Informatics Fourth Year Honours Course Guide
Facilities

Access to buildings

James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB)

The JCMB is open 07:30-22:00 on weekdays, and 09:00-19:00 at weekends; students must have a letter of authorization from the Deputy Head of School if they are in the JCMB outside these times. The JCMB library is in 4327.

Appleton Tower, George Square

Students are issued on matriculation with smart cards which enable them to gain access to the facilities in Appleton Tower out of hours.  The refurbishment of Appleton Tower will continue, and occassionally temporary arrangements will need to be made.  Please keep an eye on this page, or contact the ITO for further information.
 

Informatics Forum

Student access to the Informatics Forum is limited to the hours of 10am-1pm during term time (Sem 1 and Sem 2), and 10am-1pm Tues+Thus outside term time. Access to the Forum is only for meetings with staff or other prearranged activities. There are no student facilities in the Forum.

Computing facilities

The bulk of machines available for UG4 are running the DICE system and most courses have moved to DICE.  Students should all be familiar with the DICE system.

Any problems with computing facilities should be reported promptly via the web form.

Informatics computing labs

General remarks

You are welcome to use your own computers for doing assessed work, but please bear in mind that: all programs that you write need to run on the School machines, using the software installed there. Some assessed work needs to be submitted via the School machines. You are responsible for making regular backups for work that you do away from the School machines. If you lose work because of a hardware crash on a non-School machine, you are liable to get a zero mark for the relevant exercise. In summary, it really makes sense to use School machines in preference to any other University machines. Any student in a computing subject area who loses their work due to their failure to back up material should really know better. Informatics takes great effort to back up you home space reliably (indeed as was proven in the South Bridge fire a few years ago). Please make use of this. If you work on your own computers you might want to check out the Unison File Synchroniser to regularly synchronise your work with DICE and hence ensure it is properly backed up.

Please be considerate when running large computer programs, especially if left running as background jobs.

When you are doing assessed practical work, you should ensure that your files are protected to prevent unauthorised use by other students. You can get into trouble if other people copy your work and pass it off as their own; penalties for plagiarism can be very severe, and it is sometimes hard to determine who is to blame (see the School of Informatics Guidelines on Plagiarism).

Student email changes

From September 2001, all students will use the EUCS Student Mail Service (SMS), rather than the School's own mail servers, as the delivery point for their email. For more information, see the Support FAQ.

Libraries

Informatics Library Resources

The collection of relevant literature on various subject areas of informatics is distributed across a number of University library sites:

1.  The Main Library, George Square - holds books and journals on AI and related subjects. Some books are located on the 4th and 5th floors but most are located in the new and rapidly growing collection on the 1st floor adjacent to Current Journals and clearly signposted "Artificial Intelligence library". This is where replacement stock of the former AI Library, 80 South  Bridge, can be found. It is worth a visit!  Please make use of this collection.

2.  The James Clerk Maxwell Library, located in Kings Buildings, is the University's major science library.  This library stocks books and journals on computer science as well as mathematics and physics.

3.  The Robertson Engineering Library, also located in Kings Buildings, holds the University's main collection of materials on electronic and electrical engineering and related fields.

Students are encouraged to explore University Library services and resources via Library Online.  Library Online also provides access to a vast and increasing range of informatics related e-journals, databases and relevant reference materials.

The Informatics librarians will be happy to assist with any enquiries. They can be found in the Main Library, George Square, tel. 650-3400.
 

Information dissemination

There are UG4 noticeboards on corridor 25 in JCMB and outside the ITO at Appleton Tower, but email, this website and the eduni.inf.ug4 newsgroup are the main channels of communication. All UG4 students (including combined degree students) must log on to the Informatics network regularly (i.e., several times per week during term) and check the website as well check their email. Anything provided by any one of these mediums are deemed to have been read and received.

Normally, course notes will be available from the appropriate documentation secretary in advance. However, in some cases, lecturers will hand out notes on a lecture-by-lecture basis.

There are pigeonholes outside the ITO at Appleton Tower. These are sometimes used for distributing handouts.  If you wish to submit coursework to Appleton Tower, please ensure that you hand this to a member of the ITO team.

Other activities

Apart from specific UG4 activities, students can participate in school activities in a number of ways, e.g., Informatics colloquia are one-hour general-interest talks given by speakers from inside and outside the school: 4th year students are encouraged to attend.


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