The meeting opened at 10.05am
Present:Ian Stark (Chair), Colin Stirling, Martin Grohe, Jane Hillston, Monika Lekuse, John Longley, Perdita Stevens, Julian Bradfield, Stephen Gilmore, Paul Jackson, Massimo Felici, Konstantinos Tourlas, Don Sannella, Mike Fourman, Bill Orrok (minute secretary), Stuart Anderson
Apologies:Javier Esparza, Alex Simpson, David Aspinall, Stuart Anderson arriving later
Re the item on user IDs David could not attend and sent his apologies. If he had been able to attend he would have had a substantive item on Computer support. Items on this will be discussed once Stuart arrives.
Alan Bundy's platform grant has been awarded. The latest EPSRC Connect magazine says there is a scheme of grant amalgamation. The suggestion is that groups might have their current grant portfolio amalgamated into a sum, then worked out how much they may get for the next 5 years, then just given it on condition that they don't apply for any grants other than that. Ian underlined the fact that this is only a couple of paragraphs in a glossy. The details are not clear and Javier is following this up directly with EPSRC. It was pointed out it could be a bit of a devils bargain and may stop departments growing or fragmenting. It is not at all clear how it is going to work.
Infrastructure charges. Monika arranged a meeting with Gordon Duckett & various other members of this committee. It has now been resolved in that we know we have some control over how the money is being spent and it is being taken from grants as and when it is available. Monika said Gordon had promised to set up a framework between Edinburgh and EPSRC. The feedback so far has been fairly negative. At the moment it is being worked out case by case.
Monika said that new grants will always be awarded at the end of a quarter of the year ie end of March end of June etc. for budgeting purposes. When a grant is announced it will start automatically six months later. This means that from application until the start of a grant can easily be more than 12 months. We have though, just successfully fought a case where a grant was supposed to start in January and we got it to start in June. There are exceptions for visiting fellowships and also if you have staff you must continue to employ. It is again a matter of negotiating case by case.
On the matter of equipment purchase Ian said we have now bought the new data projector which is smaller, lighter and brighter than the other one.
The next matter arising was the changeover of incumbent in the post of Deputy Director of LFCS. The outgoing Deputy Director of LFCS was thanked for doing such a wonderful job during his tenure of office. The task load of Deputy Director will be reduced and discussions are ongoing as to transferring tasks to other members. It was proposed and agreed that John Longley be the new Deputy Director of LFCS. He agreed to take the post effective from Monday 1st July.
Colin reported on PhD applications. The situation at the moment is there are 5 offers out and three have accepted, James Brotherston, Allan Clark and Daniel Sheridan. Daniel is transferring here. Samuel Staton and Jonathan Colby have not yet accepted.
We had various suggestions for summer studentships from our own undergraduates going from 3rd into 4th year and in the end we have two to be funded, Nicholas Wolverson and Matthew Prowse. It was suggested that next year we should announce the Summer Studentships earlier. There will be a post available for a Postgraduate Assistant for software support.
Visitors: We still have Bartek Klin and Paolo Ballarini. Linda Brodo is going to leave at the end of July as is Kaoro Katayama.
Javier is going to leave. Stefan Schwoon is leaving. Alin Stefanescu and Claus Schroter will leave probably in March.
Research grants look quite healthy with over 4 million and possibly going up.
Recent grants: Javier's got a grant which he going to take with him. Don has got a travel collaboration grant. There are also a couple of grants applied for.
The Advance Workshop happened and Stephen and Jane organised a PASTA workshop. Stephen said it was a small one day affair which was successful and fun. Jane said they had very positive feedback from it.
There is a position in DATABASE Systems which is advertised. The Division is advertising three posts, one Readership and two Lectureships.
Kousha Etessami was here last week and is returning in September as a lecturer.
4. TPG course report (John Longley). John supplied a printed report on the 2001/2002 TPG course which has recently finished. He expects to have all the marks back within a week or so and will circulate them to students and supervisors.
The 1st term was a great success while the 2nd term was a bit less so. The 1st term had a very large number of participants, both normal students and visitors. It consisted of the core subjects. Some of them were updated in content. It was more personalised this year with John initially holding short individual meetings with students and their supervisors.
In the 2nd term there was not a wide choice of optional courses and those that did run were biased towards pure theory logics, semantics etc. This was very good for the hardcore theory students but not so good for the others as it was not a balanced selection. Two students, Jennifer and Alin, did not feel it was worth their while attending any of the 2nd term courses hence they did not sit the exam. They both felt the 1st term courses were "necessary and sufficient" for their needs. They felt from their personal point of view it was more worth while getting on with their research in the 2nd Term. On the other hand there were some people that would like to have been involved in more courses.
Jon put two questions to the meeting
(a) what can be done to make it easier to persuade people to offer courses
(b) should students be forced to take a quota of optional courses irrespective of whether the courses on offer match their own interests.
