Newer news items can be found on our news pages.
Researchers receive funding to explore ambitious new ways of improving AI security
7 October 2026
At a time when concerns about AI safety are hitting the headlines, and even some AI leaders themselves are urgently warning we need to develop the technology more carefully, three researchers here are receiving funding from a £50m UK government programme to explore ambitious new ways of improving AI security. More …
Undergraduates' work is presented at major conference
6 October 2026
Among the presenters at a major ACM conference today will be an undergraduate from this Department, sharing research on ways to improve bias and accuracy in new AI tools that are being developed to assess patients' mental health. More …
Professor becomes new head of Royal Meteorological Society
1 October 2026
Professor Emily Shuckburgh CBE has today (1 October 2026) become the President of the Royal Meteorological Society. Emily is Professor of Environmental Data Science in this Department. More …
National Cyber Award for our Professor of Emergent Harms
29 September 2026
Many congratulations to our colleague Prof Alice Hutchings, who was honoured with The Alan Turing Cyber Leadership Award yesterday (28 September) at the National Cyber Awards 2026. More …
How new AI tool could help efforts to improve food security in the Global South
29 September 2026
Tessera, an AI tool that can map crops from satellite images, could offer valuable help to those working to improve food security in the Global South, new research suggests. More …
Wheeler Lecture 2026: 'Mind the Gap in Quantum Computing'
16 September 2026
The 2026 Wheeler Lecture will focus on the 'Challenges & Opportunities in Closing the Algorithms-to-Devices Gap in Quantum Computing'. More …
Sleep app tracks link between air pollution and a bad night’s sleep
15 September 2026
Daytime pollution is strongly linked to higher levels of coughing at night, even where local pollution levels are below the World Health Organization's (WHO) recommended daily exposure limit. More …
'Why we should amend copyright licences to halt AI misuse and reassert human control'
27 August 2026
Three leading researchers in human-computer interaction have told the journal Nature about their concerns over the failure of current copyright licences to protect their work from misuse by AI. More …
Learning about student life on our Women in Computer Science residential
18 August 2026
Going to lectures on quantum computing and wearable technology, watching a mock admissions interview, doing a programming workshop and touring Cambridge colleges. These were among the activities sampled by the prospective undergraduates who came to our Women in Computer Science residential course last week. More …
Stayin' Alive: How Global Stolen Data Markets Thrive on Telegram
17 August 2026
Though law enforcement agencies are closing down an increasing number of cybercrime marketplaces, bad actors are not just giving up and going away. Instead, they’re reconvening on other platforms, most notably the messaging app Telegram, as a researcher told the USENIX Security conference last week. More …
The Red Queen hypothesis - a new way forward for self-improving AI
21 July 2026
At a time when there's keen public interest in AI that can make itself better, researchers here have tackled one of the central challenges affecting its development. More …
Meet the researcher teaching AI drones to count trees
21 July 2026
A drone swoops low over an alpine forest. It climbs suddenly to follow the contours of the sharply rising landscape. Pulses from its lidar (light detection and ranging) instrument – a laser mapping tool – rapidly scan the trees below. More …
Welcoming students at our 2026 Open Days
14 July 2026
We held Open Days here on 9 – 10 July for prospective undergraduate students. More …
How AI could bring satellite crop monitoring to the world's most vulnerable farms
2 July 2026
Small farms grow much of the world's food, but from space they are nearly invisible. Their fields are tiny and ill-defined, and the satellite tools built to track crops were designed for the large uniform fields of industrial agriculture, not the small sub-hectare plots that feed many of the world's poorest people. More …
Cambridge's history of pioneering computer science inspires generous gift from alumnus
30 June 2026
An entrepreneurial alumnus whose time at Cambridge helped him develop his fascination with computers into a string of successful businesses is endowing a professorship and a PhD studentship in this Department. More …
Joining the Science of Fundamental AI Research Lab, a major national initiative
23 June 2026
This Department is delighted to be part of the newly announced Science of Fundamental AI Research (SOFAIR) Lab, a major national research initiative led by Professor David Barber and hosted at UCL, working in collaboration with Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. More …
A Blue Plaque for EDSAC – Cambridge University’s pioneering first computer
23 June 2026
A blue plaque was unveiled in this Department today, 23 June 2026, to commemorate the development of EDSAC, a landmark event in the history of modern computing. (See a video of the full unveiling ceremony here.) More …
OBE for leader in computing education
13 June 2026
Many congratulations to our colleague Professor Sue Sentance who has been awarded an OBE in the 2026 King’s Birthday Honours! She is recognised for her services to education. More …
Royal Society Fellowships honour two Computer Scientists
26 May 2026
A Royal Society Fellowship is an accolade awarded to pioneers and leaders in their scientific fields. Anuj is a theoretician who has developed new methods to study computational complexity. Keshav is a researcher passionate about using our computational capabilities to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss. More …
GitHub celebrates open source compiler project here
25 May 2026
Throughout May, code-hosting platform GitHub is celebrating maintainer month, "a month for open source maintainers to gather, share, and be celebrated." As Computer Science research at Cambridge has a long history in open source, we're very glad to see our project xDSL being celebrated as part of GitHub's maintainer month. More …
TESSERA - the AI model helping to protect hedgehogs from space
19 May 2026
Hedgehogs are under threat in this country. Government surveys suggest their numbers have fallen by up to 75% in rural areas since the turn of the century, and sightings of them in our gardens are rare. But now these much-loved animals are getting help from an unlikely new ally: AI. More …
'Test of Time' Award for research into why we can't do without passwords
18 May 2026
Passwords are irritating to manage and can be a weak link in security. Yet they still play a key role in protecting our online identities. Now, research explaining why we're still using them and why they're so difficult to replace has won a prestigious award... 14 years after it was first published. More …
A School for Scoundrels: how cybercriminals learn their trade
12 May 2026
Why cybercriminals get involved with ideological hacking; how restricting customer data sharing by firms can reduce financial fraud; and 'A School for Scoundrels: How Newbies learn in the Cybercrime Ecosystem'. More …
Carbon credits have enabled vital protection of tropical forests, despite being oversold
30 April 2026
Carbon credits have enabled the vital protection of tropical forests despite being hugely oversold, a major analysis led by Cambridge University researchers has found. More …
Gambling ads on social media reach more than twice as many men as women
28 April 2026
Gambling companies advertising on social media are reaching young men – the group most likely to exhibit problem gambling behaviour – at more than double the rate of women, a study has found. More …
Celebrating a 'culture of innovation' at our Hall of Fame Awards
16 April 2026
A semiconductor company distinguished for its rapid growth and the important role it plays in the open hardware movement; a research team turning ordinary earbuds into health sensors; an advance in the field of AI-assisted drug discovery; and a tool used by millions of developers to build, share and run software stacks. More …
Programming a robot car and making music with code at our Cambridge Festival Open Day
24 March 2026
Meet researchers working in robotics, and try programming your own mini robot car. Take a virtual tour of the Dawn supercomputer or make music with Sonic Pi code. More …
Landmark birthday for pioneering computer security research project
24 March 2026
A research project that has developed from an ambitious research idea into a transformative approach to computer security will celebrate a landmark birthday this week. More …
Student-designed technology aids beekeepers and blind learners
18 March 2026
An app that assists beekeepers in identifying sick bees, and an open-source tool to help blind people learn how to program from scratch, were two of the winning Group Design Projects created by second-year students this year. More …
Can we trust AI to use our computers?
16 March 2026
AI makes our world more useful and convenient, saving time – and possibly even our lives. But simultaneously, it creates new levels of risk to things we completely depend on like hospitals, banks, and energy and food supplies. How can we reconcile these tensions between the usefulness and the danger of AI? That’s a question that researcher Hanna Foerster will be addressing this Saturday, 21 March, when she gives a series of talks here on 'Can We Trust AI to Use Our Computers?' More …
Celebrating A Decade of Docker Containers
25 February 2026
A transformative software developer tool that was created through years of work by researchers here, and is now used by organisations from NASA to Netflix, is being celebrated this month by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). More …
How using AI to analyse body sounds can help doctors diagnose heart and lung disease
26 January 2026
Artificial intelligence (AI) models can help doctors make faster and more accurate diagnoses when they’re trained to analyse medical images, such as scans of tumours or photos of skin growths. Now a researcher is investigating if AI can diagnose diseases just as effectively from analysing body sounds like heartbeats, speaking, coughing and breathing. More …
The start-up using AI to predict climate hazards
13 January 2026
Finding a memorable name for your start-up can be inspired by many things – including, it turns out, the discovery of a human corpse in a melting glacier. More …
Summer research placements to support a more diverse AI research community
5 January 2026
Students from backgrounds under-represented in AI are invited to apply for paid AI research placements here this summer. Applications are open until 16 February 2026. More …
200 millionth question attempt made on learning platform co-developed here
4 December 2025
Isaac Science – an innovative learning platform for schools co-developed by researchers here – this week clocked up a major milestone when a student made the 200 millionth question attempt on the site. More …
Cadence supports PhD research into novel computer architectures at our CASCADE Centre
24 November 2025
Thanks to a donation from Cadence, we can further expand the number of PhD students at CASCADE – our new Computer Architecture and Semiconductor Design Centre. More …
How a secure whistleblower technology moved from the research lab to the newsroom
11 November 2025
In a functioning democracy, a free press plays a vital role in holding powerful institutions to account. But for journalism to thrive, citizens must be able to contact reporters securely – especially when revealing sensitive or controversial information. More …
Google Fellowship highlights 'unloved' AI research field
3 November 2025
A PhD student who would like to encourage more researchers into his – currently under-explored – area of AI research is delighted to have won the support of Google. More …
Researchers measure the resolution limit of the human eye
27 October 2025
Is an ultra-high-definition television really worth it? Do you need a 4K or an 8K screen to get the best viewing experience at home? More …
Professor Emily Shuckburgh appointed Chief Scientific Adviser
22 October 2025
Professor Emily Shuckburgh has been appointed as the new Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ). More …
'Efficiency, Resilience, and Artificial Intelligence': the 2025 Wheeler Lecture
22 October 2025
'Efficiency, Resilience, and Artificial Intelligence' was the topic when Prof Moshe Vardi delivered the 2025 Wheeler Lecture here on Wednesday 22 October. More …
CASCADE Computer Architecture Centre welcomes its first PhD students
15 October 2025
The first PhD students are just starting their studies at the CASCADE Centre, our dedicated new Computer Architecture and Semiconductor Design Centre. Welcome, Luisa and Qianhui! More …
Seeking an Assistant/Associate Professor in Algorithms & Complexity
14 October 2025
We are currently recruiting an Assistant/Associate Professor in Algorithms and Complexity. More …
Extending robot minds through collective learning
24 September 2025
Intelligent beings such as humans do not learn in isolation. So neither should robots, argues Amanda Prorok, Professor of Collective Intelligence and Robotics, in an editorial on collective learning in Science Robotics that she hopes will provoke debate among the robotics community. More …
Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship honours Professor of Mobile Systems
22 September 2025
Prof Cecilia Mascolo has just been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She is one of 74 leading figures in the field of engineering and technology to be elected to the Academy Fellowship this year. More …
A summer of accolades for our researchers
18 September 2025
Research by Department members was honoured by several leading conferences and organisations in August. More …
Award supports research into developing new AI tools to advance mathematics
17 September 2025
A new fund that seeks to advance the pace and impact of maths discovery by supporting projects important for the field has made a grant to two researchers here. More …
New AI molecular prediction model could speed up drug discovery
15 September 2025
Innovative research conducted in collaboration between a graduate student here and the global biopharmaceutical leader AstraZeneca has led to an important advancement in the field of AI-assisted drug discovery. More …
Summer School offers a taste of life at university
12 August 2025
During our Sutton Trust Summer School this week, a group of A Level students are programming robot cars, taking practical classes in artificial intelligence and computer graphics, and attending lectures on privacy and security. It's all giving them a taste of what it's like to study Computer Science at university. More …
A Level Students complete our Women in Computer Science programme
22 July 2025
A group of Year 12 students from across the UK visited Cambridge for a residential course at the end of our five-month Women in Computer Science programme. Congratulations to them on their hard work and achievements. More …
Welcoming prospective students at our 2025 Open Days
8 July 2025
We're holding Open Days in the Department this week (10 and 11 July) for prospective undergraduate students. More …
AMD supports CASCADE Centre to advance PhD research in Computer Architecture and Semiconductor Design
2 July 2025
Thanks to a donation from AMD, we're expanding the number of PhD students we will welcome this autumn at CASCADE – our dedicated new Computer Architecture and Semiconductor Design Centre. More …
Researchers say AI art protection tools still leave creators at risk
24 June 2025
Artists urgently need stronger defences to protect their work from being used to train AI models without their consent. More …
King’s Birthday Honours for two Department members
14 June 2025
Two members of our Department are among those featured in the King's Birthday Honours 2025, which recognises the achievements and contributions of people across the UK. More …
Colleagues' achievements recognised with Senior Academic Promotions
11 June 2025
Congratulations to the three members of this Department who have been promoted as Professor. More …
Guardian launches messaging tech for whistleblowers developed with researchers here
9 June 2025
From today, whistleblowers can contact journalists more securely thanks to a new confidential messaging technology co-developed by researchers here and software engineers at The Guardian. More …
New Associate Professor in Wearable Computing
4 June 2025
"One of the next frontiers for AI lies in deciphering human-centred data captured by wearable devices." So says Dr Dong Ma who will join us in January 2026 as an Associate Professor in Wearable Computing. He will be contributing to our research and teaching in this area. More …
Transforming Robot Dexterity
29 May 2025
As part of a highly ambitious UK research programme to improve Robot Dexterity, Rika Antonova – an Associate Professor here at the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology – is leading a new project to co-evolve smarter robot bodies and learning. More …
Welcoming our new Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction
27 May 2025
Dr Katie Seaborn will be joining us as a new member of our faculty in February 2026. She is coming here as an Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction and will be contributing to both our research and our teaching in this area. More …
Royal Society Fellowship honours Theoretical Computer Scientist
20 May 2025
Our colleague Professor Andrew Pitts has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, it was announced today (Tuesday 20 May 2025). More …
Can AI offer better conservation advice than human experts?
15 May 2025
With the world facing a biodiversity crisis, conservationists need accurate evidence to help them decide how best to protect species and habitats. But the information they require is scattered across thousands of scientific studies. Can AI tools like Chat GPT help them find it more quickly and reliably than humans? More …
Government pushes for adoption of cybersecurity technology co-developed here
7 May 2025
The UK government has announced measures to drive the commercial adoption of CHERI, the pioneering cybersecurity technology co-developed by researchers here. More …
Gift from alumnus supports PhD programme in Computer Science
23 April 2025
Ten years after he completed his own PhD here thanks to a scholarship, an alumnus is giving another student here the same opportunity. More …
Celebrating our students' Group Design Projects
2 April 2025
Awards were presented at the end of term to those second-year students judged to have created the most outstanding Group Design Projects. More …
Touring a supercomputer and meeting robots at our Cambridge Festival Open Day
31 March 2025
Taking a virtual tour of the Dawn supercomputer. Chatting to a robot or making music with code. Discovering how AI can help with insomnia, or turn you into a guitar genius. Solving the logic puzzles that unlock a pirate's treasure chest, or trying out some Computer Science 'Taskmaster'-style tasks. More …
Hosting the 2025 Oxbridge Women in Computer Science Conference
6 March 2025
We're getting ready to host the 2025 Oxbridge Women in Computer Science Conference here in Cambridge this May. More …
Recognition for "significant achievements in computing"
12 February 2025
Congratulations to Prof Cecilia Mascolo who has today been named a 2024 ACM Distinguished Member. This accolade is awarded to computer scientists "for significant achievements in computing beyond the norm". More …
Campaigners call for concerted effort on software memory safety issues
6 February 2025
Led by researchers in this Department, campaigners across industry and academia are calling for a concerted effort to finally solve the stubborn security issue that lies behind the majority of all cyberattacks. More …
January Showcase highlights importance of humans in computing
27 January 2025
Human-centred computing and human-machine interaction were the topics in our latest Research Showcase. Taking place on 23 January 2025, it comprised a series of short talks by early-career researchers here. More …
Can we use AI to regulate AI?
