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Faculty of Life Sciences and Computing
For your Calendar
Professor Karim OuazzaneInaugural Lecture
5th December 2012
6pm in GC01-08
First graduating cohort at Nepal
Islington College, Nepal recently held its very first Graduation Cere-mony for students who have successfully completed BSc Computing orBSc Computer Networking and IT Security. 115 students proudlydonned their Londonmet gowns and convened at an impressive hotelvenue in central Kathmandu, accompanied by family and friends.
The Ceremony marks a year of successful partnership between Isling-ton College and the School of Computing. Professor Dominic Palmer-Brown headed a team of SoC academics (including Dr Fang Fang Cai, DrSaeed Taghizadeh and Preeti Patel) who attended the ceremony. Theteam also conducted a scheduled course visit covering range of activi-ties including yearly review , course committee meetings, staff devel-opment, student inductions and administrative operation – all of whichensure the continuing high standard of the courses being deliveredthrough this successful partnership.
Issue 2November 2012
Edited by Preeti Patel
The students are:
Sabah Ayaz (BSc Biomedical Science)Mujakkir Ahmed (BSc Chemistry)
In addition to this Barclays PLC have confirmed that they willoffer a mentoring programme to these successful students, to belaunched at Canary Wharf in December. These opportunitiesshould really give these students a great platform to build agreat career.
Editor’s Note
We are still looking for a suitable name for this newsletter—please send
in your suggestions.
Contributions for the next issue are welcome from all areas of the
Faculty.
Email items to me at [email protected] by the middle of each
month.
Preeti Patel
School of Computing
2
Human Sciences bursary winners
Two students from the School of Human Sciences have been successful with their applica-tions to the Sir John Cass's Foundation Lord Mayor Bursary Programme. The applicationprocess was highly competitive and the students were ably supported by Paul Blagburn(Widening Participation and Recruitment Strategy Manager, Londonmet) and Dr SundusTewkis (Senior Lecturer, SoHS). Sundus has worked tirelessly by identifying suitable stu-dents, conducting workshops, giving feedback and counselling applicants.Both students were able to collect their certificates from the Lord Mayor at an Awards Re-
ception at Mansion House. The bursary is worth approximately £15,000 for each student.
3
Knowledge Transfer Partnerships thrive at Londonmet
New Brand Vision are launching their future-proof CMS which provides a one-stopwebsite design and development environment for businesses of all sizes. The Decibelsuite of tools enable businesses to get the very best out of their websites by providingin-built performance enhancing concepts. The Faculty of Life Sciences and Comput-ing has played an important part in this project by establishing a Knowledge TransferPartnership (KTP) with New Brand Vision, the company driving this technology. Theproject is an excellent example of the success that these partnerships can achieve forall stakeholders involved. The recipe for success is configuration of the right team:academics (Professor Dominic Palmer-Brown, Dr Vassil Vassilev, Dr Farhi Marir), KTPdirector (Professor Karim Ouazzane), WOW Agency manager (Alan Stuart), Student(Mohammad Haque) and of course industrial partner (Ben Harris) and his develop-ment team.
The Faculty and New Brand Vision have an established history of collaboration since2009 when the WOW Agency was asked to source a number of skilled PHP develop-ers. WOW has now supplied 7 graduates to the company – all of whom have gone onto work full-time for the business.
Ben Harris - Director of New Brand Vision commented: “WOW is a unique initiativethat I have not seen in any other University. It has allowed us to tap into great newtalent coming through and their support has been invaluable in getting our businessestablished”
A successful KTP (Knowledge Transfer Partnership) application was submitted in2010 that would see the development of an innovative optimisation tool and dataanalytics solution to be embedded within the company's Decibel platform. KTP re-quires a 3-way relationship between the University, the business and the graduateassociate employed specifically to deliver against the project outputs.
The company are now keen to explore a further KTP opportunity with the School of Com-puting and to continue this successful partnership.