A general discussion ensued during which Perdita said she was Jennifer's supervisor and thought that in Jennifer's case it was fine the way it worked this year. It was also mentioned as to the possibility of doing 8 hours over one week instead of one hour a week for 8 weeks. John said he was prepared to be completely flexible as to which form the courses take. It was also asked whether it was feasible for it to be counted as teaching. It was reckoned it was not feasible for next year but maybe for the year after. There was a suggestion that whatever scheme was put in place it did not exclude the possibility of some teaching credits.
John sees 2nd term courses as being very informal. His idea is that it gets progressively more informal as the course goes on. It was mentioned as a possibility that people could be asked to do a session on their own research during 2nd Term. There may be a greater response to this.
As Stuart Anderson had now arrived the Chair reverted to "Matters Arising" to deal with the matters passed over earlier. David Aspinall was unable to attend this meeting and Ian spoke as his proxy on the items David wished raised.
David had an action from the previous meeting to raise at the Computer Committee about our students having purely numeric user IDs. As well as being dehumanising their URLs are utterly unmemorable as they include a seven digit number. David raised this, other user and various other issues with the computer committee as well as with individual computing officers. He received mixed responses. His request in reference to Home Web Pages is that both staff and students could benefit from home page addresses that included peoples names.
There is going to be a separate server for staff home pages. The original proposal was, although these were to be redirected to this from the proper Informatics address it would be accompanied with a nuisance ware pop up. It would encourage readers of the page to tell the person that it was not their official URL and that the home pages URL should be publicised. Following David's complaint it has now been removed. It does raise a more general issue. He is extremely unhappy that issues like this are never passed by any academic for approval. They don't even make it to the computer committee. While this is not a weighty decision, but one where somewhere there should be a sanity check by a person representing the people it would affect, it could make a big difference. There is a specific request that PhD students and staff be given be given sensible redirection so that they can quote an Informatics URL which does not look like it is their personal hobbies page but is, actually, their professional publications.
It was stated that "Supported laptops" is a major strategic issue. Everybody seems to have problems with this. For instance the "Doctoral Training" programme has a budget for getting each student who comes on board a laptop. At the moment there is no laptop we can get for them. The problem is from January the model the COs would provide support for was no longer sold by HP. It is, from then, impossible to buy a laptop and have it supported. Currently the COs are promising that one will be looked at by the end of July. Stuart thought the end of July was a firm date for a decision. Monika raised the issue that it was also loosing us money saying that if we wanted to buy machines on new projects we had to buy them in "month one" not in "month fifteen" because someone has to underwrite the depreciation and that costs the Division or Institutes money. Ian agreed there are grants where you have to buy at the beginning of the grant. After discussion the recommendation was that as a matter of urgency a suitable laptop be found. Perdita suggested it should be two, a standard laptop and a super lightweight laptop. This was agreed along with the suggestion that suitable laptops should be identified on a recurrent basis as laptop models change so quickly.
David also passed on some figures from Gordon Duckett. These were distributed with the minutes. They are basically recharge income from grants and expenditure on COs and other types of support staff.
There is a general complaint that there is no support for research software. Marco is being paid to install a number of packages. These now need to be rebuilt for DICE or the next version of Red Hat and the COs will not be doing that except with JAVA. Marco will, if he has time before he leaves. Paul is searching for someone to replace Marco but again there is something of an objection that this is not considered a matter of Computing Support. On the teaching side Carwyn Edwards has had half his time directed to be on support for some class of teaching. The specific request that David would like to make is that as a minimum the same fraction of this year be assigned to support of research software.
Stephen feels that this is not enough and said he was mystified as to where all of the effort goes as they don't support teaching and don't support research.
Stuart pointed out that we now have a group of COs at KB with a good selection of skills and it had, in the past, not been the case for quite a long time. That relatively small group at KB are at the moment actually supporting the bulk of the work of moving all of the services on to DICE. It is a massive amount of work. There are in the region of 40 to 50 different services to be moved on to the DICE platform and the COs are working flat out on these.
Michael Fourman said that when DICE is installed we will then free up some effort. He similarly shares the frustrations and we need to make sure that effort is redirected to giving us some visible support across the division for both teaching and research. What he would like to hear coming from computing committee is a prediction of some fixed time they will start freeing up some of the effort that has been essentially saved by getting DICE in so that we can prioritise these other tasks.
Mike also mentioned there used to be a list of installed software with a, b, c or d against them. One of the letters, possibly c, meant there was someone about who installed it and was around if there was any problems. It was their responsibility as they had installed it. He wished to know if that facility will re-appear. Stuart said he thought it would. A question was raised as to whether it would be possible to put software installed by academics on that list. Stuart replied the list still exists and he believes we will be able to manage it that way. Mike then suggested getting a timetable and procedures for doing it would be really helpful.