10 December 2024
Can we use AI to help regulate AI? That’s one of the intriguing question researchers in this Department will pose at a conference this Sunday, just weeks before parts of the EU AI Act – the world’s first comprehensive law on the use of AI – take effect. More …
The researcher looking for better ways to prove systems software is correct
26 November 2024
In today's world, systems software – low-level software such as operating systems and hypervisors – is absolutely vital in running our computers and mobile phones. More …
Fellowship funds new research into 'hearable' health sensors
25 November 2024
Exploring how to turn 'hearable' devices like earbuds into genuinely trustworthy and reliable instruments for measuring human health and fitness: that's the target of a new research project that will shortly get underway. More …
Arm donation funds PhD students in new Computer Architecture Research Centre
20 November 2024
Arm is donating £3.5 million to enable 15 PhD students over the next five years to study at CASCADE – our dedicated new Computer Architecture and Semiconductor Design Centre. More …
New alliance launches to tackle cybersecurity threats
12 November 2024
A new alliance launches today to take forward a pioneering cybersecurity technology co-developed by researchers here. More …
Using AI to understand and tackle the spread of fake cancer treatments
29 October 2024
How is medical misinformation being spread online? Who is spreading it? And can we develop tools to reduce the harm caused to patients by conspiracy theorists and scammers selling fake cures? More …
The 2024 Wheeler Lecture - 'Supercharging the Human Mind With AI'
27 October 2024
Professor Yvonne Rogers, Director of the Interaction Centre at UCL, was our speaker for the 2024 Wheeler Lecture. 'Supercharging the human mind with AI' took place here in the William Gates Building on Wednesday 23 October and the recording is below. More …
Lovelace Medal for Dr Sue Sentance
24 October 2024
Many congratulations to our colleague Dr Sue Sentance, Director of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre here. She has just been awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal 2024. More …
Researchers' work on electronic eavesdropping attacks wins Best Paper Award
16 October 2024
For their research into ways that spies can pick up information by 'eavesdropping' on the signals that computer devices emit, Dimitrije Erdeljan and Markus Kuhn from the Department's Security Research Group have won a Best Paper Award. More …
Nobel Prize for our alumnus Sir Demis Hassabis
9 October 2024
"The reason I've worked on AI my whole life is that I'm passionate about science and finding out knowledge, and I've always thought if we could build AI in the right way, it could be the ultimate tool to help scientists, help us explore the universe around us. I hope AlphaFold is a first example of that." More …
ERC Starting Grant awarded for research on new quantum algorithms
5 September 2024
What does designing new quantum algorithms have to do with predicting the outcome of a general election? The surprising answer is, more than you might think. It turns out that an exit poll on the night of a general election could be a good proxy for the way such new quantum algorithms will need to work – namely, by inferring the answer based on a small, randomly-selected sample space. More …
Meet 'Terra', the AI aiming to map terrestrial life on the planet
2 September 2024
We've all read the urban myths about how evil Artificially Intelligent robots are going to take over the world. Now meet 'Terra' – an AI that researchers hope will help us save the planet by mapping the terrestrial life on it. More …
Experiencing life as a Computer Science student
12 August 2024
Students on our Sutton Trust Summer School last week learned about algorithms, experimented with computer graphics and attended lectures on cybersecurity as they learned what it's like to study Computer Science at university. More …
PhD student awarded Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship
9 July 2024
Many congratulations to PhD student Chaitanya Joshi, one of just five students across Europe to receive a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Europe 2024. More …
First students complete our Women in Computer Science programme
8 July 2024
The first group of Year 12 students to complete our five-month Women in Computer Science programme have just visited Cambridge for an end-of-course residential. Congratulations to them on their hard work and achievements! More …
Welcoming prospective students at the 2024 Open Days
4 July 2024
We're holding Open Days in the Department today and tomorrow (4 and 5 July 2024) when we're welcoming prospective undergraduate students. More …
The computer scientist whose technology helped millions to prove their identity
25 June 2024
John Daugman - a pioneering computer scientist whose iris recognition algorithm helped change the lives of millions of people - died earlier this month at the age of 70. More …
Celebrating Computer Architecture
20 June 2024
At a special event in June we highlighted the work in Computer Architecture taking place in Cambridge - and discussed ways to build our future capacity in this field by creating a new Computer Architecture research centre for PhD students. It is called CASCADE – the Computer Architecture and Semiconductor Design Centre More …
lowRISC and the Sunburst Project Bring CHERI Hackathon to Cambridge
17 June 2024
A hackathon held here in the Department gave participants the chance to explore the development of secure applications for Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices using a novel secure architecture. More …
Six colleagues' achievements recognised with Senior Academic Promotions
12 June 2024
Congratulations to the six members of this Department who have been promoted as Professor! More …
'Escaping the Pointless' research wins undergraduate top prize
5 June 2024
Many congratulations to 3rd-year undergraduate Jakub Bachurski! He has just been named the Undergraduate Grand Finals Winner in the Student Research Competition run by the Association for Computing Machinery. More …
The Atomic Human - Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI
5 June 2024
The Atomic Human, a new book by our DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning, will try to reset the conversation around artificial intelligence when it is published this week. More …
Cybercrime under the spotlight at June conference
15 May 2024
Why we should treat organised international e-crime the way we treat a pandemic; understanding the full range of harms suffered by ransomware attack victims; and how the UK National Cyber Crime Unit has used honey traps to disrupt cybercrime-for-hire marketplaces. These are just three of the topics that will be discussed at the Annual Cambridge Cybercrime Conference in June. More …
CHERI workshop brings attendees to Cambridge
13 May 2024
Dozens of attendees attended a workshop for the industry, academia and government experts evaluating a pioneering new cybersecurity technology co-developed here. More …
A farewell to Jack Lang
7 May 2024
We're saddened by the death of Jack Lang, an enthusiastic supporter of the next generation of computer scientists and company founders who had a long association with this Department. Jack died on 23rd April, aged 76. More …
Gold and silver award for student's cutting-edge research
1 May 2024
A Livery Company celebrating 400 years of history is honouring a student researching cutting-edge technology. More …
Meet our Planetary Computing Fellows
24 April 2024
Meet our new Planetary Computing Fellows Dr Michael Dales and Dr Sadiq Jaffer, who are working on harnessing the power of computer science to tackle the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Both their roles have been made possible through philanthropic support. More …
Celebrating at our Hall of Fame Awards
19 April 2024
A world-leading British semiconductor company; a project investigating how robots could help boost our mental wellbeing; an email app so fast it promises to give users four hours back a week; and leading research into deterministic parsing. These are the winners of our annual Hall of Fame Awards, which were presented on Thursday 18 April in a ceremony at Queens' College. More …
Success for inaugural Cambridge Algorithms and Complexity Workshop
17 April 2024
Stellar speakers and a growing interest in the power of Theoretical Computer Science to shed light on central problems in mathematics and computation made the inaugural Cambridge Algorithms and Complexity Workshop this week a great success. More …
Ross Anderson, 1956 - 2024
3 April 2024
Ross made significant contributions across many areas of computer security and beyond, including cryptology; cryptographic protocols; cybercrime; hardware security and tamper resistance; information hiding and steganography; peer-to-peer networking; the security of application programming interfaces; the usability of computer security methods; the economics of information security; the connection between security and human behaviour; and many more. He was one of the founders of the field of security economics which explored how ideas from economics can be used to improve our understanding of computer security as well as better inform public policy. More …
Marking 20 years of Women@CL
27 March 2024
The Department's Women@CL network - which exists to support female and non-binary computer science students here - is 20 years old! To celebrate this milestone, we held a special anniversary event on Wednesday 20th March 2024. More …
Meeting robots, solving puzzles & making music with code at our Cambridge Festival day
19 March 2024
Playing a negotiation game with a robot to see how may points you could win. Using your computational thinking skills to solve the puzzles that will unlock a pirate's treasure chest. Or making music with code. These were just some of the activities visitors were able to try at our Cambridge Festival Open Day on Saturday 16 March 2024. More …
Students' Group Design Projects enjoy success
14 March 2024
Our second-year undergraduates exhibited their Group Design Projects this week. And their success in addressing the challenges they were set impressed the external companies and clients they were working for. More …
Making the development of AI more democratic
14 March 2024
Many congratulations to Prof Nic Lane who was today awarded a Chair in Emerging Technologies by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) for work to make the development of AI more democratic. To do this, he will be focusing on AI methods that are less centralised and more collaborative, and offer better privacy protection. More …
'For excellence in teaching' - Dr Carl Henrik Ek wins a Pilkington Prize
7 March 2024
Congratulations to our colleague Dr Carl Henrik Ek who has won a 2024 Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching. More …
Department spin-out lowRISC and OpenTitan coalition announce world's first commercial quality open-source chip
20 February 2024
While much of our digital world is now based upon open-source software, hardware has remained stubbornly closed-source since the very first modern computers (such as EDSAC) were built in the late 1940s. That is now changing. More …
Showcasing our Climate and Sustainability research
29 January 2024
We shone the spotlight on our research in Climate and Sustainability in January 2024. More …
Research internship programme offers students from under-represented backgrounds insights into AI research
16 January 2024
Research Ready is a new summer internship programme that will offer insights into AI research to students from under-represented backgrounds. More …
New Associate Professor in Computer Architecture
5 December 2023
We’re very pleased to share the news that Dr Prakash Murali will be joining us as a new member of our faculty in January 2024. More …
Micro:bit Educational Foundation supports new research into physical computing in schools
27 November 2023
In a new project about to get underway in our Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, researchers will explore over time the impact of physical computing on children who are introduced to it at primary school. More …
The 2023 Wheeler Lecture: 'A taste of Verse'
15 November 2023
Alumni and students packed out our main lecture theatre today as Simon Peyton Jones delivered the 2023 Wheeler Lecture, 'Beyond functional programming: a taste of Verse'. More …
How can compilers contribute to understanding climate change?
7 November 2023
We’re very pleased to welcome Dr Tobias Grosser as a new member of our faculty. More …
Training the next generation of AI researchers
31 October 2023
We're pleased to announce we're offering a new Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence (AI) from next academic year in partnership with the University of Manchester. More …
Computer modelling helps researchers value the carbon storage potential of natural habitats
30 October 2023
Researchers have invented a more reliable and transparent method than previously of estimating the benefit of carbon stored as a result of forest conservation. More …
The 2023 Postgraduate Open Days
23 October 2023
Virtual Postgraduate Open Days take place across the University of Cambridge from 23 October to 3 November. More …
Announcing the Hopper Studentship
18 October 2023
Professor Sir Andy Hopper has created the Hopper Studentship fund that will enable one recipient every year to study for their PhD here. More …
Supporting Human Intelligence
17 October 2023
In a year that has brought Artificial Intelligence into public debate, it’s timely that a new research group has been set up in this Department to refocus attention on supporting Human Intelligence. More …
Opportunity for research internships in Japan
10 October 2023
PhD students can apply this month for internships that offer opportunities for a wide range of research in a very different cultural environment. More …
Meet our new Head of Department
3 October 2023
A new Head of Department takes up his post here this week as the University’s academic year gets underway. More …
Ada Computer Science - the new online computer science learning platform
13 September 2023
As children return to school this autumn, Ada Computer Science – the new online computer science learning platform – is offering computing teachers a diagnostic test they can use to benchmark where students are in their learning. The test can also be personalised by teachers. More …
Celebrating the renewal of our Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence
11 September 2023
We'll be celebrating the renewal of the Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence next week. The Centre will hold a special Open Day here on Wednesday 20th September. More …
Welcoming alumni to our 'Computer Vision' event
6 September 2023
How AI 'truth-tellers' can check the evidence behind claims made by politicians and by Chat GPT; how different ways of representing environmental data can make it easier for us to understand; and how we can make computing education more relevant to school children. More …
Discovering what Computer Science is like at Uni
16 August 2023
We're very pleased to be welcoming students into the Department this week for the 2023 Sutton Trust / University of Cambridge Computer Science Summer School. More …
Can AI diagnose patients with severe respiratory tract infections?
14 August 2023
Researchers using AI to identify patients at risk of developing severe respiratory tract infections have just won support from UK Research and Innovation. More …
New computational method can integrate gene expression across multiple tissue types
11 August 2023
A novel computational method for integrating gene expression across many different types of human tissue has been developed by a team including researchers here. More …
New Associate Professor in Computer Security and Privacy
11 August 2023
We’re delighted to announce that Dr Martin Kleppmann will be joining us as a member of our faculty from January 2024. More …
Mobile health-monitoring device wins ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant
27 July 2023
Many congratulations to Cecilia Mascolo, Professor of Mobile Systems here, who has won an ERC Proof of Concept grant 2023. More …
Computational method produces robust roadmap of how brain regions are related
18 July 2023
Researchers using computational methods to study MRI scans say they can produce a more detailed picture of the structural architecture of the human brain than was previously possible. More …
Researcher receives 'Test of Time' Award for her work on data stream processing
17 July 2023
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) – the world's largest association of computing professionals – has honoured a researcher here for her work on the efficient use of cloud resources for data stream processing. More …
Award for advancing the sensing capabilities of in-ear devices
11 July 2023
A researcher into the use of wearable devices for health monitoring has just won the 2023 ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Runner-up Award. More …
Free places for UK teachers at computing education conference
10 July 2023
UK-based teachers of computing subjects can apply for a funded place at a leading computing education conference that we and the Raspberry Pi Foundation are hosting in Cambridge this September. More …
Welcoming prospective students at the 2023 Open Days
6 July 2023
We're holding Open Days in the Department this week when we're welcoming in prospective undergraduate students and their parents. More …
Using computing to address deforestation
27 June 2023
Climate change is the greatest challenge of our age. The impacts of climate change are now being felt in every region of the planet. Solutions are being developed here at the University of Cambridge that can be implemented, grown to scale, and used to accelerate the rapid transition to a net zero and then zero emissions economy. More …
Professorial promotions for six of our colleagues
19 June 2023
Pictured above, from left to right: Alice Hutchings, Neel Krishnaswami, Cengiz Oztireli, Hatice Gunes, Rafal Mantiuk and Rob Mullins. More …
More UK companies sign up to test groundbreaking cybersecurity technology
19 June 2023
Eight more companies have signed up to help test a pioneering new approach to cybersecurity that started life here. More …
ACM Programming Languages Software Award goes to OCaml researchers
19 June 2023
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest association of computing professionals, today gave the 2023 SIGPLAN Award to a group of developers for their work on the functional programming language OCaml. More …
New Associate Professor in Logical Foundations and Formal Methods
13 June 2023
We’re very pleased to announce that Jon Sterling will be joining us as a new member of our faculty this September. More …
Cybercrime in the spotlight at June conference
8 June 2023
A talk by the FBI on their collaborative approach to investigating cybercriminals. A new approach to studying the relationship between autism and cybercrime. And an analysis of how effective online ad campaigns are in protecting at-risk users from denial of service attacks. These are among the talks on the agenda at the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre annual conference this month. More …
New Associate Professor in Computational Linguistics
30 May 2023
We’re very pleased to announce that Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín will be joining us as a new member of our faculty this August. More …
'Stand-out' dissertation receives ACM award
24 May 2023
Many congratulations to Research Fellow Conrad Watt whose PhD dissertation today received an Honourable Mention for the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. More …
The researchers offering a Pint of Science!
22 May 2023
Four researchers in this Department are talking about their work in pubs this week as part of the science festival, Pint of Science. More …
Looking through the lens of complexity theory
18 May 2023
We’re very pleased to announce that Tom Gur will be joining us as a new member of our faculty this August. More …
Addressing inequalities in the digital society
17 May 2023
Two researchers from this Department are part of a new national initiative exploring how digital services and infrastructures can be made to better support inclusion and equality. More …
Professor elected to Royal Society Fellowship
9 May 2023
Our colleague Professor Peter Sewell has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, it was announced today (Wednesday 10 May 2023). More …
Hosting the Oxbridge Women in Computer Science Conference
26 April 2023
The 2023 Oxbridge Women in Computer Science Conference takes place here in the William Gates Building this Saturday. More …
Deep Gaussian Processes paper wins AISTATS Test of Time Award
26 April 2023
For their paper on Deep Gaussian Processes, our colleague Professor Neil Lawrence and his former PhD student Dr Andreas Damianou have today won the AISTATS 2023 'Test of Time' Award. More …
Presenting the 2022 Hall of Fame Awards
20 April 2023
A company aiming to 'invent the way humanity interacts with AI'; a project investigating if we can identify patients with Alzheimer’s disease by using GPS to track how well they navigate their way round their local area; a platform offering a unified approach to federated learning; and a research centre scaling up the supply of deforestation-avoidance carbon credits to help tackle tropical deforestation. More …
Getting ready to welcome two new Gates Scholars
17 April 2023
We look forward to welcoming Gates Scholars 2023 Anais Berkes and Gregor Feierabend when they join us later this year! More …
Researchers named joint winners of UK-US challenge to detect financial crime
4 April 2023
A team led by Professor Nic Lane has been announced as joint winner of a prize to drive ‘innovation in privacy-enhancing technologies that reinforce democratic values’ for its work on tackling international money laundering. More …
ERC grant for work on making our data and systems SAFER from malicious attacks
30 March 2023
Congratulations to Professor Peter Sewell who was today awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for his project 'SAFER' – 'Secure Foundations: Verified Systems Software Above Full-Scale Integrated Semantics'. More …
Talking to robots and making music with code...
19 March 2023
Talking to robots and making music with code were just two of the activities visitors could try out at our day of open events on Saturday 18 March. More …
Students find success at design project awards
15 March 2023
Three teams of second-year students took home the honours today when the Part 1B Group Project Awards were announced. More …
Connecting computer science and the climate crisis
7 March 2023
Researchers have developed an algorithm that uses computer vision techniques to accurately measure trees almost five times faster than traditional, manual methods. More …
Micro:bit Educational Foundation supports PhD research into helping children acquire digital skills
6 March 2023
Through a partnership with a research centre here, Micro:bit Educational Foundation is supporting a PhD student who wants to help more children around the world to acquire digital skills. More …
AI truth tellers. Fact... or fiction?
13 February 2023
Fact-checking has become increasingly important because of the speed with which both information and misinformation can spread in the modern media ecosystem. But fact-checking is a time-consuming task. For example, to judge the validity of claims about how many jobs were gained under the Trump administration compared to the Obama administration, a journalist would need to search many sources and evaluate the reliability of each of them before making a comparison. More …
Student wins award for work on pioneering cybersecurity technology
30 January 2023
An undergraduate working on a pioneering new way to make our digital devices more secure has become the third student to win the annual Gold and Silver Wyre Drawers' Award for Excellence and Achievement in Computer Hardware. More …
Showcasing our security research
26 January 2023
From protecting whistleblowers to preventing the abuse of item-tracking technology, and from software compartmentalisation to cybercrime, a Security Research Showcase in January 2023 highlighted some of the security work being carried out here. More …
Federated learning tool wins ERC Proof of Concept grant
24 January 2023
Congratulations to Nic Lane, Professor of Machine Learning Systems here, who has won an ERC Proof of Concept grant 2022. More …
Sandy Fraser: a memorial to his achievements
20 January 2023
We're holding a memorial in February for Dr Alexander Fraser, a computer science pioneer whose work was fundamental to the development of the internet we use today. This special event will remember and celebrate his legacy. More …
Datacentre electrical maintenance: Fri 13 Jan 2023
29 December 2022
Work to upgrade power resilience in the Computer Lab's datacentre (GN09) will take place from 10th until 13th January 2023, requiring a shutdown of some electrical circuits in our datacentre for most of 13th January. This will require powering off a number of (mainly) research servers, and some network equipment connecting a larger set of research servers. Owners of affected servers have been contacted. We have some (very limited) capacity to provide temporary power to some machines if arranged in advance. More …
Evaluating work to support the next generation of AI leaders
7 December 2022
The Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, which is based in this Department, is playing a key role in a new programme of work aimed at supporting the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) leaders and building a more diverse, inclusive AI ecosystem. More …
The researcher scaling new frontiers in multi-robotic research
6 December 2022
In the Prorok Lab here, Dr Amanda Prorok and her team are researching practical ways to solve problems that require robots to coordinate with each other. This includes 'flocking' - a process in which each robot in the group adjusts its velocity and aligns with other robots while maintaining a predetermined path and avoiding collisions. More …
Applications open for new 'Data Science For Science' course
6 December 2022
PhD students and postdocs across Cambridge University can apply for a new training course that will equip them with skills in using data science to advance their own scientific research. More …
Machine learning enables AI systems to do maths in English as well as logic
1 December 2022
Work on using AI to help computers solve mathematical problems is being presented at a major international conference this week – including the finding that AI systems can now learn maths in English (in addition to logic) and it’s helping them to improve their problem-solving powers. More …
Fitness levels can be accurately predicted using wearable devices – no exercise required
29 November 2022
Using machine learning, a team of researchers has developed a new method of measuring overall fitness on wearable devices. It is highly accurate and outperforms current consumer smartwatches and fitness monitors – even though it does not require the device wearers to exercise. More …
Turning the metaverse from myth to reality - POSTPONED
27 September 2022
The Wednesday Seminar by our alumnus Herman Narula - the CEO of Improbable and author of Virtual Society - planned for 9th November has had to be postponed. More …
The Long Reach of Computer Science
21 September 2022
Four speakers will introduce this Department and some of our latest research – in Security, Human-Computer Interaction and Education – at an event here on Friday 23 September. More …
Seeking volunteers for federated learning user study.
