Dr. Peter Tino gave a research talk entitled "Searching for co-expressed genes in three-color cDNA microarray data using a probabilistic model based Hough Transform" on the 30th of June.

Abstract. The effects of a drug on the genomic scale can be assessed in a three-color cDNA microarray with the three color intensities represented through the so-called hexaMplot. It has been demonstrated that the Hough Transform (HT, a signal processing technique) applied to the hexaMplot can be used to detect groups of co-expressed genes in the normal-disease-drug samples ... (download full abstract and biography) 

Dr Wang Wei has won 1st Prize in the Hypios competition (http://www.hypios.com/) for the development of a method and software for "Automatic discovery of scientific domains, and their relationships". His proposed solution learns the vocabulary and concepts of a scientific domain, and identifies the relationships between these concepts. The method can be used to deduce effectively a hierarchical representation of scientific domains and to classify accurately a short text (ranging from a few keywords to a few paragraphs) into one or several of those domains.

Prof. Andrzej Bargiela has been elected as President of the European Council for Modelling and Simulation (ECMS) for the next term of office, 2010–2012.  The ECMS is an independent forum of European academics and practitioners dedicated to research, development, and applications of modelling and simulation.

Geetha Baskaran, Computer Science lecturer on the Foundation Programme has received a prestigious Lord Dearing Award for innovation in teaching and learning. This is a very rare distinction that is bestowed for exceptional teaching performance and places Geetha in the select group of leading academic teachers at the University of Nottingham.

The 24th European Conference on Modelling and Simulation (ECMS 2010) has a specific aim of bringing together researchers and practitioners of modelling in simulation from Europe and Asia. The conference, which for the past 23 years has been held in Europe, is making a bold change to this pattern with its 2010 venue in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The conference was held between the 1st and 4th of June, 2010. You may view the conference photos here.

Dr. Tim Brailsford gave a Research Seminar entitled "Geospatial Hypermedia", on the 2nd of March 2010.

Abstract: Mobile computing devices (such as phones) are increasingly becoming capable of delivering rich media over networks (3G), and many of these devices are aware of their geospatial location (using GPS, and sometimes other technologies).   This raises the interesting possibility of Geospatial Hypermedia, where the triggers used to traverse an information space include physical location as well as user interactions.  Where topographic data of the surroundings is available, this may be used to calculate "viewsheds", which are areas that are visible to the human eye from any given vantage point. Mobile devices that are direction as well as location aware,  may then use what the user can see as a trigger rather than proximity ... (download full abstract)

Dr. Zakria Hussain from the Department of Computer Science, University College London, gave a talk entitled "The Set Covering Machine (SCM)", on the 3rd of February 2010.

Abstract: The Set Covering Machine (SCM) is based on strong theoretical principles and shown to compete well with the SVM. In this talk I will discuss the SCM, which uses older learning theory techniques in order to construct hypotheses, and fits into the class of ensemble learners. The SCM has some nice properties such as sparsity, tight generalization error bounds and a simple greedy solution, making it an appealing alternative to the SVM.

The School of Computer Science was visited by Dr. Peter Blanchfield from Computer Science (UK). Peter shared his valuable experience by giving  a seminar on the 20th of January 2010 on the  subject: Engaging the Un-engageable.

The talk examined the problem of integrating game-play and education with reference to a study which attempts to utilise the motivational power of computer games to aid the education of some of  the most challenging students: children who are exhibiting behavioural disorders (oppositional defiant behaviour, attention deficit).

Professor Backhouse shared his valuable experience by giving a seminar on Tuesday, 8 December 2009, on the subject of ‘Algorithmic Problem Solving’.

In the seminar, Professor Backhouse explained some of the background to why algorithms are important, offering examples of some of the problems that are presented and how they have been chosen, as well as discussing its relevance to other disciplines, in particular to a modern mathematics curriculum.