The meeting opened at 10am.
Present: Samson Abramsky, Margaret Davis (Secretary), Massimo Felici, Stephen Gilmore, Martin Hoffman, Monika Lekuse, Gordon Plotkin, Don Sannella, Ian Stark (Chair), Colin Stirling, Kostas Tourlas.
Apologies: Julian Bradfield, Jane Hillston, Paul Jackson, Alex Simpson, Perdita Stevens.
Appraisal of Research Staff Ian Stark had collected a list of people who wish to attend a Divisional appraisal course; others had applied to take the University course. There were concerns that the minutes did not make it explicit that agreed actions had to be carried out, and that appraisees should have a copy of the forms. It was not known if any progress had been made on revision of the appraisal format being undertaken by the Staff Development Section.
Ian Stark reported that much relevant information was included in the LFCS Appraisal Document prepared by Samson Abramsky for the Division Review, which was one of the papers for this meeting.
2.1 LFCS membership Following Rod Burstall's retirement, there were now 18 lecturing staff, equivalent to 15.3 full-time. There were 12 research staff, and 21 resident research students. Chris Walton had started as an RA with Mike Fourman, and in March Kostas Tourlas had submitted his PhD dissertation.
There were seven PhD applicants outstanding, some still to commit to the offer of a place, with a wide range of different forms of funding. The LFCS studentship had played a significant role in attracting some of these candidates, by underwriting their support until funding opportunities could be finalised. Many LFCS members would like to have more PhD students but applications remain low. We currently advertise through a string of mailing lists and newsgroups, and the studentship in particular had raised interest. It may be worthwhile readvertising later in the year.
2.2 Teaching Assistant Posts Colin Stirling reported on "teaching assistantships", a new development arising out of casual teaching money held by Helen Pain. These could pay up to £15,000 per year for a generous PhD studentship, but with an obligation to work an average of 10 hours per week on various computing support and tutoring activities. The proposal has to go through the necessary committees but several PhDs were considered suitable for this work.
2.3 Budget Ian Stark reported on the LFCS budget figures included in the Review Document. The grant portfolio was now valued at £3 million, increasing as a result of a new EPSRC grant and two EC grants. Samson Abramsky noted that 86% of our funding is EPSRC based and if less money becomes available from this source it will have an immediate impact; by comparison, most other Institutes draw on a wider range of funding sources.
Infrastructure charges on grants totalling £12,000 had been spent by the Computing Officers on cabling and equipment to provide a faster ethernet. Other income of £21,000 had been allocated to studentships and computing equipment: such as laptops for academic and research staff, a CD writer and a number of licenses for VMware. As large uncommitted cash reserves cannot be kept from year to year and are liable to be removed by Faculty or the University, LFCS had committed its reserve to funding studentships over the next three to four years.
2.4 Small projects LFCS had given funding this summer to employ James Brotherston, a third year student working with Renée Vestergard. There was general approval for a proposal to make some such "summer studentship" a regular arrangement, to encourage potential PhD students among our own undergraduates.
2.5 New Director of LFCS A successor to Samson Abramsky as Director of LFCS, will be appointed by the Head of Division following a process of nomination and, if necessary, an election. Nominations have been requested and a job description is available on the web. The closing date is noon on 2nd June. Colin Stirling has been nominated by Samson Abramsky and Don Sannella.
2.6 Milner Lecture This had been given by Joseph Halpern, along with two other lectures within the Informatics Jamboree. All were most successful, and had attracted a lot of attention. Suggestions for next year's lecturer will be requested shortly: approaches made many months in advance help to confirm the high profile nature of the event.
Samson reported on the Institute self-appraisal review which had been held on 18th and 19th May in Pollock Halls. The document submitted as input to the LFCS appraisal was attached to the papers for this meeting. The review had been attended by Head and Deputy Head of Division, Informatics Professors, Heads of Institutes and a group of external advisors to the Divisional Research Advisory Committee: these were John Gurd (Manchester), Robin Milner (Cambridge), Harry Barrow (Sussex), Stephen Muggleton (York) and Hans Uszkoreit (Saarbruecken).
The LFCS presentation and discussion followed the lines of the document in front of the Committee and Ian Stark, as rapporteur for LFCS, will write up a fairly brief summary of the main points and conclusions. This will be circulated when available.
