Welcome to new PhD students

We are delighted to introduce three female PhD students funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council.

Xue Guo (JC1.06)
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“I am Xue Guo, a returning student from Beijing. My PhD research into Complex Networks is supervised by Prof. Simon Dobson. Last seven years, I hopped over five places: four undergraduate years in BUPT and UCSD, one master year in St Andrews, and two gap years – one in Phoenix TV as a technology journalist, and one in Skyscanner as a software engineer. A three-to-four-year research in one town seems quite a LONG journey for me, but I am sure it will NOT be a LONGLY one in this warm academic community of School of Computer Science. My current research interest is modelling real world phenomena using complex networks, esp. smart city design. Born in Beijing, a city with a population of over 20 million, I have experienced most urban problems that a metropolis can suffer from. I would like to design a research tool for the city designers to generate solutions to traffic congestion and give advice on city infrastructure distribution. I am looking forward to learning from you and exploring more applications of complex networks. In my free time, I enjoy fencing, snowboarding, calligraphy and music.”

Yanbei Chen (JC1.19)
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“From 2011 to 2014, I was studying in Zhejiang University in China, with a speciality in Automation. In 2014, I started my master program in KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, with a major in System, Control and Robotics. In the summer of 2015, I enrolled in Tohoku University Engineering Summer Program in Japan. In the first half of 2016, I conducted my master thesis in the field of machine learning, deep learning and multimodal learning under the supervision of Dr. Atsuto Maki in Computer Vision and Active Perception Lab in KTH.Currently, with the scholarship from China Scholarship Council and University of St Andrews, I will start my PhD study under the supervision of Dr. Juan Ye. My research interests lie in the fields of activity recognition, machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. From now on, my research will focus on activity recognition based on sensor data from smartphone. In my leisure time, I enjoy music, travel, reading, and jogging.”

Sidi Zhan (JC1.11)
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“Hi, I am Sidi Zhan! I completed my BEng in Computer Science at Beijing Foreign Studies University, focusing on recommending doctors to patients in online healthcare QA community. I am now working as a PhD student in Computer Science under the supervision of Dr. Tristan Henderson and Dr. Juan Ye. My proposed research is to enhance peers mutual help and promote their social support in online healthcare community by using recommender to match-make the patient users. My research project will include collecting and analyzing users’ profiles and records data, so policies on user privacy protection will also be examined. I enjoy studying and living in St Andrews, the beautiful coastal city, very much. I am so willing to combine my hobbies with the life here by experiencing local culture, like jogging along the East Sands, singing in a chorus and going Ceilidh dances.”

System Seminar: Middleware support for wireless sensor network, by Prof. Danny Hughes, KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract:

Contemporary ICT infrastructures are trending towards a pervasive substrate of internet-connected sensors, actuators and human interfaces. Effective use of this pervasive infrastructure is key to solving 21st century challenges such as: mass transportation, energy conservation and environmental monitoring. Building effective applications that execute on this infrastructure requires advanced middleware support that respects the resource constraints of embedded devices. In this talk, I will present recent work from KU Leuven in the area of middleware support for sensing applications, with a focus on the Loosely-coupled Component Infrastructure (LooCI). I will then discuss emerging opportunities for ‘social sensing’ wherein online social networks are used to source and configure participatory sensor networks.

Bio:

Dr. Danny Hughes is an Assistant Professor with the iMinds-DistriNet group of the department of Computer Science at KU Leuven, Belgium. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University in 2007. He has since worked as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley (USA) and Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) and as a lecturer at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (China). His research interests are in distributed systems, with a focus on middleware support for dynamic systems such as wireless sensor networks, peer-to-peer networks and online social networks. You can find out more about his research at: https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/people/showMember.do?memberID=u0061846

Event details

  • When: 2nd May 2013 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

System Seminar: Unifying sensor fault detection with energy conservation, on 23 April, by Lei Fang, University of St Andrews

Abstract
Wireless sensor networks are attracting increasing interest but suffering from severe challenges such as power constraints and low data reliability. Sensors are often energy-hungry and cannot operate over a long period, and the data they collect are frequently erroneous due to complex causes. Thus a challenging research question is how to optimise energy consumptions on sensors while keeping the collected sensor data accurate. The current literature often treat these two problems separately, however, in this talk we will present an integrated self-organising solution for model-based data collection that can preserve sensors’ energy by reducing the amount of communications and as well as deal with sensor errors.

