2019
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 …