why get involved? You’ll develop skills in leadership, negotiation, and professionalism and build great relationships across your programme. In the past reps have been key in improving assessment deadlines, changing communication methods between staff & students and improving the way students are supported. You’ll receive training from the Students’ Union and from your programme, so you don’t need any prior experience – just an interest in helping improve student experience for yourself and your peers! Interested? To sign up, head to this form and input your details by Thursday 28 September, 12 noon. After this we’ll get back in touch with the next steps! Please contact me if you have any questions.

KILBURN LOWER FIRST FLOOR REFURBISHMENT.

Over the summer we’ve been busy refurbishing the lower first floor of the Kilburn Building (the home of CS students) by repainting the walls and providing new furniture/social seating for you to use, such as new high-level desks with power, seating booths (behind lecture theatre 1.1) and soundproof booths for private meetings, holding online interviews etc. We are still waiting for the electrical connections to be made to the power/USB sockets in the new furniture, and new coffee tables for some of the seating areas. We’ve also introduced some new seating in the open area outside the Turing lounge on the first floor. We hope you like the changes.

KILBURN WINDOW DESIGN.

Last year, Phoebe Pinney (Graduated in 2023, CS) won a prize for her eye-catching design in the Oxford Road Window Competition. The design was finally installed over the summer and can now be seen in all its glory in the large window on the Oxford Road side of the Kilburn building (top right hand side of Kilburn looking from Oxford Road).

LIBRARY STUDENT OFFER IN SEMESTER 1.

This from Gemma Smith: The Library is here to support student learning throughout their University experience. We provide students with:

access to resources like books, journals and databases
training to help them succeed in their studies
spaces to study when they’re on campus
help and support, including IT support

If students need introductory information to help them use the Library, or if they want to find out about tours and events, please visit the Library’s Get Started webpage. Students can also drop-in at any of our Library sites and chat to our friendly staff about how the Library can support their studies.