General Announcements

an updated account of items discussed at the general meeting held in Appleton Tower 2007-09-14-1600 Z+1

Research

Ten new members of academic staff are joining us this year (see individual announcements on this blog for more details): Subramanian Ramamoorthy, Michael Hermann, Rahul Santhanam, Amin Coja-Oghlan, Graham Steel, Elham Kashefi, Richard Mayr, Victor Lavrenko, Sharon Goldwater, and Vincent Danos.

We have four Distinguished Visiting Professors this semester: David Harel, Hector Geffner, Diane Litman, Vassilis Christophides.

Our research grant expenditure reached £10M for the year 2006-2007 (up from £8.35M in the previous year).

We expect around 60 new Ph.D. students to join our Graduate School this year (50 have already matriculated; we currently have a total of 210 matriculated PGR students in years 1-4).

Teaching

Floors 3-5 of the Appleton Tower have now been refurbished to accommodate our teaching. We have 150 M.Sc. students matriculated, almost 40 more than last year. We also have 117 new undergraduates, around 20 more than last year, with a total of 345 undergraduates matriculated over all years of study.

Commercialisation

The PROSPEKT team, now established on floor 8 of Appleton Tower, will extend its operations occupy floors 6-8 (along with some of our industry-facing research) once we have occupied the Forum.

Outreach

We have made two new appointments designed to support our engagement with students before they arrive, and after they graduate: Morna Findlay our Schools Liaison Officer, and Naomi Nunn our Informatics Alumni Officer.

Our engagement with the Arts, led by Jon Oberlander and our artist in residence, Richard Brown, continues. We sponsored The Turing Test, an opera by Julian Wagstaff, in the Fringe this summer, and we are working on plans (and sponsorship) for inSpace, the 300m² public engagement venue on the ground floor of the Wolfson Wing of the new building.

Migration

Marije Vugts has been working steadily, and tirelessly, as our Migration Co-ordinator. We are advised that the offices in the Forum will be ready by January. All going well, we hope to install office furniture and equipment in February. March and April will then be removals months, and we hope to have everyone installed by Mayday.