Posted: 17th June 2014

Congratulations go to four postgraduate students who won awards at the 2014 Oxford Computer Science student conference.  The standard of the talks was so high that it was impossible to pick an overall winner and so there were two best talks: 

• Sara Dutta: best talk award for Efficacy of Anti-arrhythmic Drugs during Ischaemia: A Computational Modelling Whole Heart Study
• Miriam Backens: best talk award for Completeness Results for the ZX-calculus for Quantum Computation
• Stefano Ortona: best poster award for ROSeAnn: Reconciling Opinions of Semantic Annotators
• Varduhi Yeghiazaryan: best abstract award for Experiments on the use of Fast Marching for Feature Identification 

Established in the late 1990’s the conference was originally held biennially but is now an annual event and is open to all students and staff within the Department and associated Centres for Doctoral Training.  This year the Conference took place on Friday 13th June and included 12 talks with representation from a variety of research areas.  The conference dinner held at Somerville College was well attended with almost 50 students and staff.

Krzysztof Bar, Chair of the Programme Committee commented that “the conference is organised by students for students and with the exceptionally high involvement  of all members of the Programme Committee this year, it was a particular pleasure to organise.” 

The keynote speaker was Ursula Martin, who opened the conference with an inspiring talk on 'Crowdsourcing, and the challenges of working in a new research area'. Ursula was also involved with picking the best talks, and was impressed with the very high quality of the content and presentation of the talks and posters, and the professionalism of this student-led event.