Alumni message

It gives me great pleasure to be able to reach our alumni. I believe if you were to come to visit you would see that we continue in the same spirit, which of course means continuous updating of our teaching, research, and labs. We were pleased (but not really surprised) when LinkedIn’s University Rankings rated us as “Best Graduate University for Software Developers. We try to keep our newsfeed on our Department homepage up-to-date with some of our latest achievements.

I think what has made me proudest of our students is that a DoC student team has qualified for the ACM 2016 Programming finals. We needed to be in the top two in Northern Europe to achieve this. We came first in Britain last year, but just missed making the finals. Our team includes two Computing students Mihai Popa and Daniel Posdarascu (years three and one) and one JMC student Yordan Chaparov (year four). We’re all rooting for them.

If you want to see what Computing students these days do for projects, as always they work on a huge variety of problems. There are a couple though that I’d like to highlight. An MSc in Advanced Computing student Matthew Lai used Deep Reinforcement Learning to teach his program Giraffe to learn to play chess. After 72 hours Giraffe could play at International Master Level. His thesis went viral and he had lots of press coverage. A fourth year MEng Computing student Le Thanh Hoang built a robot that can solve a Rubik’s cube in 32 seconds. His You Tube video of it has had more than 1900 hits and is really fun to watch.

It’s hard for me to come up with just one piece of our research to write about. Professor Yi-ke Guo runs Imperial’s Data Science Institute and they have The Global Data Observatory, a stunning visualization centre. If you want to see a picture of it, Professor William Knottenbelt gave a talk on BBC Click about BitCoins which features the GDO. Professor Andy Davison and Dr Stefan Leutenegger run the Dyson Robotics Lab and their computer vision work is now becoming available in a Dyson vacuum cleaner sold in Japan.

All these and other stories are brief snippets from our homepage news. We also have a large number of seminars and public lectures, which are visible from our events listing also on our homepage. If you might wish to engage with us on trying to solve some of your toughest technical problems or to have access to our students, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me and I will forward it to the appropriate place.

Professor Susan Eisenbach, Head of Department of Computing