School of Computing News

An article published on the BBC news website reports that two banks are allowing their customers to access accounts on their smartphones using fingerprint recognition technology. The School of Computing's Eerke Boiten responds to the use of this technology: ‘If users “must activate the feature with their security information, but would only need to use Apple’s Touch ID thereafter”, then there is some scope for...

The School of Computing welcomes Dr Marek Grzes who joined the University of Kent in February after a previous role at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He received his PhD degree in computer science from the University of York, UK. He will be based at the Canterbury campus and will join the computational intelligence research group. His research interests include artificial intelligence, decision-theoretic planning, probabilistic reasoning, and applications thereof.

Alex Maskill decided to undertake a conversion Master's in Computer Science at Kent after he discovered an interest in programming whilst writing an award-winning science fiction novel. Alex was an undergraduate student in Political Science at the University of Leicester when he heard of the Terry Pratchett First Novel Award, a competition soliciting fiction manuscripts from unpublished authors. Alex heard about the competition in August 2012, and with ...

The efficiency of the administration team in the School of Computing has been recognised with an award for ‘the fastest successful postgraduate application turnaround' in the University of Kent. The award and a box of chocolates was given to Sonnary Dearden, Examination & Research Students Administration Officer. Sonnary said: 'I think this award is a team effort as we all work hard to make sure that applications, exam...

Not many undergraduates have the opportunity to order a book they have authored into their own University library, but that is just what Shane Hudson, final year Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) student has done. Shane is the author of JavaScript Creativity, which highlights a range of things that were not possible on the web just a couple of years ago, for example making music by waving your hands at a webcam. The foreword sums it us as: "a s...

Two lecturers joined the academic staff at the School of Computing in January. Dr Meng Wang has joined the University of Kent from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Before that, he studied in the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore. He will join the programming languages and systems research group (PLAS) and continue his research in functional programming, bidirectional transformation and software testing & debugging. Dr Vincent Cheval...

Research at the School of Computing has performed very strongly in the national assessment of research quality, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise. We have greatly improved our performance compared to the last exercise in 2008. The School has been judged to be in the top quarter of institutions for the first time, with a rank of 22nd out of 89 based on the key indicator of research power, showing that 81% of research was either w...

A national report on industry placements for computer science students uses the School of Computing's placement team an example of best practice. The report, Growing Experience: A Review of Undergraduate Placements in Computer Science by the National Centre for Universities and Businesses, was published on 14 January. It highlights the 'organic growth' model which is part of the placement team strategy. The report investigates the relatively h...

Dr Julio Hernandez-Castro has secured funding for three projects starting in 2015. The first, Improving cyber security using realistic synthetic face generation, has secured funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). This project will be looking at the applications of facial recognition to cyber security, in particular authentications and captchas based on face generation and recognition. The project leads are Stuart Gibson ...

Congratulations to Dr Anna Jordanous who has been awarded with the best paper award for her paper entitled Enhancing Information Retrieval and Resource Discovery from Data using the Semantic Web. Anna presented the paper during the 4th International Symposium on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Libraries and Information Services, held at Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India on 8 January 2015.