Research Committee Meeting

Friday 16 March 2001
Room 2511, JCMB, King's Buildings

Minutes

The meeting opened at 11.05am

Present: Ian Stark (chair), Alex Simpson, Massimo Felici, John Longley, Konstatinos Tourlas, Martin Grohe, Don Sannella, Monika Lekuse, Colin Stirling, Paul Jackson, Bill Orrok (minute secretary).

Apologies: David Aspinall, Perdita Stevens, Julian Bradfield, Stephen Gilmore, Jane Hillston.

Ian Stark welcomed everyone to the meeting.

1. Minutes of the previous meeting

1.1 Milner Lecture & Jamboree Ian Stark reported that the Milner Lecture "Algorithmic Problems Related to the Internet" will be held on the afternoon of Wednesday 23rd May in the Law Lecture Theatre. It will be the decent one this time with softer seats and more leg room. The reception will be held in the Talbot Rice Gallery. Ian also said the Jamboree will over two days this year, the Thursday and Friday following on from the Milner Lecture.

1.2 Research Staff Appraisals Due to further changes in the LFCS support team with Neil McGillivray being moved to the ITO at South Bridge the arrangements for appraisals was no further forward. Monika said she has not yet discussed this with Bill Orrok.

No progress has been made by Gordon Duckett in arranging with Personnel for an "Appraiser Training" course within Informatics. The courses run by Personnel at the moment are either over subscribed or empty. The empty ones being at times when no one can get to them.

2. Grant Portfolio

Monika said she had taken a look at the success rate of grant applications over the last three years

Since the last meeting, Alex Simpson has been awarded an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship. Yoram Hirschfeld will be coming here on an EPSRC Visiting Fellowship, and DAAD have funded a travel fellowship for Francis Tang to visit Martin Hofmann in Darmstadt.

Several new applications were planned. David Aspinall, Martin Grohe and Javier Esparza are all preparing EPSRC Fast Stream applications.

2.1 Don Sannella outlined a proposal on Mobile Resource Guarantees for Framework 5. It is a partnership between Ian, David, Stephen, and Martin Hofmann.

2.2 Ian Stark has finally managed to recruit a student for his EPSRC grant

2.3 Colin intimated there will be two teaching positions available. One to replace Alex Simpson and one additional post on Software Model Checking.

2.4 Paul Jackson said he and Jacque Fleuriot were talking about combining on a grant assistance application involving advanced protocols.

2.5 Don spoke on grant recoveries - see §3.5 on previous minutes. This is no longer a "target", but it is Divisional policy to do so wherever possible.

2.6 It was suggested we collect referees comments. It would be helpful to see the comments especially to people putting in grant applications for the first time. It may help to stop people agonising over how much to ask for. Monica said she would try to do so but there is also a balance to be struck as to what people wish to go for and Divisional policy.

3. Arrivals and Departures

Ian introduced Martin Grohe and said that Paul Jackson has a new PhD student Hongqian Liang. Two new RAs will be arriving by the end of the month; Monika Maidl and Luciana D'Adderio. Juliusz Chroboczek has submitted his PhD thesis, and Kostas Tourlas and Tim Kempster have had their viva examinations. LFCS now has 19 members of staff, 11 RAs and about 16 PhDs. Javier Esparza is bringing two PhD students. People who are about to leave are Martin Hofmannn and Matias Menni.

4. Graduate School and PhD admissions

Paul Jackson distributed a printed handout detailing current applications for PhD places at LFCS. One student, Hongqian Liang, has already started and another has received an offer; these are EPSRC project studentships with Paul and Ian respectively. Alin Stefanescu will be coming with Javier Esparza, funded by the Division. Five other students are under consideration, and two more have expressed interest in applying.

Applications are on file with Dyane Goodchild in room 3421 for anyone to see.

General information about accommodation etc should be dealt with by the Grad School (Betty Hughes).

5. Interaction with the rest of Informatics

Colin Stirling spoke briefly on the PEA Pod programme (Processes, Events and Activity). This involves Alan Bundy, Mike Fourman, Paul Jackson, Colin Stirling, Ewan Klein and others.

Don Sannella raised the question about the situation with JCMB Administration Support Staff. We are effectively understaffed equivalent to two people at the present time: Neil McGillivray has been move to the ITO at South Bridge and Kendal Reid has been moved to the ITO JCMB with Bill Orrok returning to the Admin Support team. As Sam Falconer is on long term sick having recently had a major operation this compounds the situation.

6. Theory Postgraduate Course Review

John Longley distributed a report on the reviewing the course. He had circulated a questionnaire among the students; 7 out of 20 took the time to respond and did so in some detail. Whilst there were many differences opinion the general consensus was the TPG course should continue to exist.

At this point Konstantinos spoke as to the relevance of the course. At the time he did the course he was not enthusiastic about it. As it was a very busy year for him he felt at that time the last thing he needed was more lectures. He has since discovered a few parts were useful to him. A discussion took place on the usefulness of aspects of the course.

After the discussion John returned to giving his report. He convened a working group consisting of 5 people to consider the future if the TPG course. The Group consisted of Colin Stirling, Alex Simpson, Marco Kick, Martin Lange and himself. They have so far only had one meeting from which Colin had to unfortunately pull out at the last moment. The working group examined various issues related to the course. Unanimity was reached on a number of them.

A long and lively discussion ensued on the pros and cons of the most controversial of the findings "The TPG exam in its present form should be abolished". As the discussion was going nowhere Ian suggested that John be allowed to continue his report and give his concrete proposals based on the questionnaire and the working group.

After presenting all his proposals John intimated that if something like his proposals were implemented he would like to be TPG Course Organiser next year so as to organise them.

Once again a general discussion ensued. Paul raised the point that we should also be looking at the need to prepare students for teaching as they may well find it is a necessity in their future employment.

The feeling of the meeting was generally in favour of the proposals, agreeing details was harder. The following were agreed:

• The course should maintain broad coverage of the research actually done in LFCS.
• Supervisors should arrange a course plan in discussion with their students, at the start of the year.

Coverage of research is difficult because LFCS research is wider than it used to be; people wanted courses to be newer, livelier, and more variable from year to year.

It was suggested that John continue as TPG Course Organiser. John felt that enough of concrete proposals were being agreed to in principal for him to carry on. It was agreed that John continue as TPG Course Organiser.

ACTION: John Longley to re-present the proposals at the next meeting
with more detail and perhaps options on the controversial parts.

7. Extending committee membership

8. Any other business

Questions were again raised about the short staffing of the Admin team and the fact they were moved about so much. Alex Simpson said he has complained about this to Alan Bundy on a number of occasions. Monika pointed out the team are extremely short staffed and had in effect only 3.9 Admin staff. In comparison with strength of numbers elsewhere in the Division we come out very badly. These 3.9 staff support 30 category A staff, while in AIAI/IRR there are 5 Admin staff for 12 category A staff. She also pointed out the team were barely coping. There are plans to disrupt the Admin team again by shuffling them about to different offices with the possibility the team ending up in a communal office. The majority of those present expressed their dissatisfaction with the short staffing and constant changes.

The meeting was closed at 12.05pm