School of Computing News

Congratulations to Ed Robbins, Research Associate in the School of Computing, who has recently passed his PhD viva, with minor corrections. His PhD thesis was entitled 'Solvers for Type Recovery and Decompilation of Binaries'. The thesis made the case that powerful boolean satisfiability, Satisfiability Modulo Theory and Constraint Handling Rules solvers are perfectly suited to developing reverse engineering tools. —————————̵...

How do you know if someone is conscious if they can’t show it? Lecturer Srivas Chennu will be featured on a programme Playing tennis in a coma exploring this topic. The broadcast follows Srivas and other researchers trying to detect consciousness in patients with brain injuries and talk to the families affected. Patients like 23 year old Chris and 75 year old John used to be thought of as unconscious. Following a car crash and a virus respectively, they both now reside in...

Anna Vasileiou, a student studying an MSc in Networks and Security at the University of Kent, has won a Postgrad Solutions Study Bursary worth £500. Anna had to submit a 200 word competition entry, articulating her reasons for deserving an award. Anna's ambition is to become a network analyst, and her choice of course has not disappointed her. She explains, ‘I love this challenging course and the lecturers have a great influence on me b...

Students from the School of Computing have been preparing themselves for a national security competition. Because the University of Kent is an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research, its students are eligible to compete alongside students from prestigious universities such as Imperial, Cambridge and Oxford in the annual Inter-ACE Cyberchallenge. In preparation, on Saturday 19 November, ten students attended the Inter-ACE Seminar in Cambridg...

As part of the University of Kent Think Kent series a collection of YouTube videos celebrating research with international impact at the University – Dr Srivas Chennu explains The Mohawk of Consciousness: Neuroscience, Computing & Assessing Awareness. Awareness and the presence of intent, both in everyday life and in the clinic, are inferred primarily through our behaviour. But what if you were aware but unable to express ...

School of Computing graduate Sebastien Marion will be returning to Kent to share his story of the ups and downs of his start-up success. His talk ‘The startup journey, how I built and sold my startup to the largest mobile game company in the world’ will be in Cornwallis SW101, 15.00, Tuesday 29 November and is open to everyone. After completing his PhD in 2008, Sebastien went on to create Comufy, the world&...

Dr Fernando Otero has won a best paper award at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) conference. His paper was cowritten by Dr Gisele Papa Lobbo, a former School of Computing PhD, and Dr Luiz Otavio Oliveira. The theoretical research entitled A Dispersion Operator for Geometric Semantic Genetic Programming won the best paper in Genetic Programming, which is a branch of artificial intelligence. Fernando sai...

The School of Computing is sad to report the sudden death of PhD student Daniel de Oliveira on 2 November 2016. After a long career in the computer industry in Brazil, France and the USA, working for Apple and the Brazilian Space Agency among others, Daniel realized a long-held ambition to study for a PhD at the University of Kent, where he was in his fourth year of study. Much of Daniel's work has been in the foundation and support of communities of practice in computing, helping profes...

Three papers from members of the School have been accepted to a leading conference. The Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) is the leading venue for theoretical and experimental programming language and systems research. Radu Grigore and Mark Batty are both members of the Programming Languages and Systems Research Group in the School of Computing. The accepted papers are: – R. Grigore, Java Generics are Turing Complete – J. Wi...

Dr Luana Micallef’s PhD thesis has been commended as a runner-up in the 2016 BCS/CHPC Distinguished Dissertation award. Her thesis Visualizing Set Relations and Cardinalities Using Venn and Euler Diagrams was supervised by Dr Peter Rodgers. Peter, who is also Director of Research in the School of Computing, said: ‘We are delighted that Luana's excellent research in this area has been recognised. Her efforts have...