About

The Midlands Graduate School (MGS) in the Foundations of Computing Science is an annual Spring School organized by researchers at the Universities of Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham, and Sheffield. See the Main MGS Website for more background.

Overview

MGS 2026 will take place over four and a half days in Nottingham 13–17 April 2026. A total of eight courses will be run, each consisting of 4–5 hours of lectures and a similar number of exercise classes. Three courses are introductory, four will cover more advanced topics, and one course will be given by an invited speaker. Participants are suggested to attend around four courses in total.

We expect around 60–80 participants. We offer the following registration options:

  • Student day registration: 350 GBP
  • Student overnight registration: 600 GBP
  • Industry day registration: 800 GBP
  • Industry overnight registration: 1,050 GBP

All options include lunch Monday–Thursday, conference dinner, and catered breaks with coffee, tea, and biscuits. The overnight registrations include five nights at Rutland Hall shared bathroom accommodations.

Registration

Registration has now closed.

Courses

The following courses will be held:

Timetable

The detailed timetable is available on the timetable page.

Venue

The school will be held on University Park Campus (postcode NG7 2RD, Google Maps) at the University of Nottingham, hosted by the School of Computer Science. All sessions will take place in the Sir Clive Granger building (number 16 on the campus map).

Travel

Nottingham is centrally located in the East Midlands in the UK, and is easily reachable by all forms of transport. The university's directions for getting to Jubilee Campus can be found here.

International travel

If you want to come by plane, closest to Nottingham is East Midlands Airport, but it is so small that you need to be lucky to find a flight arriving there. More realistic airports within reasonable distance and with good train connections to Nottingham are:

Other London airports such as Heathrow Airport LHR, and Gatwick Airport LGW are also options, with train connections via London or direct bus connection (see national travel below).

If you want to avoid a flight, the Eurostar is fantastic with connections from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, Lille, and Paris.

National travel

National Rail is one of the sites that let you find train connections. If you want to try to save costs, there are websites that let you split the journey into smaller parts (search for “UK train split ticket”), using that the triangle inequality does not hold for UK train fares. However, be aware that your tickets will be less flexible.

National Express offers cheap and often very convenient bus journeys and is an interesting option when the train connection is not direct. Similar services are offered by Megabus and FlixBux.

Local travel

University Park Campus (Google Maps) has the address University Blvd, Nottingham NG7 2RD. The campus is quite a bit away from Nottingham Railway Station. Convenient connections include:

Parking

Please contact the organisers (see below) if you would like to park on Jubilee Campus.

Visa

Please check whether you need a visa to enter the UK on the government website. If you are an EU citizen, you will normally not require a visa. If you require an official invitation letter in order to apply for a visa, please contact the organisers (see below).

Sponsorship

If your organisation would like to sponsor MGS 2026, then we would be delighted to discuss this with you.

Organisation

For all enquiries, please contact Ulrik Buchholtz by email or Dan Marsden, also by email.