Final-year undergraduate students are being encouraged to complete the 2012 National Student Survey (NSS) which is being run this term.  The survey is run by Ipsos MORI, the opinion poll organisation. It consists of 23 questions to be answered using a scale from 1 (the lowest) to 5 (the highest).

The NSS provides valuable information to departments to help improve the student experience. Results of previous surveys can be found on the UCL Academic Support web-site NSS page.

Yvonne Rogers, the director of the UCL INTERACTION CENTRE (UCLIC), has been elected to the CHI Academy. Membership of the Academy is awarded by SIGCHI - the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction.

SIGCHI states that; "The CHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. These are the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the disciplines and/or industry, and led the research and/or innovation in human-computer interaction." 

UCL-CS has completed its first International Software Engineering (ISE) event held by TopSE at the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo Japan. Led by Dr. Dean Mohamedally, a Senior Teaching Fellow in UCL-CS's Software Systems Engineering Group, a party of Software Systems Engineering and UCL-CS students were cordially welcomed by Prof. Shinichi Honiden and Dr Tanabe Yoshinori of NII Tokyo.

Dr. Mohamedally reports: "Our students were given an extensive one week project to construct a robotics solution using full software engineering methodologies using mixed teams from UCL-CS and NII Tokyo ... All of the robotics tasks were completed ahead of schedule". More >

UCL FINDS has issued a Xmas newsletter which summarises the events they have sponsored this year. These have included the Sovereign Debt Crisis Panel Debate, the  talk on OTC Derivatives and the Next Reserve Currency Debate.

The newsletter also includes a tribute to Dr. Paval Pinkava who, sadly, died in October.

On 15th Nov 2011 UCLFINDS.COM sponsored the thought leadership debate Managing Collateral in an ever changing world for a full house of 180 industry practitioners in the JZ Young Lecture Theatre at University College London.

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Dr. Dean Mohamedally, a Senior Teaching Fellow in UCL-CS's Software Systems Engineering Group has arrived in Japan with a party of Software Systems Engineering students who will take part in a joint exercise in programming robots for embedded systems - an area in which Japan has particular expertise. Their partners will be students from the TopSE project; a collaboration between Japanese universities and industry. The UCL students began their stay with a visit to NTT,  the Japanese equivalent of BT or AT&T.

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At present, psychiatrists have no clear method of assessing a person’s risk of future episodes of psychosis and predicting how the disease will progress. Now a study led by Dr Paola Dazzan and Dr Janaina Mourao-Miranda at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London in collaboration with the Computer Science Department at University College London reports the successful use of computer algorithms to analyse MRI scans and predict a patient’s outcome.

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Undergraduates on UCL's BSc & MEng Computer Science programmes will hone their problem-solving and programming skills by learning to program robots. By the end of the course, which begins in January, students will have programmed the robots to race around a course and navigate through a maze.

Prof Mark Handley, who will share the teaching with Dr. Dean Mohamedally, explains the robot's capabilities in this video.

An experiment led by Professor Mel Slater (UCL Computer Science) shows how virtual reality can be used to investigate if people have a moral instinct, and if they do, what it would look like in operation. The work has been featured on the BBC's "Horizon" science programme.

Watch: BBC 2's 'Horizon' (from 1min 38s)

In the run-up to the sub-prime crisis, certain OTC derivatives accelerated the irresponsible lending behaviour of certain US banks. Subsequently, when the web of OTC contracts around Lehman Brothers was torn apart the world was plunged into the "Great Recession". Three years later the legislators and regulators have been very busy but are we really on the brink of a meaningful reform of OTC derivatives? Can these markets ever be made as robust as the existing futures and options exchanges?

The IEEE Internet award may be presented annually for "exceptional contributions to the advancement of Internet technology for network architecture, mobility, and/or end-use applications". The 2012 Internet Award is to be presented to Prof. Mark Handley of the Networks Research Group at UCL Computer Science.

Mark Handley's citations states that the award was given "For contributions to Internet multicast, telephony, congestion control, and the shaping of open Internet standards and open-source systems in all these areas."

One of the biggest German weekly news magazines, "Der Spiegel", has featured Dr Bill Langdon's work on the virtual infection of the human genome.

The human genome sequence database contains DNA sequences which appear not to be human but genes of mycoplasma moulds. These moulds routinely infect molecular biology laboratories and it appears they were picked up by experimenters from contaminated samples and inserted into the GenBank database as if they were human. The researchers have reported two examples and suggested there is a need to clean up genomic databases but fear current tools will be inadequate to catch genes which have jumped the silicon barrier.

Further articles on this work can be found at science.shlashodo.org and in Technology Review.

Research by Tim Weyrich, in conjunction with with researchers at Disney Research Zürich, has shown how the light shining through a window on a sunny day could project a picture on the wall. The work, recently featured in an article in New Scientist, demonstrates that complex images can be created by carefully reshaping the surface of a transparent sheet. The system exploits "caustics" - slivers of brightness such as those seen when light shines through a wine-glass - to produce an image.

An explanatory video illustrates the system in action.

Commuters in London are spending £200m more than necessary on their regular commute, according to research by Neal Lathia (UCL Computer Science).

The research (featured on BBC News) analysed data from Oyster payment cards, which many Londoners use for travel on buses, trains and tube. The results show that most commuters' journeys are predictable and that many Londoners do not buy the cheapest ticket. For example, many use Oyster Pay As You Go when perhaps a seven-day travel card would be cheaper. The researchers have produced a "decision tree" to illustrate the complexity of the choice facing travellers.

The researchers aim to show how machine learning techniques could be used to provide automatic assistance to travellers. A paper describing their work will appear at the ACM SIGKDD 2011 Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.