14 December 2012

Christmas Lectures take pupils from outer space deep into the brain

Photo opportunity: 10am on Tuesday, 18th December at Dalhousie Building.

Leading researchers from the University of Dundee will next week take school pupils from across Scotland on a journey from outer space into the brain before showing them how to analyse their discoveries.

More than 240 fifth- and sixth-year pupils from 14 schools will be welcomed to the University for the School of Computing's annual Christmas Lectures. Researchers and experts will deliver a programme of lectures and demonstrations that will highlight the links between computing and a wide range of other subjects including space and communication.

The event will provide students and teachers with a glimpse of the wide range of computing research being undertaken in the School of Computing. The lectures taking place are:

• Beyond the Earth: Spacecraft Technology from Dundee.
• Whose voice is it anyway? - Communication is the essence of being human, so what happens if you can't speak?
• Yes, but what have Analytics ever done for me?

"We are delighted to welcome so many pupils to our Christmas Lecture, and introduce some of the exciting areas of research being undertaken at Dundee," said Dr Karen Petrie from the School of Computing.

"Professor Steve Parkes will discuss everything from the design of spacecraft nervous systems, to research on guidance systems used to land robotic spacecraft on the surface of other planets, to the monitoring of the Earth's environment. He will introduce research helping to protect our planet and to explore beyond it.

"That will be followed by Dr Annalu Waller exploring how we can harness speech language technologies to give people a voice. She will ask how computers can go beyond communicating basic needs and wants to empower people to share jokes, hopes and desires.

"In the third, and final, lecture Professor Mark Whitehorn will introduce the pupils to analytics, the process of extracting useful information from data. This used to be simple, but in this new world of big databases and the web, much, much more subtle analytics are going on. In this talk he'll take a look at some of them and try to explain the weirder ones."

"Live demonstrations will be used to bring these theories to life and teach the pupils more about cutting-edge research taking place here that impacts on all our lives."

The programme will run from 10am-1pm on Tuesday, 18th December, with lunch provided for pupils and teachers in the Queen Mother Building afterwards.

Pupils from the following schools will be in attendance:
Arbroath High School, Clydebank High School, Craigie High School, Dundee High School, Grove Academy, Hazlehead Academy, Inverkeithing High School, Madras College, Menzieshill High School, Perth Academy, Perth High School, St Columba's High School, Webster's High School, Woodmill High School.

For more information visit: www.computing.dundee.ac.uk/christmaslectures/index/home.html.

For media enquiries contact:
Grant Hill
Press Officer
University of Dundee
Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN
TEL: 01382 384768
E-MAIL: g.hill@dundee.ac.uk
MOBILE: 07854 953277