20 September 2022
Researchers here are seeking up to 500 volunteers for an experiment that could help shape the future of private digital advertising. Could you help them out by taking part? More …
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for PhD student
15 September 2022
Many congratulations to machine learning PhD student Francisco Vargas, who has won $40,000 in funding to conduct a project described as 'an exciting theoretical tour-de-force'. More …
Pioneering cybersecurity collaboration shortlisted for prestigious award
5 September 2022
Researchers here, working with colleagues at SRI International and Arm, have jointly developed a potentially game-changing new cybersecurity technology called CHERI ('Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions'). More …
The robots assessing children’s mental wellbeing
1 September 2022
Robots can be better at detecting mental wellbeing issues in children than parent-reported or self-reported testing, a new study suggests. More …
Welcoming the Sutton Trust Summer School 2022
23 August 2022
We're very pleased to welcome students into the Department this week for the Sutton Trust / University of Cambridge Computer Science Summer School. More …
Remote monitoring successfully tracks Covid-19 progression over time
19 August 2022
As the UK licences a new Covid-19 vaccine ahead of this autumn’s booster campaign, researchers here have unveiled another tool that could help control the spread of the virus. More …
New analysis of noisy balanced allocations wins Student Best Paper Award
27 July 2022
A PhD student here is receiving an award this week for the analysis of a model of balanced task allocations that has wide relevance to industry. More …
Death of computer science pioneer Sandy Fraser
25 July 2022
We're sad to record the death of Dr Alexander Fraser, a computer science pioneer whose work was fundamental to the development of the internet we use today. More …
Energy and Environment research group launches
19 July 2022
Image: Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash More …
Award for student's work in addressing bias in machine learning
18 July 2022
A PhD student here investigating ways to tackle bias in machine learning systems has won the Young AI Researcher 2022 Award at the Perspektywy Women in Tech Summit in Warsaw, Poland. More …
Department hosts in-person Open Days again
12 July 2022
We really enjoyed welcoming would-be undergraduates into the Department on the Open Days on Thursday 7 and Friday 8 July 2022. More …
New funding programme to help deploy AI for research and innovation
11 July 2022
In a new funding programme, University of Cambridge researchers pursuing innovative applications of AI in research or real-world contexts can apply for small grants through The Accelerate Programme (which is based in this Department) and the Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery. More …
Launching the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre
4 July 2022
We're delighted to be hosting the official launch of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre here on Wednesday 20 July. More …
A plethora of professors
15 June 2022
Congratulations to the eight members of this Department who have been promoted! More …
An OBE for Prof Simon Peyton Jones
7 June 2022
Professor Simon Peyton Jones, a Distinguished Honorary Fellow in this Department, has received an OBE for services to education and to computer science in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2022. More …
Dr Peter Ochieng appointed first DeepMind Academic Fellow in Computer Science at Cambridge
25 May 2022
We're delighted to welcome Dr Peter Ochieng, a researcher in natural language processing and AI, who has just been appointed as the inaugural DeepMind Academic Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. More …
New Python for Science course will help researchers learn programming skills
24 May 2022
The Accelerate Science Programme (based in this Department) and education technology company Cambridge Spark are offering researchers across Cambridge University a new self-learning module so they can learn programming in Python. More …
Cambridge's global reputation in Computer Science recognised in REF 2021
11 May 2022
The results from the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF) - a major UK exercise to assess the quality of research at our universities - are published today. More …
Research Showcase replaces cancelled Wheeler Lecture 2022
5 May 2022
As our speaker is unwell, we are have cancelled the 2022 Wheeler Lecture that should have taken place today (Wednesday 18th May). We are replacing it instead with a Research Showcase event. More …
Professor awarded ERC Advanced Grant for 'trying to prove the impossible'
26 April 2022
For his work in – quite literally – trying to prove the impossible, Professor Anuj Dawar has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant. More …
Hybrid approach to 'Travelling Salesman Problem' produces best results
26 April 2022
Image: Wiktor Karkocha on Unsplash.com More …
Visitors meet our robots & build quantum computers at the Cambridge Festival
13 April 2022
Visitors had wellbeing sessions led by a robot coach, 'built' their own quantum computers, and found out why we need to 'reclaim control' of AI at a day of public events we ran during the Cambridge Festival. More …
Presenting the Hall of Fame Awards
7 April 2022
A tool for diagnosing Covid from recordings of coughing and breathing sounds; a novel AI-powered knowledge discovery business; a demonstration of ways to use Graph Neural Networks to plot the pathways of swarms of autonomous robots; and an analytics tool that helps HR directors with recruitment, and inclusion and diversity in their workforces. These are the winners of our Hall of Fame Awards 2021. More …
Schools compete to crack the code
22 March 2022
There was fierce concentration and lively discussion in one of our computer labs today as 14 teams of students from local secondary schools took part in a coding contest. More …
Students win awards for their designs
16 March 2022
A system to help the RSPB count vulnerable birds. An app for users to compare the carbon costs of travelling by bike, car or public transport. And a tool to help people in rural Bangladesh report climate change effects. More …
'Innovative' teaching wins Dr Amanda Prorok a Pilkington Prize
16 March 2022
Congratulations to our colleague Dr Amanda Prorok who has won a 2022 Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching. More …
Data Trusts Pilots unveiled
15 March 2022
A small fishing town in Devon, and a Scottish project supporting health data research into pregnancy and childhood development, have been unveiled as pilot data trusts. More …
Research into developing a software ecosystem for a more secure digital future
24 February 2022
Congratulations to Professor Jon Crowcroft, Dr Tim Jones and Dr Theo Markettos. Their research projects are among those jointly awarded £7.9m funding to help develop a software ecosystem for a more secure digital future. More …
The science behind that viral Wordle video…
21 February 2022
A natural language processing PhD student created a TikTok video on how to calculate the best first word in Wordle – the online game of the moment – and it went viral, attracting more than one million views. So now he's followed it up with another video to explain the maths behind his thinking. More …
Coding Competition for Schools launched
14 February 2022
We are holding a Coding Competition for Secondary school students here on 22 March. Teams of pupils will be invited into the Department for a day to work on challenges, test their problem-solving skills, meet researchers – and discover more about what Computer Science can do. More …
Showcasing our education research
31 January 2022
The Education Research Showcase, on Thursday 27 January 2022, was recorded and can be watched above: More …
Researching culturally responsive computing teaching in schools in England
27 January 2022
A new research project – 'Roots' – gets underway this month to learn how culturally responsive computing teaching can be implemented in classrooms in England. More …
Pioneering computer processor security rolls out for industry testing
20 January 2022
A pioneering new approach to computer processor security that started life here and is being further developed with Arm and other industry leaders will be rolled out for widescale testing this year through the UK government's £200m Digital Security by Design initiative. More …
New Institute of Computing for Climate Science announced
19 January 2022
The University of Cambridge is partnering with Schmidt Futures in a new software engineering network. Called the Virtual Institute of Scientific Software (VISS), the network will start with four inaugural centres based at leading universities, including a new Institute of Computing for Climate Science here at the University of Cambridge. More …
Student cyclist's frustration over wind noise inspires award-winning research
14 December 2021
Undergraduate student Jack Parkinson would often jump on his bike to get from his college to lectures here in the Department. But it frustrated him that wind noise made it difficult for him to listen to music, or answer phone calls, while he was cycling. So he decided to do something about it. For his third-year research project, he set about exploring existing ways of removing wind noise from a single microphone to see if he could improve on them. More …
The climate crisis: 'change is possible'
7 December 2021
"We are already seeing the impacts of climate change around the world today, in terms of extreme weather events, wildfires, floods, melting polar ice," says climate scientist Emily Shuckburgh, our Professor of Environmental Data Science. "These impacts will only increase if we don’t address climate change today. And that will result in a loss of human society and the natural world as we know it." More …
Support for student using machine learning to understand forest ecosystems
24 November 2021
An award to a PhD student here will help her work with local communities as she uses machine learning techniques to monitor the health, biodiversity and deforestation of Ghanaian forests. More …
DeepMind Scholarships for AI-related learning
23 November 2021
DeepMind Cambridge Scholarships are available for postgraduate courses in computer science, AI and machine learning for students starting in the 2022 academic year. More …
New Centre links computer and conservation scientists to support reforestation efforts
9 November 2021
A new Centre here will bring together computer scientists and conservation scientists to build a trusted marketplace for carbon credits and support global reforestation efforts. More …
AI for science: frontiers, opportunities and challenges
2 November 2021
How can we harness the potential of AI to accelerate scientific discovery? The frontiers, opportunities and challenges of doing so will be discussed on Friday 19th November at a symposium hosted by Neil Lawrence, Deepmind Professor of Machine Learning here. More …
Accelerate Programme funds PhD studentships in Computer Science
25 October 2021
A programme here promoting the use of machine learning to tackle major scientific challenges is offering funding for PhD students starting next autumn. More …
The Internet of Stings
21 October 2021
What happens to all the sensitive personal information our smart devices collect from us? Where does the data picked up by our smart watches, speakers and TVs go, who has access to it and how is it used? More …
The computer scientist who helped design the world’s fastest supercomputer
20 October 2021
Dr Bo Eyole is a Principal Research Engineer at Arm. He studied for his PhD here in this Department and then stayed on as a postdoctoral researcher, thanks to a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, before moving to Arm. More …
Success for our students in two international competitions
6 October 2021
Students from this Department have been successful in two prestigious contests - the International Collegiate Programming Competition World Finals, and the Country-2-Country Capture The Flag cybersecurity competition. More …
The Antiques Code Show
29 September 2021
In 1949 EDSAC, the first computer built in Cambridge, took up an entire room and needed a committee of experts to programme it. Today, the latest – the Raspberry Pi – sits in a hand and is being used to help Primary School children learn to code. More …
Students win award for pilot in-ear personal navigation device
27 September 2021
A prototype personal navigation device we could wear in our ears, created by two students here, has just won an award at an international conference. More …
Mobile phone system that can monitor our happiness wins 10-year impact award
24 September 2021
Developing smartphone technology that can sense our emotions and tell if we are happy or sad has just won researchers here a 10-Year Impact Award. More …
Filer maintenance: Tues 28 Sep (rescheduled)
20 September 2021
Update: this work has been rescheduled for the afternoon of Tuesday 28th September due to contractor unavailability. More …
Twitter to fund four Scholarships in Machine Learning
28 July 2021
A gift from Twitter will fund four Scholarships in Machine Learning (ML) here in the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology. More …
Seeking Data Trusts Pioneers
28 July 2021
New uses of data can improve our health, wealth and wellbeing, but careful stewardship is needed to align these aspirations with concerns about the vulnerabilities that data use can bring, for individuals, communities and society. In pursuit of this goal, policymakers and practitioners have been investigating the role that data trusts can play in growing the digital economy while empowering citizens to influence the terms of data use. More …
Introducing the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre
22 July 2021
We are pleased to announce the creation of a new Computing Education Research Centre here in the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology. More …
ssh users: upgrade of ely / slogin-serv system
21 July 2021
The TSS 'ely', the main machine in the slogin-serv.cl.cam.ac.uk ssh service, is being upgraded as there is a security vulnerability in its kernel. If things don't work, please try slogin-new in place of ely. More …
Alumnus commended for his contributions to computer science
19 July 2021
For the second year running, the judges of a prestigious academic award have commended a former student here for their research contributions to computer science. More …
#StateSchoolProud to be here
7 July 2021
"Don’t worry that you might not fit in. When you get here, you will naturally find other people like you." So says ex-comprehensive school pupil Tanya Morris who is now a Computer Science undergraduate here. More …
Welcome to the Virtual Open Days July 2021
5 July 2021
We are taking part in the University of Cambridge Virtual Open Days from 5-18 July, offering prospective applicants opportunities to find out what it’s like to study Computer Science here. More …
Award celebrates the medieval craft helping power modern-day computers
29 June 2021
A Livery Company rooted in the medieval craft of producing gold wire for embroidering tapestries and robes yesterday presented student Jonáš Fiala with an award celebrating its modern day use in computer hardware. More …
Professor's contributions to computer technology recognised with knighthood
14 June 2021
Many congratulations to Professor Andy Hopper, our colleague of many years and a former Head of Department, whose work was recognised with a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours. More …
Lessons for today from The Class of 1971
9 June 2021
Fifty years ago this month, the first ever Computer Science undergraduates in Cambridge sat their finals before going out to face an uncertain future. And what they went on to do should offer hope to this year’s finalists. More …
Undergraduates win Neurodiversity Hackathon
25 May 2021
Congratulations to first-year undergraduates Marc Harvey-Hill, Yash Shah, Nicole Choong and Matthew Elliot who teamed up to take part in a Hackathon on 'Embracing Neurodiversity' – and won. More …
How many robots does it take to screw in a lightbulb? – The Wheeler Lecture 2021
17 May 2021
'How many robots does it take to screw in a lightbulb?' No, it was not a joke. It was the start of The Wheeler Lecture 2021 on 'Reimagining Robots'. More …
Can Federated Learning save the world?
10 May 2021
Training the artificial intelligence models that underpin web search engines, power smart assistants and enable driverless cars, consumes megawatts of energy and generates worrying carbon dioxide emissions. But as members of this Department will tell an international research summit tomorrow, 11 May, new ways of training these models are proven to be greener. More …
The internship scheme fostering new skills, interests... and careers
27 April 2021
An internship scheme here that allows undergraduates to put theory into practice, develop valuable skills, and discover unexpected research interests and/or career paths, will get underway again in June. More …
Robert Watson wins EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award 2021
26 April 2021
Dr Robert Watson has won the 2021 EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award. This honour recognises European junior researchers (i.e. those no more than 10 years on from receiving their PhD) who have demonstrated exceptional creativity and innovation in systems research. More …
Government to fund more businesses to test CHERI digital security solutions
19 April 2021
The UK government is making more funding available this spring to encourage companies to test out in the 'real world' new digital security solutions developed by this Department as part of the CHERI project. More …
July Data for Science Residency: applications open
14 April 2021
PhD students and postdocs across Cambridge have another chance to apply for a funded training course that is successfully equipping scientists with powerful tools to progress their research. More …
The Wheeler Lecture 2021
13 April 2021
Save the date of Wednesday 12 May, when Professor Daniela Rus - Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT - will be giving this year's Wheeler Lecture. Her talk is entitled 'Reimagining Robots'. More …
Helping Augmented and Virtual Reality realise their potential
5 April 2021
Though the concepts of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) were first demonstrated back in the 1950s and 1960s, a major effort is needed to solve the slew of technical issues that are stopping them achieving their full potential. More …
www-dyn / www-dyn1 rebuilt on Ubuntu 20.04 - www-dyn2 (Fedora 9) shutdown
27 March 2021
The www-dyn service, provided by www-dyn1 runing Fedora 9, ceased working a year ago (the www-dyn2 and www-dyn3 services continued to run). More …
An AI revolution in science? Using machine learning for scientific discovery
23 March 2021
What role could AI play in advancing the frontiers of science? And how can researchers benefit from advances in AI technologies? Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor Machine Learning here, will host a panel discussion on Monday 26 April to debate these questions. More …
Expansion planned for Isaac Computer Science learning platform
22 March 2021
The free Isaac Computer Science learning platform developed by experts from this Department and the Raspberry Pi Foundation is expanding to cover GCSE content as well as A levels. The change is happening in response to overwhelming demand from teachers and students. More …
Success for students at design project awards
17 March 2021
Three teams of undergraduates today won awards for projects including creating an app to help children's nurses in Myanmar, and using a robotic arm successfully to pack 3D objects into a delivery box. More …
A journey to Cambridge on 'the road less travelled'
7 March 2021
After dropping out of school, Sian Gooding went to sell PCs in a high-street retailer. It got her hooked on computing and eight years later she’s an award-winning student here, working towards her PhD. She tells us about her journey. More …
Improving diversity in AI 'would benefit society'
7 March 2021
"I'd urge you to consider a career in AI and data science," Michelle Seng Ah Lee told a group of black state school students recently. "Improving diversity in AI would benefit our industries and our society – making sure diverse backgrounds and thoughts are represented in the algorithms we are releasing into the wild." More …
'I want to make a contribution through science'
5 March 2021
PhD student Mahwish Arif (pictured front right at the Oxbridge Women in Science Conference) arrived here following a stint with the Pakistan Space Agency, a Commonwealth Scholarship and an MSc at the University of Edinburgh. On International Women's Day on 8 March, she tells us about her journey. More …
'Conducting research here has been a transformative experience'
17 February 2021
Meet Dr Ildiko Pete, a postdoc in our Cambridge Cybercrime Centre where she works at the intersection of machine learning and cybersecurity. More …
Showcasing our healthcare research
1 February 2021
Using body sound recordings to train computer models to predict Covid-19, and employing AI techniques in the quest to improve cancer treatment, were among the projects discussed at our Healthcare Research Showcase last week. More …
Students get hands-on with Federated Learning
15 January 2021
At a time when concerns about data sharing and data privacy have soared, students here have had a rare opportunity to experiment with Federated Learning – a technique for training machine learning models across devices without sharing the raw data they hold. More …
Professor named founding Vice-Chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Energy
13 January 2021
Srinivasan Keshav, the Robert Sansom Professor of Computer Science here, has been named the founding Vice-Chair of a new Special Interest Group on Energy set up by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). More …
Data Trusts Initiative offers grants for research bridging theory to practice
17 December 2020
Do you have an idea about the action needed to design real-world data trusts? The Data Trusts Initiative – a new initiative from this Department and collaborators at Birmingham University – has launched its research programme, offering funding for research projects that help bridge the gap between discussions about how data trusts could work and their practical application. More …
Students take the crown in global cybersecurity contest
15 December 2020
Congratulations to the undergraduate and MPhil students of this Department who took the crown in an international cyber security competition last week. More …
January event to showcase healthcare research
14 December 2020
A Healthcare Research Showcase on 29 January 2021 will highlight some of the healthcare projects we're undertaking – including using body sound recordings to train computer models to recognise Covid-19, and employing AI techniques in the quest to improve cancer treatment. More …
Harnessing computing to achieve net zero
3 December 2020
"There are many routes to net zero, but digital technology has a central role to play, no matter what sector or country you look at," says our own Professor Andy Hopper at the start of the Royal Society's new report 'Digital Technology and the Planet'. More …
The ethical hacking competition inspiring future cyber-defenders
30 November 2020
Inspired by a cyber security competition that was co-founded and held here, a worldwide 'ethical hacking' contest takes place this Sunday for competitors who – the organisers hope – will fill a vital skills gap in computer security. More …
Free 'Data for Science' training course for Cambridge researchers
27 November 2020
Accelerate-Spark 'Data for Science' Residency Programme More …
New Fellows will help Accelerate Discovery
18 November 2020
Predicting mental health conditions like schizophrenia; accelerating the development of new materials; investigating the building blocks of living systems; and advancing our understanding of the fundamental dynamics of the Universe. Four new Early Career Fellows who have just joined this Department's Accelerate Programme will be using artificial intelligence to advance their research in these fields – and equipping young researchers across the University with the skills to use it in theirs. More …
Cambridge Ring 'Hall of Fame' Awards recognise our staff, students and alumni
11 November 2020
A computer science researcher helping deploy technology to make a difference in East Africa; a platform that helps companies easily build web apps entirely in Python; research that alerted Apple and Google to a key privacy vulnerability in their smartphones; and a company whose technology makes it simple to connect any display to any computer: these are the winners of our Hall of Fame Awards 2020. More …
'Honour among thieves': the evolution of a cybercrime market
5 November 2020
Researchers at the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre here will today reveal what they’ve learned from analysing hundreds of thousands of illicit trades that took place in an underground cybercrime forum over the last two years. More …
SRI and Cambridge release CHERI software stack for Arm Morello
29 October 2020
The CHERI architecture co-developed by researchers here to protect computer systems from widely-exploited security vulnerabilities takes a major step forward today with the release of software and the first industrial simulator for it. More …
New Data Trusts Initiative will spearhead community-focused data governance
21 October 2020
A new initiative from this Department will build a community of researchers and social entrepreneurs developing fresh approaches to data governance challenges. More …
Future Leaders Fellowship for 3D digital reality researcher
15 October 2020
It’s your weekly meeting with your team and it’s taking place virtually. At the moment, that means looking at a row of miniaturised faces on the laptop screen in front of you. But how would it be if you could put on a pair of virtual reality glasses instead and – thanks to computer-generated 3D models – see all your team-mates apparently sitting in your office alongside you? More …
Using technology to address global challenges
1 October 2020
A University research initiative that addresses challenges in developing countries formally becomes part of this Department today (1 October 2020). More …
Connecting analog microphones to headset sockets
30 September 2020
Connecting USB microphones to a laptop or desktop machine is easy. But analog microphones, which are intended for connection to a camera, voice recorder or amplifier can be more complex, unless your computer has a dedicated microphone socket or you have a USB audio interface. More …
Mobile computing 'rockstar' talks revolution
21 September 2020
Nic Lane, named as SIGMOBILE's Rockstar 2020 for his outstanding contributions to mobile computing, will give the keynote talk 'What is Next for the Efficient Machine Learning Revolution?' at the MobiCom 2020 conference this week. More …
Welcome to the Virtual Open Days September 2020
16 September 2020
We are taking part in the University of Cambridge Virtual Open Days on Thursday 17 and Friday 18 September, where prospective applicants can find out what it’s like to study Computer Science here. More …
OCaml Labs breakthrough - good things come to those who wait
16 September 2020
A group of systems researchers here, along with their industrial and academic collaborators, are celebrating receiving a prestigious award for a breakthrough that took them six years to achieve. More …
Monitoring body sounds 'in the wild' wins student Best Paper award
15 September 2020
Body sounds are an excellent source of information for understanding the state of the human body and monitoring them with digital devices is a technique that is being increasingly explored. But there are many challenges in deploying such devices effectively. More …
Student-Run Computing Facility seeks your help
7 September 2020
The Cambridge University Student-Run Computing Facility (SRCF) is trying to raise funds for a new updated cluster of machines and also taking hardware donations for its free video conferencing service. Could you help them? More …
Some thoughts on slide-driven presentations
4 September 2020
Suppose you created your lecture video directly from Powerpoint? More …
'Robot trainer' receives ERC Starting Grant to study transport systems of the future
3 September 2020
Dr Amanda Prorok, an Assistant Professor and University Lecturer in Cyber-Physical Systems here, has today been awarded a coveted European Research Council Starting Grant. More …
Private-eye-turned-researcher receives ERC Starting Grant to study cybercrime
3 September 2020
Dr Alice Hutchings, a researcher into cybercrime and a University Lecturer on computer security, has today (3 Sept 2020) been awarded a coveted European Research Council Starting Grant. More …
Two new videos about cameras
29 August 2020
A couple of tutorials giving a bit more information about cameras. More …
An update on the recording rooms
24 August 2020
Th recording rooms are nearly ready for use. What might you find in them now? More …
Hosting the Sutton Trust Summer School
18 August 2020
We are sorry the students can't be here in person - as they would normally be. But we're still very happy to be running the Sutton Trust / University of Cambridge Computer Science Summer School this week. More …
Schmidt Data for Science Course scores a hit
29 July 2020
Our first-ever Schmidt Data for Science Residency Programme is underway – and is being enthusiastically received by the 27 PhDs and postdocs selected to participate. More …
Why I thought I wasn't smart enough for Computer Science...