Nikki Gordon, a second year student on BSc Com-puter Games Programming, participated in agamejam which took place in Mind Candy offices(the games company responsible for Moshi Mon-sters), started at 7pm on Friday 26th October andfinished 24 hours later. Fiona French, Senior Lec-turer in SoC, was a mentor at the event and spenttime helping a team produce sound effects for"Tick Tock Terror" which featured Ada Lovelacedropping heavy cogs onto a crazy crocodile whileattempting to build the Difference Engine!
Nikki’s team came second with "The DastardlyCarillon" – their game was developed in Unity andNikki created all the sound effects using Reason.The majority of the participants were profession-als, some from as far away as Denmark.
4
Gamejamming with Nikki and Fiona
VP of Telefonica visits the Faculty
Prof. Dominic Palmer-Brown, Dr Mike Short, Mr Kafil Ahmed, Prof. Bal Virdee, Dr Vince Hargy
Dr Mike Short CBE delivered an inspiring lunch time talk to a packed audience of staff and students on 23 Octo-ber 2012. The event was organised by the Faculty’s Centre for Communications Technology. Dr Short isPresident of IET and Vice President at Telefonica, the company who owns O2. The talk on “Internet for all”looked at connectivity needs of people, services and machines. It explored the need for innovation and engi-neering including O2’s R&D work on 5G mobile networks. At the talk he made a “hot” announcement of a jointinitiative launched that very day by O2 and Bauer Media of the GoThinkBig venture to create work experienceopportunities for 30,000 14-25 year olds across the UK over the next three years. O2 and Bauer Media are in-vesting £5 million on this new initiative which has been underpinned by new research showing lack of accessto work skills and experience is a major barrier to employment for many young people.
The event was organised by Professor Bal Virdee (Centre for CommunicationsTechnology Research). Bal has also being supporting and co-authoring with hisstudent Kafil Ahmed (pictured above) to have successfully accepted twojournals for publication in renowned international journals within the RF/Microwave community.
Chris is a psychologist who works on visual and auditory processingin tasks such as object search, memory, reading and drawing in in-fants, children, adults, and neural networks. She also works on themore general aspects of development and learning such as repetitioneffects during practice, feedback processing and reaction times/acceleration in children. She is on the Editorial Board of the Journal ofExperimental Child Psychology and the International Journal of De-velopmental Science. She is Associate Faculty of the University of Bre-men which belongs to the Excellence Cluster of German universities.
In her collaboration with Bruno Averbeck from the Laboratory ofNeuropsychology, Division of Intramural Research Programs, Na-tional Institute of Mental Health/National Institutes of Health, Be-thesda, MD, USA, she found that 8- to 11-year old children’s learningbreaks down when they get feedback that they have been wrongwhen in fact they were right (self-assertiveness), while getting feed-back that they were right even when they were wrong still supportslearning even if the feedback was false (self-reflection).
Other work focuses on the gender by modality interaction, wheregirls are more adept in language, while boys are more likely to use avisual perceptual approach. A visual approach may appear to be lesssocial than verbal interaction, and indeed males with mental healthdisorders can demonstrate superior visual perception to controls.The male focus on shape may also be a social activity, for instance,since centuries many fashion designers are males creating interestingsilhouettes for women’s figures.
Staff mini profile: Chris Lange-Küttner
For more about Chris visit:
https://intranet.londonmet.ac.uk/fls/staff_profiles/psychologystaff/academic/k-z/lange-kuettnerc.cfm
Contact Chris:
5555
Forthcoming events:
21st—23rd November—Psychology of Programming Interest Group Annual Conference 2012
London Metropolitan University (email Dr Yanguo Jing [email protected])
26th November—SEW—’The Use of Social Media to Find Employment Opportunity’
30th November - Dr Dan Stratton, SHS 1pm-2pm T11-03 ”The joy of microvesicles”
7th December - SEW—The Spring Project—one day workshop for employability training.