In summary, LFCS is seen to be in a strong position across the board but should continue to be responsive to new opportunities for research and also in relation to the development of Informatics as a whole. A pressure point is the perception within the Division that LFCS is not operating at the same efficiency as other Institutes, if viewed in terms of converting FTE's into income. This has been documented in Gordon Duckett's paper "Cross Division Subsidy" which shows that the other Institutes have a much higher ratio of PhD students and postdocs to lecturing staff, with research income coming from a more diverse range of sources. It was noted, however, that other Institutes relied more heavily on charities' funding which did not allow overheads. The nature of the research undertaken in LFCS, difficulties with PhD recruitment, completion rates improving, and smaller research grants supporting fewer postdocs account for some of these differences. There may be a need to encourage applications for larger grants supporting more postdocs, a situation already accepted by EPSRC. These arguments will need to continue to be made in any future discussions within the Division to ensure that LFCS does not suffer a contraction, and continues to have a reasonable claim on resources.
The appraisal meeting had given solid feedback confirming the strength of LFCS research work and its general reputation and standing in the international community. There continued to be enthusiasm for the general aims of Informatics and the issue of co-location was strongly supported by the external advisors, although this tended to open old wounds as to where the building should be located.
Samson commented that the LFCS Appraisal Document now had the revised research descriptions incorporated, taking into account comments made by staff. As well as the short output document which will be circulated there are also notes and a tape of the discussion should anyone wish a more detailed account. The PG and RA representatives commented that this output document, particularly in terms of assessment, directions and future prospects, including input from the external advisors, should be available to RAs and PhD students. Although information can be accessed through their particular representative, it was agreed that a lab lunch to disseminate the results could be organised.
It was felt important to raise awareness of the mechanisms for PhD support and the issue of obtaining funding for RAs which both representatives felt should be more transparent. Samson commented that there was a disappointingly low level of participation by PhDs from JCMB in the Jamboree, either in going to events or giving talks. He added that their attendance at Informatics Colloquium events was also low and this was an issue that needs to be addressed in a continuing way.
Ian Stark reported that two postgraduate assistant posts are to be set up. These would be much less substantial than the teaching assistantship mentioned earlier, and would involve people working up to six hours a week, paid at demonstrator rates. One post would involve work on technical reports and the other on software support. These posts were intended for current PhD students, and they will be advertised by email.
Jane had sent her apologies and Stephen reported on this item. A recent consultation exercise had been held on journal usage within the Division. Any unused journals would be reconsidered with a view to cancellation. The results of the exercise showed affiliation of most journals to Institutes, and the number of people in support of retention of each. Ian Stark pointed out that journals were not directly paid for by the Institutes and the attribution list was mainly for administrative purposes. One Journal "Combinatorial Theory Series A" in the LFCS list attracted no support. Mark Jerrum and Kyriakos Kalorkoti were thought to be the only people likely to use it and efforts would be made to consult them. It was agreed that an email would be circulated to LFCS academic staff, stating that unless anyone came forward to support this journal it would be cancelled.
Paul Anderson had sent his apologies and Ian reported on this item. Over the summer there would be rewiring for 100Mb ethernet including the upgrade of switches, and also a move to Redhat 6.2. Ten new desktop machines would arrive for LFCS teaching staff from general divisional funds. A number of people had portables, some self-managed and some supported. There was a divisional standard installation for one particular machine that could be supported, although it would be necessary to find another one soon before this goes out of production. The aim was to support two models, a large and a small portable, but having enough spares to make this possible was tricky.
Paul had been conducting trials with VMware, software which allows Microsoft applications to be run on Linux. The intention was to have this as a division-wide tool and part of commodity computing. It worked very well, but was expensive, and licences would still have to be bought for Microsoft applications.
Paul was preparing a summary of work on DICE, the Divisional Informatics Computing Environment, for Policy Committee. This would be circulated when complete.
The possibility had arisen for LFCS to recruit half a Computing Officer post to provide committed support for research projects. This would cost about £10-15,000 a year, and the length of forward commitment required was unknown, although likely to be for more than a year. This was not well received: there was a feeling that we were anyway not getting good value for CO time paid for through grant funds; financing this post would seem to be paying for CO effort twice and would set a bad precedent. Instead there needed to be continuing pressure to get value for money from the CO time already paid for. It was commented that recharge payments of approximately £50K should already allow for a dedicated half-time CO and this is was position Perdita Stevens was actively following up at Computing Committee.