ICR News

ICR Research Scholar selected for ORSAS Award

Interacting with Computers 2005-2007 Most Cited Paper Award

ICR Members elected Chartered Fellows of the British Computer Society

ICR Research Fellow in the news

LSBU to host International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods

Canadian Researcher Visits ICR

Computing Research Students Celebrate their Work

ICR Researchers Visit Caltech

ICR Member Joins Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions

Springer Publishes CSP25 Festschrift

ICR Research Scholar selected for ORSAS Award

The University selected Hassan Takabi for an Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme (ORSAS) award. Hassan is a research scholar within the Institute for Computing Research. He received his MSc in Information Technology last year from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, and joined us to investigate formal aspects of information security under the supervison of Ali Abdallah . The Scheme was set up by the Secretary of State for Education and Science in 1979 to attract high-quality international students to the United Kingdom to undertake research. ORSAS awards provide funding to pay the difference between the international student tuition fees and the home/EU student tuition fees charged by the academic institution that the student attends. The only two criteria for winning an award are: (1) academic ability, and (2) research potential.

Interacting with Computers 2005-2007 Most Cited Paper Award

Xristine Faulkner and Fintan Culwin's article "When fingers do the talking: A study of text messaging" have received the Most Cited Paper Award from the publishers of "Interacting with Computers", an interdisciplinary journal of Human-Computer Interaction. Papers for this distinction are determined solely based on the highest number of cites, excluding self-citations, received for all journal articles published between the years 2005-2007. The paper was published in Volume 17, Issue 2, March 2005, Pages 167-18.

ICR Members elected Chartered Fellows of the British Computer Society

During 2007, Xristine Faulkner PhD and Shushma Patel PhD were elected Chartered Fellows of the British Computer Society (FBCS CITP). This was in recognition of their established reputation of eminence or authority in the field of Information Technology, and of their competence and commitment to keep pace with advancing knowledge and the increasing expectations and requirements of the profession. In addition, the University's recent submission to the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise in Computer Science and Informatics highlights Xristine and Shushma's interdisciplinary research interests in human-computer studies, more specifically in human factors and in cognitive informatics, respectively.

ICR Research Fellow in the news

ICR Senior Research Fellow, Dr. Dennis Furey <http://www.basis.uklinux.net/>, has recently released a compiler for a functional programming language that he calls Ursala (UniveRSal Applicative Language) <http://www.basis.uklinux.net/ursala/>.

The language is suitable for scientific and numerical computation, and is the product of over 10 years research and development! Dr. Furey has written a 468-page book entitled 'Notational innovations for rapid application development' <http://www.basis.uklinux.net/ursala/manual.pdf> to accompany this release. The book describes the language and gives examples of its application in a variety of areas.

LSBU to host International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods

The 5th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2007) will take place on 12-14 September 2007 in the Keyworth Centre. The General Chair is Prof. Jonathan Bowen, Head of the Centre for Applied Formal Methods

Canadian Researcher Visits ICR

Prof. Marina Gavrilova, University of Calgary, visited the ICR during August 2006, hosted by Dr. Frank Devai. This was part of their on-going research collaboration into Computational Geometry.

Computing Research Students Celebrate their Work

Ten of BCIM's computing research students took the opportunity to polish their presentation skills and learn more about each other's work at a Fourth of July Plenary Day organised by the Institute for Computing Research. The event was opened by Pro-Dean Geoff Elliott who chairs the Faculty Research Commitee. Geoff emphasised the Faculty's commitment to postgraduate research support and training and how research students play a vital part in the academic life of the University. Mark Josephs, Director of the Institute, painted the big picture: he described the broad scope of research in the computing discipline and the nature of the research communities in which we operate; he also explained the publication process, giving insights that may benefit our research students in their future careers. The third speaker in the morning session was Sarah Plant from the University's Research & Business Development Office. She talked about the many opportunities available to UK academics to obtain external funding for their research, including travel grants, postdoctoral fellowships and early-career research project grants funded by the EPSRC. In the afternoon session the audience was swelled by the arrival of a group of MSc students who were interested in finding out what their fellow postgraduate students have been getting up to. This turned out to be a fascinating mixture of research topics, ranging from the mathematical to the sociological. The research students had plenty to talk about and five minutes were allowed for questions and answers after each presentation, so there was a real conference feel to the day, mixed with some gentle guidance.

ICR Researchers Visit Caltech

In September 2005 Prof. Mark Josephs was awarded an EPSRC Overseas Travel Grant to facilitate scientific exchange and research collaboration with various research groups within the California Institute of Technology and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. Researchers at Caltech "investigate the most challenging, fundamental problems in science and technology in a singularly collegial, interdisciplinary atmosphere, while educating outstanding students to become creative members of society". Caltech also manages NASA/JPL, which leads the "evolution, development, validation, and transfer of space exploration technology". The ICR was represented by Prof. Josephs, Dr. Dennis Furey (Senior Research Fellow) and Mohsen Naderi (Research Scholar). They interacted with Prof. Alain J. Martin's Caltech Asynchronous VLSI Group, Dr. Gerard Holzmann's NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software, Prof. K. Mani Chandy's Caltech Infospheres Group and Dr. Jason Hickey's Caltech Mojave Research Group.

ICR Member Joins Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions

In July 2005 Dr. Jon Selig, a member of the Institute for Computing Research, Faculty of BCIM, became an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, one of the leading scholarly journals in the field of Robotics. Associate Editors are selected by the Senior Editors Panel and ratified by the President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and their selection is based on scientific quality, international reputation, commitment to service, reliability, and the needs of the Editorial Board. Also that year, the second edition of Dr. Selig's book on the geometrical foundations of robotics was published in a high-quality series of research monographs in Computer Science.

Springer Publishes CSP25 Festschrift

June 2005 saw the publication of "Communicating Sequential Processes: the First 25 Years" , edited by Dr. Ali Abdallah (LSBU), Prof. Cliff Jones (Newcastle) and Dr. Jeff Sanders (Oxford) in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. Sir Tony Hoare’s 1978 paper “Communicating Sequential Processes” (CSP) is today widely regarded as one of the most influential papers in computer science. This LNCS volume comprises 19 carefully reviewed and revised full papers that were presented the previous year at a two-day symposium, hosted by the ICR. They celebrate, reflect upon and look beyond the first quarter-century of CSP’s contributions to computer science. The meeting examined the impact of CSP on many areas stretching from semantics (mathematical models for understanding concurrency and communications) and logic (for reasoning about behavior), through the design of parallel programming languages (i/o, parallelism, synchronization and threads) to applications varying from distributed software and parallel computing to information security, Web services and concurrent hardware circuits.