28 July 2020
She was conditioned by a tutor to believe that "girls aren't smart enough for Computer Science". But two years into her degree here, Vasundhara Agarwal now knows that's just not true. More …
Your phone 'could tell us if you have coronavirus'
27 July 2020
A mobile phone app that collects recordings of its users coughing and breathing has been used by researchers here successfully to predict whether people have coronavirus. More …
DeepMind to support a further five scholarships for Cambridge students from backgrounds under-represented in Computer Science
18 July 2020
DeepMind is to support a further five scholarships for Cambridge students from backgrounds under-represented in Computer Science. More …
Aaron is an Apple Scholar
11 July 2020
Congratulations to PhD student Yiren 'Aaron' Zhao. He has just been named as an Apple Scholar in a programme created by Apple to recognise emerging leaders among computer science and engineering postgraduates. More …
Schmidt Data for Science Residency Programme
30 June 2020
We are offering PhDs and postdocs in science disciplines across Cambridge a free 'Data for Science' training course this summer. Aimed at helping participants to apply data analysis to their own datasets and problems, the course runs over five weeks, starting on 20th July. More …
Promotions for five Department members
24 June 2020
Five members of this department have been promoted - and as a result, we have two new Readers and three new Professors here. More …
New programme to accelerate AI research capability at Cambridge
22 June 2020
A new initiative at Cambridge will equip young researchers outside computer science with the skills they need to use machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to power their research. More …
Helping make future technologies more secure
15 June 2020
Two research teams here are among the recipients of a £10 million government investment in 'Digital Security by Design', a programme aiming to help the tech infrastructure of UK organisations and digital devices be more resilient to cyber attacks. More …
We’re old hands at new-style teaching
8 June 2020
The headline that large lectures will be delivered online next year, rather than in person, has raised some concerns. More …
Lockdown 'helps fuel rise in cybercrime'
2 June 2020
Take extra care before buying facemasks or testing kits online, or responding to texts apparently sent to you by the UK government or the NHS. Because while lockdown has helped reduce the spread of the coronavirus, it is also helping fuel a rise in cybercrime. More …
Datacentre cooling works
26 May 2020
An upgrade to the cooling capacity of the department's datacentre (GN09) will take place starting on 1st June 2020, for two weeks. More …
The Wheeler Lecture 2020: The Future of Microprocessors
20 May 2020
The annual Wheeler Lecture looked at the history of microprocessors, how we got to where we are now, and what constraints there are on the future. As predicted, there were laws, graphs and references to Star Wars... More …
Denial-of-service attacks research wins 'Test of Time' award
18 May 2020
A researcher here was presented with an award today for work that he and colleagues conducted more than 20 years ago. More …
OWLS seminars Take Flight
14 May 2020
When coronavirus first saw researchers working from home and unable to meet for the normal weekly seminars "that are the lifeblood of research groups", new Research Fellow Jamie Vicary (pictured above, top right) thought something should be done. More …
How Isaac is helping students learn Computer Science from home
4 May 2020
A Computer Science learning platform developed by experts from this department and the Raspberry Pi Foundation has just added new materials to provide extra support for those learning or teaching A Level Computer Science from home. More …
svr-ssh-0 now Ubuntu 20.04 - please try it if you use slogin-serv
3 May 2020
slogin-serv.cl.cam.ac.uk is provided by three servers, mostly by "ely". One of the two alternatives, svr-ssh-0.cl.cam.ac.uk, has been upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04. If you routinely use slogin-serv, please try using svr-ssh-0 and email sys-admin if tere any problems. Thanks. More …
The essential travel assistant that could guide us out of lockdown
28 April 2020
Image: You. Smart. Thing. Covid-19 Essential Travel Assistant. More …
Guidance on using Zoom
24 April 2020
UIS has now published guidance on how to use Zoom securely for online videoconferencing. More …
Alumni commended for their contributions to computer science
20 April 2020
Two alumni of this department have been highly commended by the judges of a prestigious academic award for their research contributions to computer science. More …
Plan AI, because there is no planet B
17 April 2020
To mark Earth Day on Wednesday 22 April, our colleague Emily Shuckburgh gave the first virtual Turing Lecture on sustainability and the climate crisis. More …
One Stop Epidemy Resource
16 April 2020
An international team of developers, including a visiting student in this Department, has created an open-source online hospital resource management system of benefit to both doctors and families. More …
Using our skills to help others
7 April 2020
“We are privileged to have so much in Cambridge – and we should be
using it to help others.”
More …
Helping Africa from afar
7 April 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has cut short one researcher’s planned sabbatical year developing AI in sub-Saharan Africa. More …
New app collects the sounds of COVID-19
6 April 2020
Researchers here have led the development of a new app that will collect the sounds made by those suffering from the coronavirus. More …
Enlisting smartphone data in the fight against coronavirus
2 April 2020
A smartphone app to map epidemics that was developed in
this department a decade ago is seeing a resurgence of interest
because of the COVID-19 outbreak
More …
Advice on moving conferences from the real to the virtual world
2 April 2020
A faculty member here is part of a taskforce advising conference
organisers on how to move their events from the real to the virtual
world
More …
Modelling demand for intensive care beds
1 April 2020
NHS regions in England are using a computer model co-developed by
this department to help them predict the surge in demand for intensive
care beds caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.
More …
Launch of Microsoft Teams
19 March 2020
Microsoft Teams is now live. It is the recommended and supported online collaboration tool for the University. Teams is integrated with other Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365) products. More …
Keep us in the loop!
11 February 2020
In the past, we have only kept a list of email addresses for Ring members, and we are trying to learn more about you so we can be more useful and keep you more connected! Having names and dates also helps us to avoid things like duplicate email addresses. If you are happy for us to have your details, can you please complete this form. More …
The Ring Newsletter
10 February 2020
The Ring is the journal of the Cambridge Ring, the graduate association of the Department of Computer Science and Technology. You can read the latest edition of The Ring here and you can find previous versions on the website. More …
Ring Dinner and Hall of Fame Awards Ceremony
10 February 2020
The Cambridge Ring dinner and Hall of Fame Awards ceremony will be held at Queens’ College on Thursday 2nd April 2020. The winners will be announced by Professor Ann Copestake, and the awards will be presented by our guest speaker. More …
Dr Neel Krishnaswami wins a Distinguished Paper Award
23 January 2020
Together with Michael Arntzenius (of the University of Birmingham), Dr Neel Krishnaswami has received a Distinguished Paper Award for their research paper at POPL 2020. More …
Do switches dream of machine learning?
22 November 2019
The paper "Do switches dream of machine learning?" appeared at the HotNets 2019 conference last week. The research paper explores the potential use of commodity programmable switches for in-network classification. More …
Cambridge students excel in European programming contest
20 November 2019
Three teams of Cambridge students enjoyed success at the Northwestern Europe Regional Contest (NWERC) in Eindhoven last weekend. More …
lowRISC launches OpenTitan and appoints Andy Hopper Chair of the Board
6 November 2019
lowRISC is a not-for-profit company that uses collaborative engineering to build open source silicon designs and tools. More …
Prevention better than cure at preventing young users from getting involved in cybercrime
22 October 2019
Highly-targeted messaging campaigns from law enforcement can be surprisingly effective at dissuading young gamers from getting involved in cybercrime, a new study has suggested. More …
Alumna Rana El Kaliouby named in BBC's 100 influential women of 2019
17 October 2019
Rana el Kaliouby is an AI pioneer and entrepreneur who works on artificial emotional intelligence. More …
Launch of AI for Environmental Risks Centre for Doctoral Training
1 October 2019
The Centre for Doctoral Training in Application of Artificial Intelligence to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER) was formally launched on Monday 30th September. The Centre is welcoming its first cohort of 10 PhD students. More …
Cambridge appoints first DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning
18 September 2019
Following an international search, Professor Neil Lawrence has been appointed as the inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at Cambridge, supported by a benefaction from the world-leading British AI company. More …
Andreas Grammenos wins a Distinguished Paper Award
11 September 2019
Andreas Grammenos, a third-year PhD student in the Department, has won a Distinguished Paper Award for the paper “You Are Sensing, but Are You Biased? A User Unaided Sensor Calibration Approach for Mobile Sensing”. The paper was coauthored by Andreas Grammenos, Professor Cecilia Mascolo and Professor Jon Crowcroft. More …
Mailing list for announcing filer migration disruption
5 September 2019
The migration of filespaces from elmer to our new NetApp servers is likely to start sometime after 24th September and will take several weeks to complete. It will be necessary to disable access to individual parts of the filestore while they are being copied. For example, your home directory, bigdisc space and any group filespaces you use are very likely to be disrupted on different days. More …
filer alias updated
4 September 2019
In a previous announcement, I said that the Windows file server name \\filer would change from being an alias of \\elmer to a dedicated server that would offer redirections to the appropriate destination for each item in the filesystem. This will allow filespaces to be migrated to the new NetApp fileserver a few at a time without end users having to know which is where. More …
Changes to the www-dyn{,1,2,3} service
30 August 2019
The facility used by the dynamic user web page service to securely access the filer relies on a feature of the old filer which is not available on the new ones. More …
Old autofs maps to be removed
29 August 2019
At the beginning of August we introduced a new set of autofs maps, and as far as we can tell they are working well. It is possible that a few machines are still using the old maps, but this will inevitably lead to problems because they are no longer being maintained. We therefore intend to remove the old maps from the LDAP server on Tuesday 3rd September. This change will ensure that all machines should follow the changes that will be necessary to migrate filesystems to our new filer. More …
New NetApp filer
22 August 2019
The department has been running a NetApp filer called elmer as its primary filestore since 2002. Since the original installation, there have been two major hardware replacements, and on each of those occasions the transition was relatively seamless. We had about a day of downtime, during which the filesystem was transferred over and an almost identical service launched on the new hardware. It is now time for a third upgrade, but this one will be a bit different. The purpose of this article is to explain what we are planning. More …
Srinivasan Keshav appointed to the Robert Sansom Professorship
1 August 2019
We're delighted to announce that Srinivasan Keshav will be joining the Department from October, as the new Robert Sansom Professor of Computer Science. More …
New autofs maps
1 August 2019
In preparation for migrating to new filer hardware, we need to make changes to the automounter mappings used on managed Linux machines to access NFS file servers. These mappings are used to implement paths mostly beginning with /auto, and most frequently accessed through symbolic links such as /homes. /anfs and /usr/groups. The maps are made available to client machines from our LDAP server. More …
PhD student Krittika D'Silva wins multiple awards
15 July 2019
Krittika D’Silva, a third-year PhD student, has been recognised with Rising Star Awards in both AI and Networking & Communications, and a Youth Award. More …
Two alumni win SME Business Awards for their software consultancy
12 July 2019
Green Custard is a Cambridge-based software consultancy supporting fast-growing startups through to global enterprises. They have been named Overall Winner at the SME Cambridgeshire Business Awards. More …
Professor Simone Teufel wins 2019 Pilkington Prize for outstanding teaching
11 July 2019
Professor Simone Teufel has been awarded a Pilkington Prize for delivering outstanding teaching. More …
Neel Krishnaswami and Jeremy Yallop win two awards
10 July 2019
Neel Krishnaswami and Jeremy Yallop received a Distinguished Paper Award and Distinguished Artifact Award for their research paper "A Typed, Algebraic Approach to Parsing" at the PLDI 2019 conference, which took place in Arizona. More …
Building AI in Africa
8 July 2019
Professor Alan Blackwell’s vision is to build AI that works for sub-Saharan Africa. More …
Pietzuch and Bacon win Most Influential Paper Award for 2002 paper on Hermes architecture
28 June 2019
A past research paper on Hermes architecture by Peter Pietzuch and Jean Bacon has won the DEBS 2002 Most Influential Paper Award. More …
Prof John Crowcroft made Honorary Professor at UCL
17 June 2019
Professor Jon Crowcroft has been made an Honorary Professor at University College London. He will supervise a PhD student in the Department of Statistical Science at UCL. The work is on machine (deep) learning and efficient graph representation. More …
Six promotions to Professor and Reader
14 June 2019
The University has promoted four members of the Department to Professor, and two more to Reader. More …
Driverless cars could speed up traffic by 35%
29 May 2019
A fleet of driverless cars working together to keep traffic moving smoothly can improve overall traffic flow by at least 35 percent, researchers have shown. More …
Sensor Calibration Fingerprinting Attack for Smartphones
20 May 2019
When you visit a website, your web browser provides a range of information to the website, including the name and version of your browser, screen size, fonts installed, and so on. Ostensibly, this information allows the website to provide a great user experience. Unfortunately this same information can also be used to track you. In particular, this information can be used to generate a distinctive signature, or device fingerprint, to identify you. More …
Dr Emily Shuckburgh appointed as Reader in Environmental Data Science
17 May 2019
We're delighted to welcome Dr Emily Shuckburgh OBE to the Department as Reader in Environmental Data Science, from 1st May 2019. More …
Chiller failure
16 May 2019
A pump in the temporary chiller failed at around 3AM. The current
suspision is that a pump tripped / failed, possibly due to a power
glitch.
GN09 warmed up to about 50C.
Remedial action taken at 7AM which brought the temperature down to
around 40C.
The pump was identified and reset at around 8:15, and temperature
returned to normal. More …
70 years since the first computer designed for practical everyday use
3 May 2019
EDSAC ran its first successful program on 6th May 1949, making it the world's first fully functional stored-program computer. More …
Andrew Pitts is joint winner of the 2019 Alonzo Church Award
18 April 2019
Andrew Pitts and Jamie Gabbay (Heriot-Watt) have been selected for the 2019 Alonzo Church Award for their work on nominal techniques, begun when Jamie was a PhD student with Andrew in the Computer Laboratory in the late 1990s. More …
Marcelo Fiore and Andrew Pitts win 2019 LICS Test-of-Time awards
17 April 2019
The ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS) annual Test-of-Time Award recognises a small number of papers from the LICS proceedings from 20 years prior. More …
CheriABI wins best paper award at ASPLOS conference
16 April 2019
The CHERI Instruction-Set Architecture (ISA) is a novel computer processor architecture intended to support more secure computer system designs. It has been developed by a multi-disciplinary team spanning the University of Cambridge and SRI International over the last decade. More …
Cambridge Ring Awards
5 April 2019
Every year the Cambridge Ring celebrates the successes of companies founded by graduates of the Department of Computer Science and Technology. More …
NetFPGA project wins SOSR System Award
31 March 2019
San Jose, California, USA, April 3rd, 2019. The NetFPGA project was
awarded today the ACM SIGCOMM SOSR System Award. The award recognises
the development of a software system that has had a significant impact
on SDN research, implementations, and tools.
The NetFPGA is an open platform enabling researchers and students to
build high-speed, hardware-accelerated networking systems. The
platform is used by researchers to prototype advanced services for
next-generation networks. It is also used in the classroom to teach
students how to build network devices, such as Ethernet switches and
Internet Protocol (IP) routers. The platform combines both hardware
(boards) and software (embedded, tools and applications), together
with reference designs and community contributed projects.
Originally developed for teaching at Stanford in 2002 and becoming
widely available in 2003, NetFPGA has developed a large community of
over 1200 users, using more than 3500 cards, at over 300 universities,
in over 60 countries across 6 continents. Alongside supporting
academic teaching and research, NetFPGA sees use and contributions
from professional research community with over 50 active
corporate-based contributors.
The prominent early success of NetFPGA has been its contribution
to OpenFlow, which in turn reignited the Software Defined Networking
movement. By providing a widely available open-source OpenFlow
development platform capable of line-rate operation, NetFPGA was,
until commercial uptake, the reference hardware platform for
OpenFlow.
In recent years, NetFPGA was increasingly used for the prototyping of
programmable data planes, and it currently offers the only open-source
hardware target for P4 programs (previously through P4FPGA, and
nowadays using the P4->NetFPGA framework).
NetFPGA has been used for the implementation of over 500 research
projects, and to date has been referenced in over three thousand
publications.