It was pointed out that the Research committee has put in recommendations in the past and they have not been acted on by the COs. Colin said that the problem is that the computing committee is not the body that seems to have the power over the over computing. It is the small Executive which does not include academics. He thinks that is very strange as a structure.
Further discussion took place as to the effectiveness of the computing committee, the make up of the executive committee, requests made to COs which academics considered as high priority and the COs considered as low priority. It was suggested it was a cultural thing. When faced with a decision of things to order, or do this or that, COs ask each other and never Academics. Jane spoke about the problems involved in transference of research mailing lists. Though she requested them transferred on a number of occasions between November and June it never happened. She was told it was on Roger's list but of low priority. This week when we were informed the DCS lists were going to be switched off, the International Research lists had still not been done though the bicycle list and the coffee room list for Buccleuch Place had been. Perdita said she had similar problems. Stuart agreed there were problems with the mailing lists and he would look into the matter. Julian spoke about BCTCS, his request for a web site for them and the negative response.
Ian recapped by saying it is clearly an issue and Stuart and Mike are well on top of it. He then raised the matter that David feels that LFCS are being under-represented by him on the Computing Committee because he has been putting all his effort into things related to teaching in CS1. If anyone's interested and willing to sit as a research representative for LFCS on the committee then he would be very keen to support that.
Perdita was on the Computing Committee before David. She gave it up as a total waste of effort because that committee doesn't do anything. Mike said he and Stuart have been talking about the fact we do not have a way of academically prioritising the work of computing staff. There have been issues in teaching also, clearly, issues in research and in mailing lists. He feels they need to grab it by the horns, explain the current system is just not acceptable and put something in its place that works. Stuart feels they are struggling towards something in the teaching but Mike feels it is a general problem.
Ian said this is something which will run and run and will come up again at the next meeting. If anyone can identify small areas within the division where things work well then that might be worth highlighting and bringing to everyones attention as all we have at the moment are discussions about how clearly something is wrong. It was pointed out that the support office works well.
The concern of LFCS is - will it be possible to move into 80 South Bridge and make it into something reasonable to work in. The major problems are air quality and noise. The budget is about 1 to 1.4 million pounds with a possibility of more from Estates and Building for upgrading. The idea would be to upgrade the entire building for sound insulation and bring in decent air. This would use up a significant amount of the money.
On the question of space the estimates are roughly LFCS at the moment occupies about 600 square metres of office space in JCMB. Allowing for circulation space meeting space etc. this should be doubled to about 1200sqm. Single offices are in range from 13 /14sqm, double occupancy 16.7 to 18sqm and professorial offices are about 20 to 22sqm. Monika gave figures as to how many staff we have; 6 professors, 16 lecturers including one soon to arrive, currently 15 RAs some of them in single occupancy and we are recruiting about 8 for various projects which have vacancies. We have 20 to 25 PhD students, some of whom are in treble occupancy, and about 5 visiting PhD students. Each year we have between 3 and 7 "long term" visitors.
Stuart displayed the first draft of a proposed floor plan for a possible layout of offices and public space. The available space in 80 South Bridge will be 1140sqm on D floor, 600sqm on C floor, 150sqm on B floor with some space on E floor. It is proposed to use the 200sqm on A floor for teaching labs. A general discussion ensued as to layout, amount of people, use of space including storage space, heating, lighting, air conditioning, soundproofing, strength of flooring etc.
In winding up Stuart said the idea is to have de-mountable soundproofed partitioning with double-glazing and venetian blinds inside the double-glazing.
Mike said the new Informatics building is 4 or 5 years away. The proposed alterations to South Bridge will allow room and opportunity for Informatics, including LFCS to expand in the meantime. On the question of support Mike also said that there will be consultation about support services across the Division. There will be major changes in three buildings and that means working out the service requirements in all three buildings.
Ian suggested as a specific proposal: "That the meeting charge someone to contact people at the meeting, other members who aren't here, RAs and PhD students, to draw up the following: A list of things we know we have in LFCS which can make us work best. Things we know we have and know that work which we would like to see in the other location. Things we would like to be able to do but can't at the moment for whatever reason because of the building we are in. These could be physical things, space and/or organisation - comments from Monika on support and management would also be welcome. The person should then bring them together as an LFCS statement rather than just individual comments".
Colin said he has already sent quite a few comments to Mike and would be very happy to be the person to be the throughput for anything for this list. Ian said it would be handy for the research committee to know the content of the list which will be sent. Colin agreed.
Mike said that Faculty will be making its decision over the next month as to what to do with its SHRIF allocation.
Mike said the E-Science Centre will be a place available for short meetings ie: day or week long meetings. It is not for regular bookings such as weekly seminars or lab lunch, just short meetings.
(b) Stuart said we did have some recharge denied on a grant. We did get CO funding but did not get secretarial funding. Monica had also reported on this.
Meeting Closed 12.15