Bio

Lei Fang is a PhD student supervised by Prof. Simon Dobson and Dr Dharini Balasubramaniam. He received his first degree in Information and Computing Science from the University of Liverpool. His research interests reside in sensor data modelling, fault detection and inference.

Event details

  • When: 23rd April 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

System Seminar: Remote Health Monitoring Using Online Social Media Systems, on 16 April, by Chonlatee Khorakhun

Abstract:

Remote monitoring is considered an essential part of future eHealth systems to enable the delivery of healthcare outside clinical sites at reduced cost, while improving quality of patient care. We examine the use of online social networks for re- mote health monitoring. By exploiting the existing infrastructure, initial costs can be reduced and fast application development is possible. Facebook is used as an example platform: as a platform allowing user-defined applications, development is flexible and can be arranged quickly to suit different requirements of patients and health professionals. We analyse the general requirements of a remote monitoring scenario and the process of building and using a Facebook application to meet these requirements. Four different access viewpoints are implemented to suit the requirements of each user in our example scenario to form a carer network: the patient, the doctor in charge, professional carers, and family members of the patient. The suitability of the application is analysed including security and privacy issues. We conclude that online social media systems could offer a suitable platform for developing certain types of remote monitoring capability.

Bio:

Chonlatee Khorakhun is a second year PhD student, supervised by Prof. Saleem Bhatti. Before coming to St. Andrews, Chonlatee had completed an M.Sc. in Information and Communication Systems at University of Technology Hamburg-Harburg and worked in industry in Germany.

Event details

  • When: 16th April 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

System Seminar: Decentralised Orchestration of Service-oriented Workflows, on 16 April, by Ward Jaradat, University of St Andrews

Abstract:

Centralised orchestration of service-oriented workflows presents significant scalability challenges, these include: the consumption of network bandwidth, degradation of performance, and single points of failure. These challenges are particularly prominent when dealing with highly distributed data-intensive workflows, which involve large quantities of intermediate data that need to be routed through a centralised engine. In this talk we present a dataflow specification language and a distributed architecture that attempt to address these scalability challenges. Our language provides simple abstractions for orchestrating large-scale web service workflows and separates between the workflow logic and its execution. It is based on a data-driven execution model that permits parallelism to improve the workflow performance. Unlike classical approaches of distributed computing, our architecture allows the computation to be moved “closer” to services in the workflow; this is achieved by partitioning the workflow specification into smaller fragments which may be sent to remote locations for execution.

Bio:

Ward is a research student supervised by Dr. Adam Barker and Prof. Alan Dearle. He completed an M.Sc. in Software Engineering at the University of St Andrews. His research interests span the areas of software engineering, distributed computing, and service-oriented architecture, with a focus on building practical solutions for improving the scalability and performance of software systems.

Event details

  • When: 16th April 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

System Seminar: Stochastic Methodologies for Autonomously Evaluating Systems State, on 12th March, by Chris Schneider, University of St Andrews

Abstract:

Rising complexity in systems management remains an open problem. As complexity increases, so do the costs associated with operating large-scale computing environments.

One approach for addressing these issues is to build self-healing systems that can autonomously detect and recover from faults. Such approaches combine machine learning with closed control loops to reduce the number of situations requiring human involvement. By reducing the need for human interaction, operational costs are reduced and systems complexity is reduced.

This talk will provide an overview of current self-healing systems methodologies (i.e., frameworks) and briefly discuss an unsupervised methodology for detecting systems faults.