The NetFPGA project is academically led by the Universities of
Cambridge and Stanford, supported by generous donations from Xilinx,
Micron, Cypress and Linear Technologies and generous support from
the National Science Foundation, DARPA, the Research Council UK
through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Council, and the
European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. More …
Professor Cecilia Mascolo wins ERC Advanced Grant
29 March 2019
Professor Cecilia Mascolo, Professor of Mobile Systems and Co-Director of the Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence, has been awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council. More …
DeepMind Professorship of Machine Learning
29 March 2019
The Board of Electors to the DeepMind Professorship of Machine Learning invite applications for this Professorship from persons whose work falls within the general field of Machine Learning to take up appointment on 1 October 2019 or as soon as possible thereafter. More …
Dr Jennifer Cobbe to give Science Festival talk on Thursday 14th March
11 March 2019
In recent years the internet has become a key battleground for electoral politics. Dr Jennifer Cobbe examines how surveillance capitalism and the increasingly algorithmic nature of online public space allows the public sphere and the democratic process to be manipulated by microtargeted political advertising, disinformation, and political bots. More …
Cambridge students earn silver in national cyber security challenge
11 March 2019
HECC (Higher Education Cyber Challenge) is a cross-university cybersecurity/CTF competition run by the University of Southampton – following in the footsteps of the Inter-ACE challenge launched by the University of Cambridge’s ACE-CSR in 2016 and hosted there for three years. More …
Success for Cambridge in the Atlantic Council’s Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge
4 March 2019
Gary Dreyer, Ainsley Katz, Jamie MacColl and Tomass Pildegovics won first place in a national cyber competition, the Atlantic Council’s Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge. The four Cambridge MPhil students in International Relations and Politics were sponsored by Cambridge's Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research. Professor Frank Stajano, head of the ACE-CSR, was delighted to cover their expenses and, more importantly, to put them in touch with a tech-savvy mentor, ACE-CSR member Dr Jat Singh, who has a multi-disciplinary background in both computer science and law. More …
Alastair Beresford receives Google Security and Privacy Research award
12 February 2019
Dr Alastair Beresford, Reader in Computer Security, has received a 2018 Google Security and Privacy Research award. More …
Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, 1927–2018
11 February 2019
The Department was saddened by the death of Professor Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer Bt KBE FRS, on 26 December 2018, at the age of 91. More …
New Active Directory domain DC.CL.CAM.AC.UK
4 February 2019
The department is migrating from an old Active Directory domain to a new one. If you are still using somewhere the domain/realm/NetBIOS names of the old one, please check the current documentation and change to the new one accordingly: More …
Cambridge team wins the 2018 Northwestern Europe Regional Contest
26 November 2018
Congratulations to Team Treenity, winners of The 2018 Northwestern Europe Regional Contest. More …
Old print server being retired
7 November 2018
The old print server (version 1-6-2) will be retired in stages over the next week or so. Most users will not be affected, as they are already using our new server. The only people who need to take action are those who used Bonjour to load printers via the old server, which will be mostly Mac users. These printers will cease to work and they should be deleted and replaced with printers using the new server. At the moment a Bonjour user will typically see two entries for each printer, e.g. More …
Dr Amanda Prorok receives Best Paper Award at DARS 2018
22 October 2018
Dr Amanda Prorok has received the Best Paper Award, at DARS 2018: 14th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems, for 'Redundant Robot Assignment on Graphs with Uncertain Edge Costs'. More …
Robert Sansom Professorship of Computer Science to be appointed
12 October 2018
The Department of Computer Science and Technology (formerly, the Computer Laboratory) will be appointing a new Robert Sansom Professorship of Computer Science in 2019/20. More …
Dr Robert Harle receives ACM Ubicomp 10 Year Impact Award
10 October 2018
Dr Robert Harle has been awarded the ACM Ubicomp 10 Year Impact Award at Ubicomp 2018, for his paper from 2008 entitled 'Pedestrian localisation for indoor environments'. More …
Dr Noa Zilberman named in list of 10 Rising Stars in Computer Networking and Communications
2 October 2018
DeepMind Chair of Machine Learning to be appointed
9 August 2018
The Department of Computer Science and Technology is to appoint a DeepMind Chair of Machine Learning thanks to a benefaction from the world-leading AI company. More …
The Department of Computer Science and Technology and Nokia Bell Labs establish the new Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence
20 June 2018
Nokia Bell Labs is a founding partner of the new Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence, to be based in the Department of Computer Science and Technology. The Centre will advance state-of-the-art mobile systems, security, new materials, and artificial intelligence (AI) to address one of the main human needs – the ability to communicate better with each other. More …
Network outage on June 2nd
4 June 2018
At 09:12 on Saturday morning, a new switch in our data centre failed. In doing so it bridged together all of its connections to the rest of the network. Since switches have multiple uplinks for resilience, this created a loop in the network. More …
Professor Jon Crowcroft awarded honorary doctorate by the Aalto University schools of technology
18 May 2018
Professor Jon Crowcroft has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the Aalto University schools of technology. More …
New Ubuntu 18.04 LTS slogin-new test server
28 April 2018
A new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS server is now available, available via the service name slogin-new and slogin. To ensure that the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS server is used, connect to slogin. Comments to sys-admin please. More …
Cambridge Computer Laboratory hosts Inter-ACE cyber security challenge
25 April 2018
More than 130 students representing 18 of the UK’s top cybersecurity universities battled it out at the Inter-ACE 2018 cyber security challenge, hosted at the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. More …
Start of change of default domain on Linux systems
9 March 2018
The department is moving from the 'AD' domain to the 'DC' domain. Linux systems use the DNS to decide which the default should be if none is given. We shall be moving certyain test hosts over to DC in the vulnereable period on Tues 20th Feb, and depending how things go, at later vulnereable or non-vulnerable periods. More …
Server Room Cooling Failure
28 February 2018
Overnight between the 27th and 28th of February the building cooling failed. This was due to the pipes on the roof freezing due to very low temperatures. Emergency actions was taken at in the middle of the night to shut down enough machines to prevent a total outage of core services. The cooler has now been inspected and declared beyond repair. This is because it had no anti-freeze in the circuit. More …
New Remote Desktop Service
26 February 2018
The previous remote access Windows machines ts01 and ts02 have now been retired. In their place is a newer version running on Windows Server 2016. The local unix command cl-rdesktop has been updated to point to this service. To login you must authenticate against the DC domain either by quoting your identifier as DC\crsid or as just crsid. Windows or MacOS users should connect to clrds.cl.cam.ac.uk to access the new servers. More …
Problem with new VPN certificate corrected
22 February 2018
Some people using the VPN service at vpn.cl.cam.ac.uk may have been experiencing difficulties since the server certficate was updated on 2018-02-13. We issued a warning applicable to Windows users, but we forgot to point out that some Linux and Android clients require a local copy of the server certificate to verify. More …
SE18 due to be cleared by 1 June 2018
15 February 2018
The deadline for moving equipment out of SE18 has been set to the 1st June 2018. The removal of the air-conditioning has been arranged to start them. More …
ely reboot in vulnerable period 28th Feb
15 February 2018
This reboot is necessary to complete the installation of some security updates. Apologies for missing the reboot on the earlier advertised date. More …
Bjarne Stroustrup named recipient of the 2018 IEEE-CS Computer Pioneer Award
8 February 2018
Bjarne Stroustrup has been selected to receive the IEEE Computer Society’s 2018 Computer Pioneer Award. More …
CL VPN certificate replacement
6 February 2018
The SSL certificate used to authenticate the CL-specific instance of the UIS VPN service at vpn.cl.cam.ac.uk is scheduled for routine replacement on Tuesday 13th February at about 08:00. The purpose of this certificate is to give the VPN client the assurance that it is communicating securely with the correct service. More …
Filer software update Tuesday 9th Jan 2018
4 January 2018
The next scheduled vulnerable period (2018-01-09 0700-1000) will be used to perform a software update on the NetApp filers elmer and eldo. Elmer is the main filer directly visible to users and eldo provides the backing store for virtual machines. More …
Bjarne Stroustrup to receive 2018 Charles Stark Draper Prize
4 January 2018
The National Academy of Engineering has announced that Bjarne Stroustrup will receive the 2018 Charles Start Draper Prize for Engineering. The prize has been awarded 'for conceptualizing and developing the C++ programming language'. More …
Cambridge team wins The 2017 Northwestern Europe Regional Contest
27 November 2017
Congratulations to Team Me[N]ta∭ca, winners of The 2017 Northwestern Europe Regional Contest. More …
Cambridge joins new UK Hardware Security Institute
23 November 2017
Researchers at the University of Cambridge are part of the new £5m multi-university Research Institute to improve hardware security and reduce vulnerability to cyber threats. More …
Department's researchers awarded a double at SPLASH 2017
26 October 2017
Department researchers Victor Gomes, Martin Kleppmann, Dominic Mulligan, and Alastair Beresford have been awarded both a distinguished paper award and a distinguished artefact award for their paper "Verifying strong evential consistency in distributed systems" at the ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH) 2017. More …
Cambridge teams triumph at the 2017 UK & Ireland Programming Contest
23 October 2017
Cambridge teams occupied six of the top ten places (including 1st place) at this year's UK & Ireland Programming Contest (UKIEPC). More …
Annual Faculty Meeting
20 October 2017
This year's Annual Meeting of the Faculty will be at 14:15 on Tuesday 7 November 2017 in Lecture Theatre 1 in the William gates Building. The meeting will be followed by refreshments in the Street. All are welcome to attend. More …
Stephen Dolan wins 2017 CPHC/BCS Distinguished Dissertation Award
27 September 2017
Stephen Dolan has been named the winner of the 2017 CPHC/BCS Distinguished Dissertation Award for his dissertation 'Algebraic subtyping'. More …
Thomas Brouwer wins the Homerton Santander award for PhD research
26 September 2017
Thomas Brouwer has won the Homerton Santander award for outstanding achievement in PhD research. Thomas was awarded the prize for his work under Pietro Lio' investigating the use of Bayesian models for analysing biological datasets. The award is given annually for outstanding research in STEM subjects. More …
Computer Laboratory researchers win SIGPLAN Most Influential ICFP Paper Award 2017
8 September 2017
Computer Laboratory researchers, led by Professor Peter Sewell, have won the SIGPLAN Most Influential ICFP Paper Award 2017. The paper “Ott: Effective Tool Support for the Working Semanticist” is joint work between members of the Computer Laboratory's Programming, Logic, and Semantics Group and Francesco Zappa Nardelli of INRIA Paris. More …
Professor Mike Gordon FRS
1 September 2017
It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Professor Mike Gordon FRS. Mike Gordon joined the Computer Laboratory in 1981 and he made magnificent contributions to the Department in many different ways. He will be sadly missed. More …
Zafar Gilani presents research on Twitter bots
24 August 2017
PhD student Zafar Gilani recently presented the results of research on Twitter bots, at the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining in Sydney, Australia. More …
Computer Laboratory researchers win best paper award at ACM SIGCOMM 2017
22 August 2017
Computer Laboratory researchers Gianni Antichi, Marcin Wójcik, and Andrew W. Moore, along with co-authors, have won the best paper award at ACM SIGCOMM 2017. More …
Ramana Kumar wins the ACM SIGPLAN Doctoral Dissertation Award
14 July 2017
Ramama Kumar has been awarded the ACM SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2017. The award is presented annually to the author of an outstanding dissertation in the field of programming languages, and includes a prize of $1000. This prize was established to honour the theoretical contributions made by John C. Reynolds to programming languages including type theory and Lambda calculus. More …
Raspberry Pi wins UK’s top engineering innovation prize
6 July 2017
Raspberry Pi has won the UK’s top engineering innovation prize – the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award. More …
Wheeler lecture video now available
23 June 2017
The video of Angela Sasse's lecture entitled "Can we make people value IT security?" is now available. This lecture was given on 24th May as this year's Wheeler lecture, and is now available to view. More …
Dr Marwa Mahmoud presents research on new artificial intelligence system
19 June 2017
Dr Marwa Mahmoud recently presented the results of research on a new artificial intelligence system designed to detect pain levels in sheep, at the 12th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition in Washington, DC. More …
Diana Popescu named Google Women Techmakers Scholar
27 May 2017
Diana Popescu has been named a Google Women Techmakers Scholar 2017. More …
Professor Andy Hopper appointed Treasurer of the Royal Society
17 May 2017
Professor Andy Hopper CBE FREng FRS has been appointed Treasurer of the Royal Society. The appointment, which is for five years, starts on November 30 2017. More …
Cambridge Computer Lab Ring Company of the Year, Improbable, raises $500m
15 May 2017
Cambridge Computer Lab Ring Company of the Year, Improbable, has raised $502m from Japan’s SoftBank corporation. More …
Professor Sir Tony Hoare newly elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences
8 May 2017
Professor Sir Tony Hoare, an Honorary member of the Computer Laboratory, has been elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. More …
Professor Lawrence Paulson elected a new fellow of the Royal Society
7 May 2017
Lawrence Paulson, Professor of Computational Logic, has been elected a new fellow of the Royal Society. More …
Success for Cambridge team at final of Google's Hash Code 2017
3 April 2017
Congratulations to team МЕТАШСА (PhD student Petar Veličković along with Part IB students Marko Stanković and Dimitrije Erdeljan) who came fifth in the final of Google's Hash Code 2017. More …
Advait Sarkar receives CSAR award
30 March 2017
The Cambridge Society for the Application of Research has announced that Advait Sarkar is one of 12 PhD students from the University of Cambridge to receive a CSAR Student Award for 2017. More …
Cristina Muñoz receives best paper award at NetSys 2017
22 March 2017
Cristina Muñoz has received a best paper award at NetSys 2017 for his paper‘I(FIB)F: Iterated Bloom Filters for Routing in Named Data Networks'. More …
Part IB Group Design Project winners announced
10 March 2017
Congratulations to all the Part IB project design groups who put on a fantastic display at the March 8th demonstrations. More …
Computer Lab team awarded bronze medal at Hack Cambridge Recurse
30 January 2017
Congratulations to Catalina Cangea, Laurynas Karazija, Edgar Liberis and Petar Veličković who were awarded a bronze medal at Cambridge Hack Recurse. More …
UPS move 10th January 2017
1 January 2017
On the 10th January the UPS was moved. This left core services vulnerable to building power outage until it is recommissioned later that day. More …
Professor Cecilia Mascolo reaches the finals of the 2016 Women in Networking/Communications
22 December 2016
Professor Cecilia Mascolo is a finalist on the second Networking Networking Women (N2 Women) list of “10 Women in Networking/Communications That You Should Know”. The award focuses on women who have had a major impact in networking and/or communications. Further details can be found on the Networking Networking Women (N2 Women) site. The main goal of N2 Women is to foster connections among the under-represented women in computer networking and related research fields. N2 women allows women to connect with other women who share the same research interests, who attend the same conferences, who face the same career hurdles, and who experience the same obstacles. More …
Success for Lab teams at Northwestern Europe Regional Contest
23 November 2016
Team Me[∰]tallica (PhD student Petar Veličković along with Part IB students Marko Stanković and Dimitrije Erdeljan) were awarded a silver medal at Northwestern Europe Regional Contest (NWERC 2016). A bronze medal was awarded to Team mpttpm (Part II students Momchil Peychev and Tudor Ţiplea along with fellow Cambridge Mathematics student Paul Musca). More …
A tribute to Negar Miralaei
30 October 2016
Staff and students at the Computer Laboratory were deeply saddened to learn of the untimely death of Negar Miralaei. Negar was a fourth year PhD student soon to submit her dissertation. Her supervisor Dr Timothy Jones said "Negar loved to travel, and seized the opportunities she was given to attend conferences and workshops across Europe and the United States. She also loved visiting different parts of the UK in her spare time, making her way as far as the Scottish Highlands and, more recently, Northern Ireland. She would always come back full of excitement about her trips and tell me all the amazing things she had seen. It was difficult to believe that the first time she had set foot outside Iran was when she went to Turkey to apply for her British visa to come to Cambridge. Negar had many friends, and was well liked by everyone she worked with. She was a generous, kind person and friendly to everyone she met. Within the Computer Lab we will all miss her optimism and warm smile. There's a huge hole now where she used to be.” All at the Computer Laboratory extend their heartfelt condolences to Negar's family and friends at this sad time. More …
Dr Mateja Jamnik to receive a Royal Society 2016 Athena award.
