
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!