School of Informatics

Compucast podcasts are back!

Hugh Leather has relaunched Compucast: podcasts by computer scientists for computer scientists.

Episodes are produced monthly by Informatics staff and students at the University of Edinburgh, in collaboration with the University of St Andrews and the University of Lancaster. The first new programme in three years went live on 1 March 2016.

Highlights included PhD student Stan Manilov talking to Professor Steve Renals about speech recognition and deep learning for audio, and fellow research student Tom Spink interviewing Volker Seeker about his PhD on saving energy on mobile phones.

The programme was presented by Hugh, who received his BSc and PhD here and spent time in industry (Microsoft, Trilogy) before becoming a Chancellor's Fellow and a lecturer.

In addition to Stan and Tom, the crew for the latest production included Rui Li, Maria Astefanoaei and Andrew McLeod.

The team says, “We set out to produce an interesting and varied show aimed specifically at those with a reasonable level of understanding of computer science: we don’t want to dance around the detail, we want to embrace it and really learn something.

“In each show correspondents with some expertise in the field will present several recently published and thoroughly researched computer-science related features. The idea is then to intertwine the nitty gritty detail of these with some more light-hearted topics (jokes and a quiz) so that we don’t lose anyone as the show progresses. We will also present a news section that will guide you through the innovative, the surreal and the absurd of the previous few months."

The next episode will be produced in collaboration with the University of Lancaster, in April. Edinburgh will host, provide news, jokes and the quiz while Lancaster provide the two features.

Useful links

Compucast

Hugh Leather’s School webpage