19 October 2016
Dr Mateja Jamnik will receive a Royal Society 2016 Athena award in a ceremony at the Royal Society’s annual diversity conference on 31 October 2016. More …
Postgraduate Open Day
11 October 2016
The University of Cambridge is proud to be hosting its first Postgraduate Open Day on Wednesday 2 November 2016. More …
Microsoft Imagine Username Changes
10 October 2016
The usernames on the Microsoft Imagine site (formerly known as Dreamspark and before than as MSDNAA) have been changed to be of the form [Javascript required] for all users. The effect of this change will be that you receive notice of your new account details and the old one will no longer be available. If this causes any difficulties for you please contact [Javascript required]. More …
Website upgrade Tuesday 4th October
30 September 2016
On the morning of Tuesday, 4th October 2016 we will upgrade the web server software behind the main Lab web site. More …
Postgraduate Open Day - 2 November 2016
22 September 2016
The University of Cambridge is proud to be hosting its first Postgraduate Open Day on Wednesday 2 November 2016. More …
Dr Andy Harter awarded prestigious Faraday Medal
20 September 2016
Visiting Industrial Fellow Dr Andy Harter has been awarded the Faraday Medal, the most prestigious award of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). The Faraday Medal dates back to 1922, and is awarded for notable scientific or industrial achievement in engineering and for conspicuous service rendered to the profession. Dr Harter is CEO of RealVNC which he founded in 2002. More …
Dropbox
15 September 2016
The UIS have recently made available reduced cost access to Business Dropbox available via normal purchasing means. More …
Advait Sarkar receives highly commended award at VL/HCC 2016
12 September 2016
Advait Sarkar has received a highly commended award at the 2016 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) for his paper ‘Visual discovery and model-driven explanation of time series patterns’. The paper is joint work with Alan Blackwell, Mateja Jamnik and Martin Spott. More …
Raspberry Pi has sold 10 million computers
8 September 2016
Raspberry Pi has announced that, over the last four and a half years, ten million computers have been sold. More …
Terminal Server access now requires VPN
29 August 2016
Following a number of brute force password attacks against our Windows Terminal Server hosts these have now been restricted to only accept connections from clients within the University network. If you need to access them from outside that network then first connect using a VPN. More …
Professor Andy Hopper named a Royal Society Premier Medallist
19 July 2016
Professor Andy Hopper CBE FREng FRS has been awarded The Bakerian Medal and Lecture 2017 for his outstanding research in computer technology, with significant economic impacts, in particular his work in computer networking and sentient computing systems with an aim to providing sustainability. More …
ssh-dss .dsa user ssh host keys to slogin-serv
18 July 2016
The new Ubuntu 16.04 slogin-serv services do not
accept the legacy ssh-dss (DSA) public key algorithm. Any users
having problems with their user ssh keys should try connecting to
slogin-old using the -v switch to check
which key is used. If it is .dsa, please generate a new
key and add it to .ssh/authorized_keys, check that it
works on slogin-serv, then remove the old .dsa key and
its .ssh/authorized_keys entry. Remember never to copy
the private key - it should only ever remain where it is generated. More …
Royal Society publishes new report on cybersecurity research
13 July 2016
The Royal Society has published a new report on cybersecurity research. More …
slogin server partial upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04
7 July 2016
Subsequent to the move of slogin-serv to Ubuntu 14.04, another server has been added, which runs Ubuntu 16.04, accessible as slogin-new.cl.cam.ac.uk, which has been in service for a while now without any reported problems. It is now being added to the slogin-serv.cl.cam.ac.uk pool, so users may get Ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04. The hope is that it should not matter, and when we are confident that 16.04 is suitable, the pool will move to being just 16.04. If you find something which requires 14.04, please connect to slogin-old.cl.cam.ac.uk and email the details to sys-admin More …
Professor Andy Hopper receives the ACM Sigmobile Test-of-Time Award
29 June 2016
Professor Andy Hopper has received the ACM Sigmobile Test-of-Time award for "The active badge location system." The paper is joint work with Roy Want, Veronica Falcao and Jonathan Gibbons. The SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time awards recognize papers that have had a sustained and significant impact in the SIGMOBILE community over at least a decade. The award was presented to Professor Andy Hopper at ACM MobiSys on June 29th, in Singapore. More …
Mariana Marasoiu receives honourable mention at EuroVis 2016
21 June 2016
Mariana Marasoiu has received an honourable mention at EuroVis 2016 for 'Clarifying Hypotheses by Sketching Data'. More …
Video available of 2016 Wheeler Lecture
14 June 2016
The video of this year's Wheeler Lecture is now available. If you were unable to attend the lecture, or you wish to hear it again, then we hope you will find this useful. The video and audio are also available to download from the Streaming Media Service. More …
International Summer School on Metaprogramming
2 June 2016
Jeremy Yallop and Ohad Kammar have organised an International Summer School on Metaprogramming. More …
new slogin-new - consider using slogin-serv
22 May 2016
The service name 'slogin-new.cl.cam.ac.uk' is used for
the newest slogin pilot or service for the department (see Time Sharing Syetsms). A new system is in
development, so anyone wanting to use the previous 'new' server
sandy should use
slogin-serv.cl.cam.ac.uk (using ssh user keys) or
sandy (using Kereberos). TGT server users should check
their configuration files. More …
Jingyun Zhang wins CAPE Acorn Post-graduate Research Award 2016
18 May 2016
PhD student Jingyun Zhang has won a CAPE Acorn Post-graduate Research Award 2016 for a joint project with Lu Bai. More …
Wheeler Lecture 2016
26 April 2016
The Wheeler lecture for 2016 will be given by Dr. Andrew Herbert on Wednesday 25th May. The programme is now available, and registration is open if you wish to attend. More …
University of Cambridge wins both individual and team gold at national cybersecurity competition
26 April 2016
Dr Frank Stajano launched and hosted the Inter-ACE Cyberchallenge, a hacking competition between the country’s GCHQ-recognized Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR). More …
Professor John Daugman elected a Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors
21 April 2016
Professor John Daugman has been elected a Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors (NAI) at a ceremony in Washington DC. More …
Dr Markus Kuhn receives Bright Ideas Award
21 April 2016
Dr Markus Kuhn received a Bright Ideas Award in a ceremony at the University Information Service (UIS) on April 7th 2016. More …
Erroll Wood receives ACM Emerging Investigator Award
17 March 2016
Erroll Wood has received the Emerging Investigator Award at the ACM SIGGraph Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications for his paper 'Learning an appearance-based gaze estimator from one million synthesised images'. The paper is joint work with Tadas Baltrusaitis, Louis-Philippe Morency, Peter Robinson and Andreas Bulling. More …
Robert Harle awarded Pilkington Prize
11 February 2016
Dr Robert Harle has been awarded a Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching. More …
Ramsey Faragher and Robert Harle receive presitigious Dr Samuel M Burka Award
4 February 2016
The Institute of Navigation (ION) presented its Dr Samuel M Burka Award to Dr Ramsey M Faragher and Dr Robert K Harle for their paper “Towards an Efficient, Intelligent Opportunistic Smartphone Indoor Positioning System” published in the Spring 2015 issue of NAVIGATION, Journal of The Institute of Navigation, Vol. 62, No. 1, pp.55-72. More …
SwiftKey, Cambridge Ring 2015 Hall of Fame winner, acquired by Microsoft
3 February 2016
SwiftKey, the winner of the Cambridge Ring Hall of Fame Company of the Year Award 2015, has been acquired by Microsoft for $250m. More …
Professor Simon Moore receives "10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper" award
26 January 2016
A research paper by Robert Mullins, Andrew West and Simon Moore was selected as the "10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper" in the 2016 Asia & South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC). The award for the paper, “The design and implementation of a low-latency on-chip network”, was presented to Professor Simon Moore at the opening ceremony of ASP-DAC’16 on January 25th, in Macao. More …
Computer Lab start-up Unikernel Systems acquired by Docker Inc
21 January 2016
Unikernel Systems, co-founded by Computer Laboratory staff and postdoctoral researchers, has been acquired by San Francisco based Docker Inc. More …
Thomas Sauerwald awarded prestigious European Research Council Starting Grant
10 November 2015
Dr Thomas Sauerwald, University Lecturer in Computer Science, has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant. His funded project titled "Dynamics of Multiple, Interacting and Concurrent Markov Chains" will run from 2016-2021, and aims to explore new algorithms based on multiple random walks that are able to cope with massive and complex data sets. More …
Andra Adams named a winner of UK ICT Pioneers 2015
7 November 2015
PhD student, Andra Adams, has been named the winner of the UK ICT Pioneers 2015 in the category 'Transforming Society'. More …
Mark Batty wins 2015 BCS Distinguished Dissertation Competition
27 October 2015
Mark Batty has been named the winner of the 2015 CPHC/BCS Distinguished Dissertation Competition. The Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC), in conjunction with BCS and BCS Academy of Computing, annually selects for publication the best British PhD/DPhil dissertations in computer science. More …
Cambridge triumphs at UKIEPC 2015
26 October 2015
Cambridge teams triumphed at The UK/IE Programming Contest (UKIEPC) 2015. Not only did a team from the University come first, but Cambridge teams filled ten slots in the top twenty. More …
Lab researchers win best paper award at ACM ICN 2015
5 October 2015
Lab researchers Liang Wang, Arjuna Sathiaseelan and Prof. Jon Crowcroft have won the best paper award at ACM ICN 2015. More …
Computer Laboratory receives prestigious Athena SWAN award
1 October 2015
The Computer Laboratory has received a prestigious bronze Athena SWAN award, the charter that recognises commitment to tackling gender inequality in higher education. More …
Ross Anderson named winner of 2015 SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation award
25 September 2015
Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering, has been named the winner of the 2015 SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation award. More …
Professor John Daugman elected to Academy Fellowship
22 September 2015
John Daugman OBE FREng, Professor of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in recognition of his outstanding contribution to engineering. More …
RA Sam Aaron teaches BBC DJ to compose music using Sonic Pi
7 September 2015
Lab Research Associate Sam Aaron can often be found in school classrooms teaching children to create music by writing code using Sonic Pi. However, recently he welcomed a slightly older pupil, BBC Radio 1 and BBC 1Xtra DJ MistJam. The pair used Sonic Pi to compose a piece, inspired by Bizet's 'Carmen'. More …
Oliver Chick wins APSys15 best paper award
2 September 2015
PhD student Oliver Chick has received the Best Paper Award at APSys15. More …
Lab PhD student wins ACM Student Research Competition at SIGCOMM 2015
19 August 2015
First year PhD student Heidi Howard has won the ACM Student Research Competition at SIGCOMM 2015 for 'Coracle: Evaluating consensus at the internet edge.' More …
TexLive 2015 now available on the filer
25 June 2015
The latest version of TeXLive is now available on the filer in /usr/groups/texlive. Using the standard TeXLive naming convention, it is in the directory 2015. More …
Mark Batty receives John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award
25 June 2015
Mark Batty has received the John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award. More …
EPSRC funds Cambridge Cloud Cybercrime Centre
17 June 2015
Thanks to an EPSRC grant, the Cambridge Cloud Cybercrime Centre will be operational from October 1st 2015. More …
Lab PhD awarded Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship
4 June 2015
Congratulations to Luana Bulat who has been awarded a Google Anita Borg Scholarship. More …
Disruption to Xen clients
28 May 2015
Our Xen system was disrupted last night. It is believed to be mostly fixed, but users should check their systems. A rogue process caused problems with the Lab routing, which caused the filer to be inaccessible, causing some domUs to deem their file systems broken. It is thought that most effected systems have been restarted, but there may still be problems which need fixing. Please email sys-admin if any help is needed. More …
Andrew W Moore receives ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award 2015
28 May 2015
Andrew W Moore has received the ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award 2015 for "Internet Traffic Classification Using Bayesian Analysis Techniques". More …
Lab PhD wins NSDI'15 Best Paper Award
5 May 2015
Matthew P Grosvenor has received the Best Paper Award at NSDI'15. More …
Cambridge Ring member Dr Hermann Hauser awarded an honorary knighthood
23 April 2015
Cambridge Ring member Dr Hermann Hauser CBE, FRS, FREng has been awarded an honorary knighthood in recognition of his services to engineering and industry. More …
Professor Ross Anderson named as BCS Lovelace Medal Winner 2015
16 April 2015
Ross Anderson FRS FREng, Professor of Security Engineering, has been named as the recipient of the 2015 BCS Lovelace Medal awarded by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. More …
Cambridge team wins ‘Oxford Instruments Special Award’ at iCAN UK 2015
23 March 2015
Congratulations to the Computer Laboratory's Ran Guan and Bob Fang who, as part of team 'GameBob' won the Oxford Instruments Special Award at iCAN UK 2015. More …
DHCP servers upgraded
9 March 2015
The main Lab DHCP servers have been replaced. This should not have changed things for clients, so if there are any problems, please report them to sys-admin. More …
2015 Wheeler Lecture
9 March 2015
The annual Wheeler Lecture will be given on Tuesday 26th May of this year. Further information is available, and registration is now open. More …
Another power glitch 2015-03-03 03:06:24
3 March 2015
This time it killed a switch ad (at least) two discs. More …
West Cambridge power problem 2015/02/23
24 February 2015
There was a power problem on the West Cambridge site effecting some of our systems in the WGB and some in the UIS at around 9PM on Mon 23 Feb. Please report any anomalies to sys-admin. More …
slogin server upgrade
21 February 2015
As there have been no reports of problems with the testing slogin server we plan to swap the DNS pointer over the weekend spanning the end of February and the start of March at which point the old instances will be available for a short time as slogin-old. More …
Professor Anuj Dawar to receive Hind Rattan Award 2015
6 January 2015
Anuj Dawar, Professor of Logic and Algorithms has been awarded a prestigious Hind Rattan Award for outstanding services, achievements and contributions in his field of research. More …
Computer Lab to host conference for policy making in the Big Data era
8 December 2014
The Computer Laboratory will host the 'Policy-Making in the Big Data Era' conference in June 2015. More …
EDSAC project reaches key milestone
27 November 2014
A project to recreate EDSAC has reached a key milestone. More …
Lab PhD wins Best Student Paper Award
16 November 2014
Marwa Mahmoud has been awarded the Best Student Paper award at the 2014 ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2014). More …
NFS version 4
11 November 2014
Support for NFS version 4 has now been enabled on the main NetApp filer "elmer". The change is upwards compatible in the sense that the older protocol remains available as well. However client systems which support multiple versions will normally use the highest version available from a server, so many machines will see a change. More …
WGB power cut 2014/11/09 17:43
9 November 2014
There was a power cut in the WGB just before 17:43 for about ten seconds. See UIS report for their timeline. More …
internal 'sysdata' web service fist to move to NFS sec=sys
27 October 2014
http://sysdata.cl.cam.ac.uk/ is the first of the Lab web services to move to Ubuntu servers running Apache 2.4 using NFS sec=krb5 to access the web pages from the filer. Please contact sys-admin if there are any problems. Other services are likely to move over in the near future. More …
Matlab updated to R2014b
23 October 2014
The version of Matlab used on lab Linux systems has been updated from R2013b to R2014b. More …
Removal of avahi-daemon from Ubuntu 14.04 systems
22 October 2014
It appears that the avahi-daemon causes the gtk+ library on Ubuntu 14.04 systems used by many GUIs (e.g. firefox and chrome) to hammer the print spooler by opening hundreds of simultaneous connections, causing the GUI to crash. To avoid this, we are removing the avahi-daemon on all Ubuntu 14.04 systems. If you manage a machine which needs it, simply add 'avahi-daemon' to /etc/user-config/bundles as usual. and it will be auto-installed. More …
Internal Lab facilities may not be available
24 September 2014
Certain commands used to do “privileged” things within the Lab may not be working for a while. If some feature you particularly need does not work, please email details to sys-admin More …
Lab PhD wins Ubicomp 2014 Best Paper Award
16 September 2014
Chloe Brown has received the Best Paper Award at the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2014). More …
condor pool moved to NFS sec=krb5
16 September 2014
As emailed to all recent users of condor, the execute machines have now moved to NFS sec-krb5. The documentation has been updated. If anyone has problems, please email sys-admin. More …
September edition of 'The Ring' now online
15 September 2014
The September edition of 'The Ring' is now available. More …
network and Xen problems
5 September 2014
A misconfiguration in the networking kit caused an outage yesterday afternoon. This caused many Linux Xen VMs to loose access to their root filesystems, so they mounted them read-only. After rebooting some of them, one of the Xen Servers lost the ability to reboot VMs, so itself had to be rebooted, causing all its VMs to crash. Many of the filesystems were deemed "unfixable" by fsck, so fsck had to be manually run before the systems rebooted. Please let sys-admin know of any remaining problems. More …
Java 8 in Action, co-authored by the Lab's Prof Alan Mycroft and Raoul-Gabriel Urma, released
18 August 2014
Java 8 in Action, co-authored by the Computer Laboratory's Professor Alan Mycroft and PhD student Raoul-Gabriel Urma, along with Mario Fusco, has been released. More …
new slogin-otpw server - generate a new pad
8 August 2014
mgk25 has just released version 1.5 of OTPW
which does not need to use $HOME for the pad. This allows per-host
local pads, removing the problems on NFS sec=krb5 systems. The DNS name
slogin-otpw now points at the testing slogin server. Any users
need to generate a new pad by logging in and running
cl-otpw-gen. More …
Ubuntu 10.04 lucid libc bug
6 August 2014
A libc bug involving nscd may cause some Ubuntu 10.04 systems to fail in various ways. The quick fix is to run "cl-asuser service nscd stop" and "cl-update-system" to install a fixed libc. Ubuntu 10.04 is getting a bit old now, and 14.04 LTS is stable - it is straightforward to install a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 onto a Lab system while it is in use, and the reboot into the new system - email sys-admin if you would like your machine upgraded. More …
Computer Laboratory hosts 2014 GNU Tools Cauldron
23 July 2014
The 2014 GNU Tools Cauldron was recently held at the Computer Laboratory (July 18-20). The event brought together researchers and developers working on the GNU Tool Chain (the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU Debugger (GDB) and the GNU binary utilities) and was the largest ever such meeting, with approximately 150 attendees from Universities and companies around the world. More …
Wireless outage
18 July 2014
The report I have received from the UIS about today's wireless outage is slightly inconclusive. It seems that there was a malfunction of the central controller that looks after our access points, causing them to reboot and go into a default unconfigured state. They were initially rescued by moving them to another controller, but have now been put back as they should be without further problems. More …
Testing new slogin / ssh-remote server
2 July 2014
The main Lab Linux TSS is currently running CentOS 5. We plan to move to Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS, so have set up a testing server "sandy" (AKA slogin-new and ssh-remote-2.cl.cam.ac.uk). Please try it out and report any problems to sys-admin. More …
Lab PhDs awarded Google European Doctoral Fellowship
19 June 2014
Congratulations to Flora Ponjou Tasse and Ionel Gog who have been awarded a Google Europe Fellowship. More …
Xen Server upgrade to 6.2
1 May 2014
The last main pool of Virtual Machines will be upgraded (6.0 to 6.2) soon, probably over the Bank Holiday weekend. Attempts to do a "smooth" migration failed for the last three pools, so this time it will not be attempted. The downtime of each machine should be short, but there will be some unavailable disruption to logged in users. Please email sys-admin if you have any particular availability requirements over the weekend. More …
www-dyn(1) upgrade
28 April 2014
The server providing the www-dyn1 and www-dyn services is to be upgraded. Users are recommended to check that any pages they publish work on the www-dyn2 and www-dyn3 servers. See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/local/web/personal.html#www-dyn for full details. More …
Professor Andy Hopper featured in the Sunday Times list of the 100 most influential Britons of the 21st century
24 March 2014
Andy Hopper, Head of Department and Professor of Computer Technology, has been named in an illustrious list of Britain's 100 most influential movers and shakers of the 21st century. More …
Further NTP related changes
24 February 2014
With the new routers, Lab machines lost the ability to NTP probe machines on the internet, as we lost stateful UDP reflexive rules. With the recent NTP amplification attacks, we have added rules which mean that machines on the internet cannot NTP probe most Lab machines (our NTP servers should still be accessible). Peerings (where source and destination ports are both 123) should still work. More …
Professor Andy Hopper named one of the UK’s 100 leading practising scientists
17 February 2014
Andy Hopper, Professor of Computer Technology and Head of Department, has been named in the Science Council's list of the country’s 100 leading practising scientists. More …
Computer Laboratory lecturers awarded Pilkington Prizes
13 February 2014
Lecturers Dr Alastair Beresford and Dr Andrew Rice have been awarded Pilkington Prizes for excellence in teaching. More …
Developer Contest - Travel Apps
23 January 2014
Prizes worth a total of £2,800 are up for grabs! More …
Purge of unused VLAN 100 IP addresses
18 January 2014
As part of a campaign to clear the use of the original lab subnet, IP address on VLAN 100 in the subnet 128.232.0.0/20 which are believed not to have not been used for a year have been removed from the DNS. Further pruning is likely in future. If you believe an address has been retired but is still needed, please email sys-admin More …
MPhil Scholarships 2014/15
17 January 2014
Advanced Computer Science MPhil Scholarships 2014-2015: The Faculty of Computer Science and Technology is pleased to announce that it will be awarding a limited number of scholarships and bursaries to UK students applying for admission for the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science for the academic year 2014-2015. The awards may include full scholarships, covering approved fees and a maintenance award, or bursaries to assist with tuition fees. More …
Wordpress upgraded to 3.8
23 December 2013
The instance of wordpress used for http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/news/ has been upgraded to 3.8. Please report any problems to sys-admin. More …
Cambridge students excel at NWERC
1 December 2013
Congratulations to the three Cambridge teams who excelled at the Northwestern European Regional Contest 2013 (NWERC). More …
DNSSEC for cl.cam.ac.uk
15 November 2013
On Monday 18th November 2013 we plan to add a DS RR for cl.cam.ac.uk to the cam.ac.uk zone. This will mean that resolvers using DNSSEC will check our information, and ignore it if the information does not have a valid signature. Apart from making our information more secure, it also has the ability to take cl.cam.ac.uk out of the DNS if something goes wrong. Please report any DNS problems with cl.cam.ac.uk More …
Networks and Operating Systems Group calls for applicatins for METRICS studentships
29 October 2013
The Computer Laboratory's Networks and Operating Systems Group calls for applications for the Marie Curie ITN METRICS studentships. More …
Filer running slowly
18 September 2013
The filer is running slowly at the moment. This is because we're copying the entire filesystem to the replacement machine. The ultimate goal is to make everything faster, but in the short term we have to suffer some pain. More …
Raspberry Pi wins INDEX 2013 award
9 September 2013
Congratulations to Raspberry Pi, which was been awarded an INDEX 2013 Award in the Play and Learning category. More …
RealVNC wins most prestigious national prize for engineering innovation
18 July 2013
RealVNC, co-founded by Professor Andy Hopper and Dr Andy Harter, has won the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award, the premier award for UK innovation in engineering. More …
Eben Upton receives prestigious Silver Medal
18 July 2013
Eben Upton, co-founder of the Rapsberry Pi Foundation, is one of four entrepreneurs to receive a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal. More …
Jon Crowcroft receives 2014 IEEE Internet Award
17 July 2013
Jon Crowcroft, Marconi Professor of Communications Systems, has been awarded the 2014 IEEE Internet Award. More …
Glynn Winskel awarded LICS Test of Time award
2 July 2013
Glynn Winskel, Professor of Computer Science, has been awarded the LICS (Logic and Computer Science) Test of Time award for his paper with Andre Joyal and Mogens Nielsen on ''Bisimulation from Open Maps'' which appeared in LICS 1993 - see http://lii.rwth-aachen.de/lics/archive/test-of-time-award.html More …
Professor Sir Maurice Wilkes born this day 100 years ago
26 June 2013
Today is the centenary of the birth of Professor Sir Maurice Wilkes, computer pioneer and past head of the Computer Laboratory. More …
PhD student awarded Google scholarship
23 June 2013
PhD student Toby Moncaster has been awarded a Google Scholarship for Students with Disabilities. More …
Cambridge formally recognised as centre of excellence for cybsersecurity research
13 June 2013
The University of Cambridge has been recognized as an "Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research” (ACE-CSR) by the UK Government. More …
John Daugman inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame
3 June 2013
John Daugman, Professor of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, has been inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. More …
Jean Bacon awarded honorary doctorate
30 May 2013
Jean Bacon, Professor of Distributed Systems, has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate of the Open University. More …
Two new lectureships announced
24 May 2013
The Computer Laboratory is pleased to announce that Dr Robert Watson and Dr Thomas Sauerwald have been appointed to Lectureships. More …
Computer Lab spin-out Cronto acquired
21 May 2013
Computer Lab spin-out Cronto, a provider of secure visual transaction authentication solutions for online banking, has been acquired by VASCO Data Security International, Inc. More …
Marwa Mahmoud wins best paper award at IEEE Face and Gesture Conference
2 May 2013
Marwa Mahmoud has won the best paper award at IEEE Face and Gesture Conference in Shanghai. More …
Computer Laboratory celebrates the first 75 years
30 April 2013
Around 300 graduates and friends of the Computer Laboratory converged on the William Gates Building to celebrate its first 75 years. More …
Tadas Baltrušaitis wins Cambridge Ring Publication of the Year award
29 April 2013
Tadas Baltrušaitis, Peter Robinson and Louis-Philippe Morency have won the Publication of the Year award at the Cambridge Ring's annual dinner for their paper on "3D Constrained local model for rigid and non-rigid facial tracking" presented at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in June 2012. The research integrated depth information with web-cam pictures to provide improved tracking of facial features. Tadas Baltrušaitis is supervised by Peter Robinson and the work was carried out in collaboration with Louis-Philippe Morency at the University of Southern California. See https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/rainbow/projects/clmz/ for details. More …
Computer Lab students win Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships
26 April 2013
Marwa Mahmoud and Steven Marsh, students at the Computer Laboratory, were awarded two of the three Qualcomm UK Innovation Fellowships in competition with other departments in Cambridge and at Imperial College. The Computer Laboratory winners were Marwa Mahmoud (supervised by Peter Robinson) and Steven Marsh (supervised by Simon Moore). The third winner was Joan Alabort-i-Medina from Imperial College. More …
Poster competition winners announced at 75th anniversary celebrations
25 April 2013
The Computer Laboratory celebrated its 75th anniversary on 24th April, at which time the winners of the associated poster competition were announced. More …
Lab PhD student wins Best Student Paper Award at EuroSys 2013
25 April 2013
Malte Schwarzkopf has received the Best Student Paper Award at EuroSys 2013. More …
RealVNC wins the triple
23 April 2013
RealVNC, the company founded by Computer Laboratory’s Professor Andy Hopper and Andy Harter together with Lily Bacon and other colleagues from the University has been singled out with its third Queen’s Awards for Enterprise in as many years, a remarkable accomplishment for the Cambridge-based provider of VNC® software. More …
Computer Lab spin-out helps protect online banking customers
18 April 2013
Computer Lab spin-out, Cronto, is helping to protect online banking customers from the threat of online banking fraud. More …
Purge of legacy automount information
17 April 2013
It is believed that the last systems using the old "indirect" autofs LDAP tables have been shut down or moved to use "direct" filer mounts, so the information is no longer included in the LDAP data. If anyone observes failure of the automount system (rather than missing krb5 tickets) please report the machine and the directory to sys-admin. More …
Lab PhD wins Mark Weiser Best Paper Award
21 March 2013
Kiran Rachuri has received the Mark Weiser Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications 2013 (PerCom 2013). More …
Andy Hopper welcomes Business Secretary, Dr Vince Cable, to the Computer Laboratory
18 March 2013
Professor Andy Hopper welcomed Business Secretary, Dr Vince Cable, to the Computer Laboratory today. Dr Cable, in Cambridge to launch Cambridge Business Week, visited the University's Computer Laboratory which, this year, celebrates its 75th anniversary. The Computer Laboratory has been instrumental in making Cambridge the premier cluster in the UK - over 200 companies have been founded by Lab graduates and staff. More …
The January 2013 edition of 'The Ring' is out!