Bio:

Chris Schneider is a second year Ph.D. student under Prof. Simon Dobson and Dr. Adam Barker. Before attending the University of St Andrews he completed an M.Sc. in Security Informatics at The Johns Hopkins University, and worked in industry as a Security Technologist.

Event details

  • When: 12th March 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

System Seminar: A Framework for Maintaining Artefact Consistency During Software Development, by Ildiko Pete, University of St Andrews

Abstract:

Software systems are subject to evolution: they may be in a state of change at any given time during their existence until they are phased out. A system is typically associated with a variety of artefacts, which are products of the various activities involved in its development.

In practice, software artefacts evolve at different paces. Modifications applied to one artefact may not necessarily get reflected in another related artefact. This differential evolution of software artefacts may result in inconsistency among artefacts, eventually leading to problems with maintenance and software aging. Therefore, the management of software evolution must also cater for artefact consistency. Although incremental practices provide a more flexible solution for handling changes during software development, they do not explicitly address artefact consistency.

This talk will provide an overview and evaluation of the state of the art in managing consistency of software artefacts during software evolution. It will also propose new research directions to solve outstanding problems in the area.

Bio:

Ildiko started her PhD with Dr Dharini Balasubramaniam at the end of October last year. Before coming to St Andrews, Ildiko obtained an MSc degree in Applied Computing at the University of Dundee and had briefly worked in industry in both Scotland and Hungary.

Event details

  • When: 26th February 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

System Seminar: Understanding Ethical Concerns in Social Media Privacy Studies, by Luke Hutton, University of St Andrews

Abstract:

Understanding privacy in social network sites (SNSs) is an area of intense interest in computer science and many other fields. The ethical considerations of such research are numerous and complicated. Our position is that understanding how to address such considerations will improve measurement, and therefore our understanding, of networked social privacy.

In this talk we discuss some empirical work that we have conducted to replicate two existing studies in an attempt to understand SNS users’ privacy concerns about sharing data with researchers, rather than with other SNS users. We will introduce an architecture we are developing to support the execution of privacy-aware social network studies. Finally, we will discuss some of the outstanding challenges in this space, including the difficulty of establishing meaningful cross-study metrics, whether we can apply Nissenbaum’s model of contextual integrity to minimise ethical concerns, and the implications of our results for sharing social network data with other researchers.

Bio of the Speaker:

Luke Hutton is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews, supervised by Tristan Henderson. His research aims to improve understanding of people’s privacy-preserving behaviour through the lens of contextual integrity, with user studies leveraging social network sites, location-based services, and ubiquitous computing environments. Additionally, his research explores the methodological challenges associated with research of this nature, developing tools to support the conduct of privacy-aware social network experiments.

Event details

  • When: 12th February 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Systems Seminar: Coupled Adaptive Complex Network, by Saray Shai, University of St Andrews

Abstract:

This talk presents the introduction and our early investigation on coupled adaptive complex networks. Generally an adaptive network is the network whose topology adapts and evolves with the dynamics of the network. At present, adaptive networks are ubiquitous across many disciplines, including technical distribution networks such as road networks and the internet; natural and biological networks; and social science networks. These networks are often interact with or depend upon other networks, resulting in coupled adaptive networks.

In this talk, we present our recent study of susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) epidemic dynamics on coupled adaptive networks, where susceptible nodes are able to avoid contact with infection by rewiring their intra-network connections. However, infected nodes can pass the disease through inter-network connections, which do not change with time: the dependencies between the coupled networks remain constant.

An analytical formalism is developed and validated using extensive numerical simulation. The experiment results show that the stability is increased with the increase in the number of inter-network links, in the sense that the range of parameters over which both endemic and healthy states coexist (both solution branches are stable) becomes smaller. Also we find a new stable solution branch that does not appear in the case of single adaptive network but only in the case of weakly coupled networks, in which the disease is endemic in one network but neither becomes endemic nor dies out in the other. Instead, it persists only at the nodes that are coupled to nodes in the other network through inter-network links.

Event details

  • When: 29th January 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Seminar