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Work performed by Computer Systems Engineering student Michael Shanta for his 3rd year project, supervised by Dr. Marina Cole and Dr. Siavash Esfahani in the School of Engineering, was written up in a paper that was recently accepted for presentation at the IEEE Sensors 2020 Conference.

For his 3rd year project Michael worked on developing machine learning techniques for an Electronic Nose in order to classify odours based on the sensor responses. The system aims to detect incontinence incidents, allowing alerts to be sent to relevant personnel from an IoT network via a cloud server.

has joined the department to work as a Research Fellow on the "Foundations of classical and quantum verifiable computing" project, which is led by .

Sathya completed his PhD in quantum computing at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Prof. Richard Jozsa. His primary interests are quantum algorithms and computational complexity theory.

We congratulate all A-level students on their recent achievements. The quality of our intake in recent years has been outstanding and we are delighted to report that we will be welcoming another exceptional cohort of first year students. We look forward to getting to know you all in the coming term, and hope you will enjoy taking your next steps in your development as Computer Scientists.

Due to this year's special circumstances, this cohort will be by far the largest in the history of the department. While there will be challenges for students and staff alike, we will work hard, together with our students, to ensure that everybody can fully realize their considerable potential. We are excited and are looking forward to meeting this new talented group of students

Dr Dmitry Chistikov and Professor Mike Paterson, together with physicists Olga Goulko (Boise State University) and Adrian Kent (Cambridge), have published an interdisciplinary paper , solving a probabilistic puzzle on the sphere that has applications to quantum information theory.

Suppose a lawn must cover exactly half the area of a sphere. A grasshopper starts from a random position on the lawn and jumps a fixed distance in a random direction. What shape of lawn maximizes the chance that the grasshopper lands back on the lawn? A natural guess would be that a hemispherical lawn is best. It turns out, however, that this is nearly never the case — there are only a few exceptional jump sizes.

This work involving spherical geometry, probability theory, basic number theory, and theoretical physics appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A and shows, apart from concern for the well-being of grasshoppers, that there are previously unknown types of Bell inequalities. The Bell inequality, devised by physicist John Stewart Bell in 1964, demonstrated that no combination of classical theories with Einstein's special relativity is able to explain the predictions (and later actual experimental observations) of quantum theory.

A University press release can be found here.

Congratulations to our 3rd and 4th year students, who are receiving their results today!

Here is a video for the occasion from the head of department.

Well done, all the best for your careers, and let us stay in touch!

We are very happy to report that Alexander Noll, PhD student at the department鈥檚 Institute for the Science of Cities, has been rewarded with the 2019/2020 91福利 Award for Teaching Excellence for Postgraduates who Teach. As a commendee, the recognition of his teaching comes in addition to a 拢200 teaching endowment. Alexander, who comes from an interdisciplinary academic background and has been teaching on several undergraduate modules of our department as well as the Department of Sociology, commented:

The thought that I was able to contribute positively to somebody鈥檚 learning and their time at 91福利 in general sparks great joy. It is a great honour to be recognised for my tiny contribution to a community of teachers who work hard on creating a positive learning environment.

WATE seek to recognise outstanding teaching and support of learning across the University. Since 2003, the Awards have helped showcase innovation and commitment from across 91福利's teaching community. Nominations can be made by both students and staff and a panel of judges then creates a shortlist of up to ten nominees. Based on additional personal statements, 10 winners are selected from the shortlist, split into five awards and five commendations.

By the start of the Autumn Term, the department will boast seven new staff who have joined us in 2020: Associate Professor , Assistant Professor Dr Weiren Yu, Senior Teaching Fellow Dr Andrew Hague, Teaching Fellows Dr Greg Watson, Dr Rossella Suma and Richard Kirk, and Research and Teaching Fellow Dr Matthew Bradbury.

Coming from Southampton, Aston and 91福利 universities, our new colleagues bring a wealth of teaching and research excellence, with expertise in areas including artificial intelligence, agent-based systems, data mining, information retrieval, educational technologies, image processing, high-performance computing, and cyber security.