29 January 2013
The January edition of the journal of the Computer Laboratory's graduate association, The Ring, is now out. More …
The Computer Laboratory gets ready to celebrate 75 years
11 January 2013
2013 is a special year for the Computer Laboratory. More …
Professor Andrew Pitts is made a Fellow of the ACM
12 December 2012
Andy Pitts has been made a Fellow of the ACM for his contributions to the theory of programming language semantics. More …
Computer Laboratory recruitment fair full to bursting
8 November 2012
Fifty one companies will converge on the Computer Laboratory on Thursday November 15th 2012 for the annual Supporters' Club recruitment fair. More …
PLS Research Group has four papers accepted for POPL 2013
29 October 2012
Of the 43 papers accepted (18.5% of those submitted) for the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2013) to be held in Rome next January, four are authored by members of the Computer Laboratory's Programming, Logic, and Semantics Research Group. More …
Charles Babbage robot head inspires research on affective computing
16 October 2012
Professor Peter Robinson's research exploring the role of emotions in human-machine interaction has inspired research on affective computing. More …
ACM Queue interview with Robert Watson on Cambridge research into the hardware-software interface
16 October 2012
Robert Watson talks about spanning industry and academia, the importance of open source in software research, and challenges facing research that spans traditional boundaries in computer science. More …
Computer Lab graduate highly commended in 2012 Undergraduate Awards
14 October 2012
Congratulations to Manfredas Zabarauskas who has been selected as one of nine Highly Commended students in the field of Computer Science & Information Technology in the 2012 Undergraduate Awards. More …
Professor Marcelo Fiore awarded most influential paper 10-year award
11 October 2012
Marcelo Fiore, Professor in Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, has been awarded the 10-Year Most Influential PPDP Paper Award. More …
Dr Malcolm Sabin awarded IMA's Gold Medal
9 October 2012
The Computer Laboratory is pleased to announce that the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) will award its 2012 Gold Medal to Dr Malcolm Sabin. More …
Computer Lab researchers awarded European Research Council Starting Grants.
5 October 2012
Congratulations to Dr Stephen Clark, Dr Robert Mullins and Dr Frank Stajano who have been awarded European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants. More …
Computer Lab researchers awarded Royal Society University Research Fellowships
4 October 2012
Congratulations to Dr Steven Murdoch and Dr Magnus Myreen who have been awarded Royal Society University Research Fellowships. More …
Xen Server problems - please report anomalies
24 July 2012
We have had a number of problems with one of our Xen pools. If any VMs appear to be behaving oddly, please contact sys-admin. A dom0 (actual machine which hosts VMs) had problems, so was taken out of service and replaced with a hot-spare. One VM (only!) appears to have problems running on the dom0, but there may be others lurking. More …
CentOS5 (Linux server) network service problems.
24 July 2012
A Redhat package problem caused CentOS 5 machines (Linux Servers) to loose access to certain network services. One of our two mail servers may have rejected email between 04:15 and 04:30, when the problem was spotted and the failing MTA was taken out of service. More …
Lab PhD receives best paper award at the Turing Centenary Conference
25 June 2012
Claudio Angione has received the best paper award at the Turing Centenary Conference in Manchester. The paper, 'Computing with Metabolic Machines', is joint work with Giovanni Carapezza, Jole Costanza, Pietro Lio' and Giuseppe Nicosia. More …
Lab PhD awarded Google Europe Fellowship
18 June 2012
Congratulations to Jisun An who has been awarded a Google Europe Fellowship in Social Computing. More …
Lab PhD wins EuroSys 2012 Roger Needham PhD award
28 May 2012
The Lab is pleased to announce that the EuroSys 2012 Roger Needham PhD award has been given to Derek Murray for 'A Distributed Execution Engine Supporting Data-Dependent Control Flow'. More …
DNS resolvers now validating
26 May 2012
The CL DNS resolvers have DNSSEC validation enabled. Please report any DNS problems to sys-admin. More …
Cambridge tops Guardian University Guide 2013 league table
24 May 2012
Cambridge has topped the Guardian University Guide league table for computer science. More …
Computer Lab students scoop Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships
21 May 2012
The Computer Laboratory is proud to announce that Tadas Baltrusaitis, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez and Al- Mustafa Zaidi have been awarded Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships 2012. More …
Computer Lab research student awarded Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship
24 April 2012
Congratulations to research student Vaiva Imbrasaite who has been awarded a Google Anita Borg Scholarship. More …
Ubisense wins the double
23 April 2012
Ubisense, founded by the Computer Laboratory's Professor Andy Hopper, has won two prestigious UK Queen's Awards; for International Trade and for Innovation. More …
Financial Times puts Raspberry Pi to the test
12 March 2012
Cambridge's Computer Laboratory has nurtured the Raspberry Pi through its development. More …
Cambridge Computer Science undergraduate named 'Cyber Security Champion'
12 March 2012
Congratulations to first-year computer science undergraduate Jonathan Millican, who has been named the UK's 'Cyber Security Champion' following a competition sponsored by GCHQ and other industry heavyweights. More …
Remote backups resumed
8 February 2012
The regular remote backups that were suspended on 30th January have now resumed. In particular home directories are now up to date on the remote server and should continue to be backed up hourly. More …
IPv6 address changes
8 February 2012
There has recently been a change to the IPv6 address allocations used in the University, though at present this affects relatively few people. The reason for the change is that the original allocation to Cambridge was not thought to be large enough; a larger allocation was subsequently obtained but this entails phasing out the old addresses. More …
Problem with remote backups
1 February 2012
Since the morning of Monday 30th January, we have had a problem with the offsite backup system; a number of filesystems, including the one containing user home directories, are not being copied to the offsite server. More …
Computer Laboratory awarded two Google Research Awards for 2011
12 December 2011
Congratulations to both Cecilia Mascolo and Andreas Bulling, who have received Google Research Awards for 2011. More …
Network problem 2011-11-25
28 November 2011
There was a major problem with the CL internal network during the afternoon of Friday 25th November, believed to have been caused by a faulty switch. There were a number of consequential side effects on other systems, which we now believe have been dealt with. More …
Unix group cleanup
25 October 2011
On departmental Linux systems, many Unix groups have been added locally, to facilitate groups of users jointly editing files. Use the shell command "id" to see which groups you are a member of. To avoid malfunctions, we now need to clean up older groups with gid value below 500. This requires your help. There are two sources of groups: More …
Computer Lab team recreate Darwin's emotion experiment
21 October 2011
A team from the lab's Graphics & Interaction Group are using 21st century technology to recreate an experiment run by Charles Darwin in the 19th century. More …
Dan Greenfield wins BCS Distinguished Dissertation Prize 2011
18 October 2011
Congratulations to Dan Greenfield, who has won the BCS Distinguished Dissertation prize 2011. More …
Dr Andy Harter elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering
14 October 2011
Computer Laboratory Visiting Fellow Dr Andy Harter has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. The Academy's Fellowship honours the UK's most distinguished engineers. More …
Computer Lab student on winning team in the 2011 Audio-Visual Emotion Challenge
12 October 2011
Tadas Baltrušaitis, a research student in the Graphics & Interaction Group, was on the winning team for the 2011 International Audio-Visual Emotion Challenge. More …
Head of Computer Laboratory calls for more computer scientists
23 September 2011
Professor Andy Hopper refutes Government Statistics More …
CentOS 5.7 released - kernel lock bug fixed
15 September 2011
Although not yet announced on the CentOS web site, CentOS 5.7 has been released, which includes a new kernel which fixes the bug which caused the machine to OOPS if an NFS file lock was attempted. As such, there will be a campaign of rebooting CentOS 5 machines, such as slogin-serv and miscellaneous other Lab servers. As CentOS systems automatically do "dot" upgrades, systems should automatically install the new kernel, and all that should be needed to move to the new kernel is a reboot. More …
Lab students win ACM Student Research Competition at SIGGRAPH 2011
13 August 2011
Lech Świrski and Christian Richardt, PhD students in the Graphics & Interaction Group, won the ACM Student Research Competition at SIGGRAPH 2011 with their poster "Layered Photo Pop-Up', based on Lech's 2011 MPhil project. More …
Wireless network replacement - phase 2 complete
29 July 2011
Phase 2 of the wireless network replacement is now complete, adding a number of mid-corridor access points. More …
Phone outage Thursday 28th July
28 July 2011
The Computing Service send their apologies for the telephone system outage this morning. A small and fairly routine reconfiguration was made to the West Cambridge routers during this morning's CUDN vulnerable period, ironically with the ultimate goal of improving network resilience. Unfortunately a maintenance script failed to run correctly and the voice network became disconnected. Once reported (by mobile phone), the communication channels worked well and the fault was attended to promptly. More …
Lab Professors elected Fellows of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications
28 July 2011
Professors John Daugman and Neil Dodgson have been elected Fellows of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. More …
Wireless network replacement - phase 1 complete
20 July 2011
The initial phase of the replacement wireless network installation is now complete. All of the old access points have been decommissioned, and 24 Aruba access points have been installed. More …
Password requirements change
19 July 2011
Passwords created or changed from now onwards will need to be of higher complexity than was permitted previously. Details of the requirements can be found at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/local/sys/access/kerberos/. Existing passwords will continue to work as normal - you only need to be aware of the extra restrictions when you choose to change your password. More …
Wireless network replacement
13 July 2011
On Monday and Tuesday of next week (18th/19th July) the long awaited upgrade of the wireless network in the building will take place. There will be disruption to wireless access as old access points are replaced with new, but I hope that there will be connectivity available from most places at most times. More …
Mohan Ganesalingam awarded Beth Prize
13 July 2011
Congratulations to Mohan Ganesalingam who has been (jointly) awarded the Beth Prize (see http://www.folli.org/) for his PhD thesis "The Language of Mathematics". More …
Professor Peter Robinson best in-category winner at Pervasive 2011
30 June 2011
Professor Peter Robinson was awarded best in-category at Pervasive 2011 for the video 'The emotional computer'. More …
Andreas Koltes awarded IET Postgraduate Scholarship
13 June 2011
Andreas Koltes has won the IET Postgraduate Scholarship, one of two awarded in 2011. More …
Peter Calvert wins ACM Student Research Competition
9 June 2011
Peter Calvert won first place, in the undergraduate category of the ACM Student Research Competition, for his final year project on offloading Java to graphics processors. More …
New package signing key
8 June 2011
A new key (3294FB03) has been generated to sign all Lab packages (RPMs and .debs). This has been installed on most Lab managed machines. Private machines which use the Lab repositories will need to register the new key. Details available on the WiKi More …
World IPv6 day - 2011/06/08 - possible network service problems
7 June 2011
On world IPv6 day there is a possibility of disruption of network services due to machine with dual stack not working correctly. Although we will be making small changes, most of the changes are outwith our control. If you experience problems, please contact sys-admin so that we can monitor and try to sort things. When we last enabled local services via IPv6 as well as IPv4 there were problems due to some Windows machines thinking that they have IPv6 connectivity, trying to use the IPv6 address, and failing. We believe that the particular problem was fixed, but there may be others. More …
svn services changes
17 April 2011
As mentioned in centos-5-machines-upgrading-to-5-6 CentOS machines have upgraded. They now run svn 1.6.11, so the svn-1-6-6-serv service is being withdrawn. More …
Computer Lab PhD scoops EAPLS Best PhD Dissertation Award 2010
11 April 2011
Dr Alexey Gotsman has been named the winner of the European Association for Programming Languages and Systems's Best Dissertation Award 2010 for his dissertation on logics and analyses for concurrent heap-manipulating programs. More …
CentOS 5 machines upgrading to 5.6
10 April 2011
CentOS 5 machines (mostly servers rather than user workstations) are automatically upgrading to 5.6. It should be mostly transparent, but the mailer (exim) has a security fix, so the old config file causes email to fail, including email saying that there is a problem. Some machines may have problems with the upgrade, and Virtual Machines may install a kernel which fails with NFS locking. If you use a CentOS machine (see /etc/issue) and it has problems, please email sys-admin. More …
WordPress upgraded
1 April 2011
The old WordPress software used for these pages has been upgraded. The theme has changed, but other things should be much the same. More …
Computer Laboratory to start full recycling scheme
29 March 2011
The Computer Laboratory will operate a full recycling system from April. More …
Network outages and consequences
17 March 2011
As of about the 11th of March, we have been having a number of problems with servers crashing, machines misbehaving, network dropouts, things going slowly, etc. We believe this to be due to some sort of local networking problem with the switches. Latest update: The supervisor in use on the central switch was was swapped Tue Mar 22 09:52 and the problems did not recur within four hours. More …
Anil Madhavapeddy wins Verisign grant
17 March 2011
Anil Madhavapeddy is one of four researchers chosen to receive a Verisign grant of US$75,000 to pursue projects aimed at strengthening Internet infrastructure. More …
Tom Cashman wins Eurographics dissertation award
14 March 2011
Eurographics, the European Association for Computer Graphics, has chosen Tom Cashman 2010 dissertation as one of this year's three award winners. Tom's dissertation, "NURBS-compatible subdivision surfaces", had previously been the runner-up in the 2010 BCS Distinguished Dissertation competition. More …
Robert Watson and Jonathan Anderson scoop Cambridge Ring Hall of Fame Award 2011.
9 March 2011
Robert Watson and Jonathan Anderson have won the Publication of the Year Award 2011, at the Cambridge Ring's Hall of Fame Awards, for 'Capsicum: Practical Capabilities for UNIX'. More …
Unix groups now also available in AD
21 February 2011
All Unix groups are now also maintained as a set of Security Groups in the Active Directory. The membership is controlled from the Unix groups and additions and deletions to maintain the groups in synchronisation are performed hourly during the working day. More …
slogin-serv move to NFS sec=krb5
7 February 2011
Any users of the "slogin-serv" service should be aware that changes
are to be made which may require them to run "kinit" to
access their home directory. Lab Linux machines are moving
from using NFS with sec=sys (which trusts the client OS user
information to auth users) to sec=krb5 (which requires the user to
have a kerberos ticket to indicate what access they should have) to
improve the security of user files on the central NFS server. Users of
new or upgraded Linux systems will be used to sec=krb5, but it's a bit
different on servers. Some hints and tips are available on the
NFS
sec=krb5 web page. We will be moving the main "slogin-serv"
service over starting the week beginning 2011/02/07. Initially the
name 'slogin-serv' will point at the existing sec=krb5 instance. Users
may need to type "kinit" (or equivalent) to get access to the filer.
Users experiencing problems should login to 'slogin-old' (or
'slogin-serv9' or 'ramsey') and then email sys-admin explaining the
problem. When we are confident that things are basically working, one
of the old servers ('ramsey') will move over to sec=krb5. When we are
happy that everything is working, the temporary name 'slogin-old' will
be removed, and 'slogin-serv9' will be retired. Users are encouraged
to try the new service in advance by connecting to ssh-remote-0, and
send any feedback to sys-admin More …
EDSAC to be recreated
13 January 2011
A working replica of EDSAC, the forerunner of general purpose computing, has been commissioned by the Computer Conservation Society, in recognition of the achievements of the pioneering computer scientists at Cambridge University in the 1940s, to inform the general public about Britain’s illustrious computer heritage and to inspire future students of engineering and computing. The CCS, a special interest group of the BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, has a 20-year track record in successfully recreating pioneering computers. More …
Web server changes
10 January 2011
Two small changes have been made to the Lab web server that may break some existing web pages, in particular those using other character encodings than UTF-8. More …
Network flood
2 December 2010
A traffic flood from a research group machine caused some network performance problems between sometime in the small hours of Thursday 2nd December and about 09:40 when the source was identified and disconnected. Our use of VLANs to separate traffic did a reasonable job of confining the problem, but there were a few knock-on effects; in particular one of the DNS resolvers found itself behind an overloaded link causing slow name lookups. Some overnight jobs may have misbehaved as a consequence. More …
Sir Maurice Wilkes, DFBCS FREng FRS
29 November 2010
It is with sadness that we announce the death of Sir Maurice Wilkes on November 29th 2010. More …
"wgb" wireless network
19 November 2010
The "wgb" wireless network is running very slowly at the moment and is congested. The reason for this is that the ADSL connectivity that lies behind it has been capped at 128kbit/s because of excessive usage under Demon's fair usage policy. We are allowed 200GB in any rolling 30-day period, and it seems that this has recently been exceeded. More …
Recruiting excellence: the Computer Lab's recruitment fair is a sell-out
10 November 2010
Fifty-one companies will converge on the Computer Laboratory, on Thursday November 18th, for its annual recruitment fair. More …
Computer Laboratory PhD scoops Distinguished Dissertation Award.
