School of Computing News

A PhD student from Kent has won international recognition in an unprecedented way for his work with the computer language Java. Daniel deOliveira won the Oracle Duke's Choice Award at the JavaOne 2015 conference – the first time the award has been made to an individual rather than a project or team. Winning the Oracle Duke's Choice Award is the equivalent of winning a film Oscar for the nine million-strong Java community. The awards celebrat...

The latest video of a masked Islamic State jihadist apparently speaking with a British accent led to him being tentatively identified as Muslim convert Siddhartha Dhar from East London. Voice recognition experts were reportedly working with UK intelligence services using voice analysis. But how does this technology work and what is it capable of? Most of us can, when we hear a voice we know well, recognise who is speaking after just a few words, w...

Final year Business Information Technology student, Michael Ikeji, has been featured in Brakes people magazine as the first information services student intern. Michael worked in the food distribution company between his second and final year at university and quickly outgrew the plans that his team had for him and had to find more things for him to take on. Michael said; ‘This was a very valuable experience as personally it helped me become a more con...

After ‘a shade over 45’ years at the University of Kent, colleagues said goodbye to Bob Eager as he left the University for the next chapter of his life. Bob came to Kent in 1970 to read Electronics (there was no computing degree in 1970) and in his second term was taught BASIC by Peter Brown and ‘never looked back’, teaching himself enough skills to hack the University system (with some accomplices) a few terms later. On graduation, although being offer...

Kent is one of only 5 UK HE institutions to have been selected for a series of joint projects with universities in Singapore to develop better defences against cyberattacks. Andy King, Professor of Program Analysis in the School of Computing, and Dr Joxan Jaffar, Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore , are coordinating partners researching Vulnerability Discovery using Abduction and Interpolation. Professor King...

Head of School, Frank Wang, attended the official opening of Turing College on the Canterbury Campus on Friday 27 November and met Alan Turing’s nephew, Sir John Dermot Turing. Dermot is the nephew of Alan Turing (1912-1954), who is well known as one of Bletchley Park's leading cryptanalysts as well as a founder of computer science. Naturally enough, Dermot has followed closely the gradual revelation of the achievements of the Bletchley codeb...

The University of Kent has been named a GPU Research Center by NVIDIA, the world leader in visual computing. It joins University College London, Sheffield, and Durham in the small list of UK universities that have been named as research centres. GPU Research Centers are institutions that embrace and use GPU (graphics processing unit) computing across multiple research fields, and are at the forefront of some of the world's most innovative scientific res...

Dr Anna Jordanous, Lecturer in the School of Computing has completed a ‘wet, windy, rainy, and crazily muddy’ marathon to fundraise for a friend. Anna completed the Thames Meander Marathon in aid of her friend and collaborator Alan Stanley who was recently paralysed in an accident. ‘I finished my marathon, running every step of the way and running a personal best of 4:38. I'm very hap...

Dr Mark Batty, Lecturer in the School of Computing, has won a second award for his doctoral thesis. His dissertation, The C11 and C++11 concurrency model, was selected as the winner in the 2015 CPHC/BCS Distinguished Dissertation Competition.  The thesis also won the John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award. The Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC), in conjunction with BCS and BCS Academy of Computing, annually sel...

Dr Eerke Boiten warns Investigatory Powers bill will remove Internet Service Providers’ right to protect your privacy. Eerke Boiten, School of Computing and Director of the Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research, writes in The Conversation : 'We should seriously debate the role of our internet service providers, or ISPs, telecoms firms and increasingly, web and smartphon...