Category Archives: Competition

Google Hash Code 2016 – team based programming competition

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Could you come up with a way to optimise Internet coverage for Project Loon balloons, or route Google Street View cars through Paris?

Organised by Google, Hash Code  gives you an opportunity to step into the shoes of a Google engineer and tackle these types of challenges in a team-based programming competition for students and professionals. You pick your team and programming language, Google pick a real-life engineering problem to solve.

The competition is divided into two stages:

  • an Online Qualification Round on 11th February at 18:30 CET
    For this round, your team can participate from wherever you’d like, including one of our Hash Code hubs. Hubs allow for teams in the same location (e.g. city or university) to compete side-by-side in a more fun and exciting environment. The Oxford Hackspace is a hub.
  • a Final Round on 19th March
    Top scoring teams from the Online Qualification Round will be invited to Google Paris to compete in the Final Round of the competition.

For more information and to sign up  g.co/hashcode!

SAP and Cabinet Office Hackathon Event – calling student participants

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SAP, in conjunction with the Cabinet Office, is organising a Hackathon on Friday 27 November in London and are looking for two to three students from Oxford to participate.

The event is part of a Cabinet Office project looking at reducing fraud across two government departments – HMRC and DWP.  Students from across the UK with a good technical or mathematical background will participate in the hackathons. The initial event will kick off at noon on Friday and continue through the night to 2pm on Saturday.  SAP are providing accommodation in a nearby hotel. The Cabinet Office will provide the data structures for one of their repositories that holds around 8 million records.

For this exercise the students will take the data structures, gain some basic understanding of one of their systems called Hana Cloud Platform and build a concept that would enable the Cabinet Office to detect fraud more effectively using an analysis of household composition.

Winning teams will go through to a second event in February where the Cabinet Office will be asking them to build a technical demonstration.

For more information about how to participate please contact Martin Gollogly martin.gollogly@sap.com who is organising the event.

Researcher’s Choice Communications Award 2015: Call for nominations

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elsevierIn an effort to further recognize and support the evolving role and skill set of early career researchers, Elsevier and the Fulbright Commission have launched a new category in its bi-annual UK young researcher awards, called the Researcher’s Choice Communications Award, rewarding exceptional skills in scientific communication. In addition to the great work of Early Career Researchers, the ideal nominee will have gone above and beyond to communicate the purpose, meaning and impact of their research to the wider public.

These young researchers have a passion for their work and have demonstrated this through publically communicating about their research in an exceptional way, via traditional or social media channels. A link has been provided (Click Here) to a profile article which was published in the New Scientist recently highlighting examples of outstanding researchers that would be ideal award nominees.

To be eligible, nominees must have begun publishing no earlier than 2012, live in the UK and be affiliated to a UK institution. In order to nominate, this can be done in a public forum on scientific social network Mendeley. Once the nomination goes live on Mendeley, you can also invite your peers and colleagues to ‘like’ the nomination – every like is a vote – and nominees with the most ‘likes’ will be shortlisted and a panel of judges will select the final winner. Alternatively, nominations can be emailed elsevier@kaizo.co.uk and will need to include the nominees: Name, Age, Institution, Reason for nomination / a short description (250 words max) and Links to evidence of the good work (e.g. research, speeches, blog posts, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)

Nominations will be close on the 30th September 2015.

To nominate (via Mendeley) – Click Here

 

 

 

Ulf Aberg Award in Human Factors – Student Competition

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CIEHF-logo-website

The Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors (CIEHF) is offering a prize for the best post graduate student project in ergonomics/humans factors for the academic year 2014/15 as part of the Ulf Aberg Award.

Ulf Aberg was born in 1920 and graduated in electrical engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1945, gaining a Doctorate in 1961. For 14 years he worked with Ericsson, and later with the National Defence Research Institute, on acoustics, speech transmission and information theory.

The application is submitted by the supervisor or course director, and which was usually marked and evaluated by the home university during the immediately preceding academic year. The winner will be presented with £100 and a certificate, and attendance at the IEHF’s Ergonomics & Human Factors Conference.

The closing date for applications is the 31st October 2015

To find out more and apply – Click Here