9 November 2010
Magnus Myreen has been named the winner of the BCS Distinguished Dissertation competition 2010, for 'Formal verification of machine-code programs'. More …
Network switch failure
21 October 2010
A network switch providing connections in the north east corner of the first floor failed shortly after 04:00 this morning (2010-10-21). It is one of two switches in the wiring closet so some machines and telephones in the area would have lost all connectivity whilst others were working normally. More …
Mail server replacement
15 October 2010
The last exim3 MTA (whittlesey) is about to be replaced by an exim4 one (sutton). This should not cause any disruption, but please email sys-admin if you suspect any problems. If email is completely failing, do phone or come to see us. Shutting down the last exim 3 server allows us to drop legacy features, and when we are convinced we won't need to roll back to either of the old exim3 servers, we'll be in a position to make use of new facilities in exim4. More …
slogin-serv* hosts IP addresses changing
11 October 2010
The IP addresses associated with the slogin-serv* servers is changing as they are moving to a subnet for machines using NFS sec=sys. This may cause ssh to warn that that the IP address differs, but that the host key matches. This is not a problem, so type "yes" to connect. e.g. More …
PhD student wins best student paper award at MASCOTS 10.
20 September 2010
PhD student, Sherif Akoush, has won the best student paper award at the 18th Annual Meeting of the IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems. The paper, Predicting the Performance of Virtual Machine Migration, is joint work with Professor Andy Hopper, Dr Andrew W Moore, Dr Andrew Rice and Dr Ripduman Sohan. More …
Computer Laboratory student wins prestigious undergraduate award.
6 September 2010
The Science Student of the Year winners were recently announced at The Science, Engineering & Technology (SET) Student of the Year Awards in London. More …
PhD student wins Best Paper Award at IWITMA 2010
25 August 2010
PhD student, Fernando Ramos, has won the Best Paper Award at the 2nd International Workshop on IPTV Technologies and Multidisciplinary Applications (IWITMA 2010). The paper, 'Channel Smurfing: Minimising Channel Switching Delay in IPTV Distribution Networks', is joint work with Professor Jon Crowcroft and Dr Richard Gibbens, both of the Computer Laboratory, Professor Ian White of the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering, and Dr Pablo Rodriguez of Telefonica Research, Barcelona. More …
PhD students win Best Student Paper award at USENIX Security '10.
23 August 2010
Robert Watson and Jonathan Anderson, PhD students at the Computer Laboratory, and Ben Laurie and Kris Kennaway of Google UK Ltd, have won the Best Student Paper award at USENIX Security ’10 for ‘Capsicum: Practical Capabilities for UNIX’. The research was sponsored by Google. More …
WGB power outages
11 August 2010
The WGB lost power on Wed 11th Aug 2010 and three times on Sat 14th due to the main 240v breaker in GN17 tripping, probably caused by a problem with the temperature sensor, from reports of other sites. It is likely to require a six hour power down at some future time to fix it (unrelated to the per-corridor shutdown on 16th August for monitoring work). More …
Professor Andy Hopper honoured at Queen's University, Belfast
9 August 2010
Professor Andy Hopper has received an honorary doctorate - DSc (Eng) - from Queen's University, Belfast, for services to information technology and business and commerce. More …
Caller ID presentation on Lab phones
6 August 2010
The new University phone system has the ability to present "caller id" on external phone calls as the actual DDI number of the phone, rather than the generic university switchboard number. This makes it easier for people to call you back. Whether the number actually reaches the called party is dependent on a number of technical and administrative factors; at present it will work for most calls to UK landlines. Unfortunately it won't work for most calls to mobile numbers. More …
Demise of Computing Service usenet server and email to it
29 July 2010
The Computing Service have announced that the University usenet news server will shut down at the beginning of next month (August 2010). Their announcement suggests alternative usenet sources. More …
Wireless network migration plans
19 July 2010
This is a status report on the planned upgrade to the wireless network, and a request for testing and feedback on the migration strategy. More …
PhD student wins best paper award
12 July 2010
PhD student Shazia Afzal has won the best paper award, at the 10th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, for 'Modelling Affect in Learning - Motivation and Methods'. More …
Computer Lab enjoys high profile visit
12 July 2010
Professor Andy Hopper was delighted to welcome Carlos Slim, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, Lady Lynn de Rothschild and Lord Martin Rees to discuss the Computer Laboratory's research on computing for the future of the planet. More …
Eduroam
14 June 2010
I have received a couple of samples of the new wireless access points that we intend to install over the summer. I have placed one of them so that it should provide some Eduroam coverage to the Street area. More …
Tim Griffin wins ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Paper Award 2010
8 June 2010
Tim Griffin, Senior Lecturer at the Computer Laboratory, and Gordon Wilfong have been awarded the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Paper Award 2010 for "An analysis of BGP convergence properties". More …
New package signing key
8 June 2010
A new key has been generated to sign all Lab packages (RPMs and
.debs). This has been installed on most Lab managed machines. Private
machines which use the Lab repositories will need to register the new
key. On a debian based system use "apt-key
add" and on an RPM based system use "rpm
--import", using the key on the lab web server, e.g. one of:
wget -O -
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/deb/cl.cam.ac.uk-archive-keyring.gpg | sudo
apt-key add -; wget -O - www/deb/KEY|sudo apt-key add -; sudo rpm
--import http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/RPM/RPM-GPG-KEY-CL; More …
Filer problems May bank holiday weekend
1 June 2010
Between sometime in the evening of Sunday 30th May and early morning on Tuesday 1st June the performance of the NetApp filer "elmer" was so badly degraded as to be effectively unusable. The problems affected various services, including the main lab web server. More …
Chips, worms and grey matter: more similar than you think
5 May 2010
Computer Laboratory PhD student Dan Greenfield is among the team of computer and neuroscientists who have discovered “striking similarities” between human brains, the nervous system of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans and computer chips. More …
The University of Cambridge invites you to participate in the FluPhone Pilot Study
22 April 2010
We would like to invite you to participate in the pilot period of the FluPhone study, an experiment being conducted by researchers at the University of Cambridge, the University of Liverpool and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. More …
Migrating the filer to a new IP address - second stage
31 March 2010
On 22nd February I wrote about the start of a campaign to the migrate the NetApp filer "elmer" to a new IP address. There have been a few hiccups, but by and large the migration has gone smoothly. The vast majority of machines migrated to the new address of their own accord, and over the last few days the stragglers have been cajoled into moving by more or less drastic means. More …
Migrating the filer to a new IP address
22 February 2010
We will shortly be making a change to the DNS to change the default IP address that is used to access the main filer, elmer. The motivation for the change is to deal with some security issues that are currently preventing the use of the latest version of the NFS protocol. More …
Web browser proxy configurations
4 February 2010
The Computing Service have recently announced that their web proxy service is to close. We have not recommended use of this service for many years, but there is still some legacy from the time when it was strongly recommended. Part of that legacy is a collection of proxy configuration files in our WWW server that some older browsers may be configured to consult. More …
Computer Laboratory receives one of Google's new Focused Research Awards
4 February 2010
The University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory has become the only university outside the US to receive a Google Focused Research Award. More …
Web server logs
7 December 2009
The web server logs (subsets of which are accessible using the cl-personal-www-log command) are now being recorded in "combined" log format rather than "common". This format adds two extra fields, giving referrer and user-agent information. More …
Industrial Supporters' Club recruitment fair
17 November 2009
The 2009 Recruitment Fair of the Computer Laboratory’s Industrial Supporters’ Club takes place in the attrium of the William Gates Building on Thursday, 19 November, 11:30–16:00. More …
December 15th 2009 - Overseas Postgraduate paper applications deadline
6 November 2009
M.Phil in Advanced Computer Science and Ph.D. in Computer Science October 2010 entry, overseas and EU applicants More …
Changing the name on telephones
26 October 2009
Until now, changing the name displayed on our VoIP telephones has been a big deal, involving an interaction with the telecomms office. We now have access to an experimental facility allowing us to change these strings ourselves. More …
cron job migration from legacy servers
21 October 2009
In preparation for decommissioning our older omnipotent servers, various cron jobs are being rehomed. This should not disrupt thing, but please let sys-admin know if there appear to be problems. More …
Computer Lab hosts The Open House Festival of Interactive Technology
14 September 2009
The Open House Festival of Interactive Technology, one of the key events during this year's HCI 2009 Conference, was held at the Computer Laboratory on September 2nd. The Festival, organised by the University and Microsoft Research Cambridge, was a one-off event to mark the University's 800th anniversary. More …
Linux kernel vulnerability tweaks
14 August 2009
Due to a Linux kernel vulnerability a number of machines have had mmap_min_addr set to 4096 or had modules.alias tweaked to disable some protocols. If any users suspect that this may have broken things on their system, please email [Javascript required] More …
Law Lords rule in favour of Procul Harum's Matthew Fisher
3 August 2009
Computer Laboratory graduate Matthew Fisher, the composer behind the organ introduction to Procol Harum's 'A Whiter Shade of Pale', has won the right to a share of the song's royalties after a three-year court battle. More …
EPSRC Fellowship awards
10 July 2009
Two members of the Computer Laboratory have been successful in the recent round of EPSRC Fellowships. More …
Main Lab web services use a pool
7 July 2009
There are now four web servers running the same configuration which provide a pool from which the services (www.cl.cam.ac.uk, www.tex.ac.uk, etc) can be served. More …
Viktor Vafeiadis receives ACM SIGPLAN outstanding doctoral dissertation award
22 June 2009
Congratulations to Viktor Vafeiadis, a former PhD student at the Computer Laboratory, who has been awarded the 2008 ACM SIGPLAN outstanding doctoral dissertation award. More …
Professor Jon Crowcroft awarded the 2009 SIGCOMM Award
1 June 2009
Jon Crowcroft, Marconi Professor of Communication Systems, has been awarded the 2009 SIGCOMM Award for his pioneering contributions to multimedia and group communications. More …
Professor Ross Anderson elected as Fellow of the Royal Society
18 May 2009
Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering, is one of nine Cambridge academics to be recognised for exceptional contributions to society, with his election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society. More …
Brief problem affecting certain home directories
12 May 2009
There was a period of about 20 minutes starting at about 09:30 this morning when certain users (those on "homes-1") may have had problems accessing their home directories. This was traced to a "garbage-in garbage-out" problem in the script that does the routine filer housekeeping, and corrected itself next time the script ran. The cause of the original "garbage-in" is still not known, but steps have been taken to detect it in future and abort the script before any damage is done. More …
Windows7 RC1 now available locally
11 May 2009
You can now download Windows 7 from the local MSDNAA site, www.cl.cam.ac.uk/MSDN, in both 32 and 64 bit versions. Please remember that since this is a release candidate it will stop working after a set period. It is only suitable for experimental use. More …
PhD Student Yan Wu wins prestigious award
11 May 2009
Congratulations to Yan Wu who has won the prestigious 2008 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Student Abroad. More …
dns[01].cl auth NS to refuse "other" requests
7 May 2009
The authorative nameservers for cl.cam.ac.uk are moving to return REFUSED for requests for other domains rather than sending back AUTHORITY and ADDITIONAL RRs to help the client to find the requested RR. More …
new page on sec=krb5
5 May 2009
The new page nfs-sec-krb5 has some initial simple (!) examples of using NFS sec=krb5 - feedback welcome. More …
800th Anniversary Seminars at the Computer Laboratory
5 May 2009
Although a young discipline by Cambridge standards, Computer Science has had an incalculably large impact on modern life, and therefore inspires a great deal of public interest. Cambridge has been responsible for many of the significant first advances in this new field (EDSAC, the world’s first practical stored program computer, and the Computer Science Diploma, the world’s first taught course in computing, to list but two), and we are planning a series of events throughout 2009 to celebrate Cambridge's contributions to computing. More …
Tool to test ssh authorized_keys files
1 May 2009
Users can check that their ~/.ssh/authorized_keys files is
"acceptable" with
/usr/groups/admin/cmds/check-ssh-auth.pl. More …
Terminal Server changes
1 May 2009
We are about to release a new terminal server (ts01.ad.cl.cam.ac.uk) to replace the ones (waterloo & charingcross) that have been in service for the last 6 years. This runs on Windows 2008 rather than 2003 and so roaming profiles are not shared between the old and new services. In addition the version of Office on the new server is Office 2007 which has a radically different user interface to previous versions. More …
Researchers help teenagers find the answer to untidiness
28 April 2009
Cecily Morrison and Laurel Riek, both post-graduate researchers at the Computer Laboratory, demonstrated the magic of computer science to a group of students from Thomas Deacon Academy in Peterborough. More …
Web server upgraded
27 April 2009
The main lab web server was upgraded to Apache 2.2 on 27 April 2009. Please check any particular configurations (e.g. via .htaccess) that you rely on and contact webmaster@cl if you spot any problems. More …
Professor Andy Hopper makes his mark on the 800th anniversary celebrations
22 April 2009
Professor Andy Hopper, Head of Department, has made his mark on the 800th anniversary celebrations by successfully completing a Round The World flight in his Cessna. More …
Seminar to Celebrate the 60th Anniversary of EDSAC
30 March 2009
As part of our Wednesday Seminar Series and the events we are holding to mark the 800th anniversary of the University of Cambridge, there will be a special seminar at 15:00 on Wednesday 6 May to celebrate the 60th anniversary of EDSAC. The speakers will be Professor David Barron and Dr Doron Swade MBE and their presentation is entitled 'Inventing the user: EDSAC in context'. Professor Sir Maurice Wilkes will also make a contribution. More …
Larry Paulson is made a Fellow of the ACM
17 January 2009
Larry Paulson has been made a Fellow of the ACM for his contributions to theorem provers and verification techniques. More …
CL gets highest grade-point average in RAE 2008
19 December 2008
The Computer Laboratory obtained the following profile for its Computer Science and Informatics submission to the Research Assessment Exercise 2008 (RAE2008): More …
Oliver Woodman scoops first prize at East of England regional poster competition
8 December 2008
Oliver Woodman scooped first prize, at the East of England Hub regional poster competition for postgraduate researchers. Oliver's poster, "Pedestrian Localisation for Indoor Environments", was also runner-up at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory's Show and Tell event in September 2008. More …
MPhil Open Day on January 28th 2009
8 December 2008
The Computer Laboratory will be holding an Open Day for students interested in applying for either the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science or the MPhil in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology. The event will be held on Wednesday, January 28th 2009 from 1 p.m. until 5 p.m. in the William Gates Building. More …
Full IEEE/IET Electronic Library (IEL) subscription
14 November 2008
The University Library announced today: More …
Industrial Supporters’ Club Annual Recruitment Fair
13 November 2008
The 2008 Recruitment Fair of the Computer Laboratory’s Industrial Supporters’ Club takes place in the attrium of the William Gates Building on Thursday, 13 November, 11:30–16:00. More …
Robert Harle and Oliver Woodman win best paper award at UbiComp 2008
6 November 2008
Robert Harle and Oliver Woodman received the best paper award for ‘Pedestrian Localisation for Indoor Environments’ at the 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp). More …
Computer Laboratory Student wins 2008 Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship
4 September 2008
Congratulations to Silvia Breu who has been awarded a €5000 Anita Borg scholarship for the 2008–2009 academic year. More …
2MinuteChallenge: Computer Science in Two Minutes
30 May 2008
Sixth form students have the opportunity to win prizes by telling the world about computer science and how important it is to our society. The University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory is running a competition this summer to find short YouTube video clips that help to educate the public (www.2minutechallenge.org). Entrants, mostly school students, must submit a video or animation that is less than two minutes long that describes some aspect of computer science in an entertaining way. The authors of the best entries will win an expenses-paid trip to see the new Google Zurich offices as well as receiving new Asus eeePCs. Entries from the general public are also being accepted, and are eligible for a separate prize. More …
Computer Laboratory graduates receive the 2008 Pierre Bézier Award
19 May 2008
Ian Braid, Alan Grayer and Charles Lang have been awarded the 2008 Pierre Bézier Award for their many fundamental contributions to practical solid modelling and the profound influence their work has had on today's commercial solid modelling systems. More …
Valediction for the Diploma Course
10 April 2008
The Diploma Course is to be withdrawn at the end of the current academical year, after 55 years of invaluable service. To mark its passing, all Diploma Course students, alumni, staff and those with past or present association with the Course are invited to attend a valedictory party at 12:30 on Wednesday 16 July 2008, in the Atrium of the William Gates Building. More …
Arthur Norman’s last lecture
12 March 2008
Today marked another landmark in Computer Science in Cambridge – Arthur Norman gave his last lecture (after continuing to lecture past his retirement). More …
Industrial Supporters' Club Annual Recruitment Fair is a sell-out
16 October 2007
Fifty-five exciting companies from software, animation and gaming, as well as many of the major names in finance, defence, communications and commerce will be attending the Industrial Supporters' Club Annual Recruitment Fair on 15 November 2007. More …
PhD Student elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College
15 October 2007
PhD student Mbou Eyole-Monono has been elected to a Title A (Junior Research) Fellowship, 2007 at Trinity College, Cambridge. More …
European Conference on Wireless Technology award for PhD student
10 October 2007
Francisco Monteiro (Fitzwilliam College), a third year PhD student in the Digital Technology Group, and his supervisor Dr Ian Wassell received the €3000 best paper award during the 10th European Conference on Wireless Technology for a paper at the European Microwave Week 2007, jointly organised by the European Microwave Association and the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society. More …
Undergraduates cruise in the Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge – Europe
4 October 2007
The Cambridge team (which included Computer Laboratory undergraduates Sunil Shah and Andy Prichard) were runners up in the Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge – Europe (SAUC-E), a competition for students from across Europe. More …
Students win IBM UK "University Team Challenge" for the third time
1 October 2007
A group of six Computer Laboratory students won the IBM University Team Challenge (formerly: ThinkPad Challenge), held at IBM Hursley on 28 September 2007. Cambridge has become the first university, among the 18 that compete, to win the contest three times. More …
Sir Maurice Wilkes wins the IEEE Computer Society 60th Anniversary award
27 September 2007
Sir Maurice Wilkes and Professor David Parnas have won the IEEE Computer Society 60th Anniversary award for seminal contributions to the discipline of computing. More …
Spin out XenSource to be acquired by Citrix Systems for $500million
25 September 2007
XenSource, the leading provider of enterprise-class virtual infrastructure solutions built on the open source Xen® hypervisor, is to be acquired by Citrix Systems, the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, for approximately $500million in a combination of cash and stock. More …
Awards for Karen Spärck Jones
15 March 2007
We are delighted to announce the following honours for Karen Spärck Jones, emeritus professor of Computers and Information at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory: More …
QUALCOMM US$ 1 million Research Students Fund donation
20 November 2006
We are delighted to announce that QUALCOMM Incorporated has funded a Research Studentship in Computing with an endowment gift of US$ 1 million. More …
2009 Computer Laboratory Research Students Fund formally announced
30 October 2006
The establishment of the 2009 Computer Laboratory Research Students Fund was formally announced in the Graces submitted to the Regent House on August 9th 2006. More …
Andy Hopper elected Fellow of the Royal Society
18 May 2006
The Royal Society elected on 18 May 2006 forty-four new Fellows, including: More …
Computer Lab students win IBM Thinkpad Challenge
3 October 2005
Last Friday, the Cambridge undergraduate team were overall winners of this year’s IBM UK “Thinkpad Challenge” competition held at IBM Hursley. The Cambridge entry had been selected as best among last year’s second-year group projects, on the basis of their Logo interpreter implementation. Cambridge has become the first university, among the 18 that compete, to win the Thinkpad Challenge twice. More …
Computer Lab team wins competition
26 May 2005
BOPPHY Technologies, founded by Dr Inaki Berenguer and Stavros Tsiakkouris from the Digital Technology Group in the Computer Laboratory together with Michele Palazzi, Prof Xiaodong Wang, Dr Mohammad Madihian and Prof Jon Crowcroft is named winner of the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs’ £50K Business Creation Competition. The other two winners are EnvAl and Cambfix. More …