Keeping Doors Open: Connection, Collaboration and Opportunities

By Nina Globerson

On 1 May, the School of Computer Science prepares to welcome visitors, staff, and students alike to its one-of-a-kind Doors Open day. As the only School to implement this initiative at St Andrews, co-founders Dr Ruth Hoffmann (Lecturer, Deputy Director of Postgraduate Research, and Head of the AI theme) and Dr Kirsty Ross (Industrial Liaison) are thrilled to welcome all to the third iteration of the event.

“Doors Open is an event where we’re trying to engage as many people as possible from the public, industry, and sectors that are not within the computer science department. The idea is to showcase what the School does and get people engaged, involved, or interested in computer science and see what we can foster from that.” Dr Ruth Hoffmann

The event emerged from conversations between Dr Ruth Hoffmann, Kenneth Boyd (Honorary Lecturer), and Dr Kirsty Ross on how they could better engage companies in the research within Computer Science. Inspired by art degree shows in Dundee and Glasgow:

“We started off with the idea to invite a bunch of industry people and give them various talks. However, we soon realised that we couldn’t simply talk at them. Therefore, we invited exhibits, and from there we decided to open the entire department up to the public because it needs to be everybody. There are many opportunities for industry people that perhaps they, staff, or the public are not aware of, especially on how we could integrate public engagement within the School for its teaching and research” Dr Ruth Hoffmann

Previous Doors Open events have led to productive and interdisciplinary projects such as the French Digital Library with Dr Pauline Souleau in the School of Modern Languages; involvement of Experian and Skyscanner in the third-year module CS3099: Software Engineering Team Project; Senior Honours projects with Wikimedia UK; as well ongoing projects with psychologists, marine biologists, and historians.

“The conversations are the real impact of Doors Open…Relationships don’t come out of nowhere. It sometimes takes time for these relationships to develop, and it might just be a random conversation at a Doors Open day that then turns into something else further down the line. It’s leaving space for serendipity, as well as creating a slightly more structured opportunity for all involved.” Dr Kirsty Ross

Besides forty projects being shown throughout the day, from climate action language models to generative machine learning for synthetic histopathology slides and video analytics for rugby skills training, this year’s Doors Open approach has evolved, with the addition of ‘Hot Tattie Talks’ to provoke meaningful conversations with the public. This includes fascinating topics such as the affordability of AI and Computing (Prof Simon Dobson), Co-designing Ethical Digital Futures (Dr Abd Alsattar Ardati), and a Brief History of Programming Languages (Dr Edwin Brady). There will also be closed sessions, similar to the collaborative nature of a sandpit event, that are driven by invited external partners who want to present a challenge and to consult with academics. This will not only spark fruitful discussions, but will also help create alliances between industry partners, academics, and the wider School.

The event is also about the students and enabling them to spotlight what they do. Dr Ruth Hoffmann commented that kudos should be given to the students as “they are extremely self-starting and they don’t need much help from us. However, I’m hoping that with these Open Days we can give them a little bit of a leg up to present their research and make new contacts.” This includes internship opportunities such as StARIS and the Vertically Integrated Projects, which often stem from conversations held between staff and various students at Doors Open. It also highlights the student societies within the School, such as St Andrews Computing Society (STACS) and Women in Computer Science (WICS) who showcase what they do, whilst accessing potential employers within a fun and interactive setting.

However, there is also something far more exciting taking place behind the scenes — the integration of external partners into academic modules, creating opportunities for students to gain industry experience. This is most notable in CS3099, where third year undergraduates work in groups to create a software product from start to finish. With the expertise provided by both academics and industry professionals, students have gone on to create Wikidata inspired web visualization, as well as creating novel social enterprise applications for specific audiences. Alongside the main theme of CS3099, accessibility has been built into the module in collaboration with Skyscanner.

“This means that every single graduate from 2024 and 2025 will have the experience of building accessibility into their software products, which is fantastic in creating a cohort of inclusive engineers coming out from the School.” Dr Kirsty Ross

It also means employers and potential employees are creating synergy to see if they are “a right fit for one another,” and having the opportunity to choose the best of the best adds Dr Ruth Hoffmann.

Doors Open is about representation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and connection. It is due to this that Dr Ruth Hoffmann  has been able to reconnect with colleagues from other Schools that she doesn’t typically get to see, as well as reigniting conversations held with visitors from previous years: “I think my favorite part is the buzz of the day where you’ve got people presenting and talking to each other and getting excited on various different levels.” It also is about highlighting that “the doors remain open permanently to anyone who wants to work with the School of Computer Science” says Dr Kirsty Ross, and creating the space to talk to people:

“I love spotting a need, joining the dots between individuals, as well as watching the relationships grow from there, and this only scratches the surface of what Doors Open could be like in the future.” Dr Kirsty Ross

This also raises the question of what’s next for Doors Open, which both Dr Kirsty Ross and Dr Ruth Hoffmann have agreed involves maintaining the enthusiasm amongst students and staff to present their work to the public, as well as encouraging other Schools within St Andrews take up the model.

Furthermore, there are ongoing discussions about setting up a rapid software prototyping centre where external partners can provide a source of paid, subject specific employment for the students of the School of Computer Science. Given St. Andrews location within a “sweet spot” to support local businesses in, around, and outside of Fife, the impact of initiatives like this could be significant. Furthermore, if more Schools were to run their own Open Doors events, the nature of academic research and student opportunity could change immensely, promoting increased interdisciplinarity and collaboration on a much larger scale.

Check out all the fantastic talks, sessions, and exhibits on show for Doors Open 2025 at https://doorsopen.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/our-show/ now, and see you on 1 May!

Celebrating Diversity in Computer Science

Celebrating Diversity in Computer Science: The Figure of the Season Initiative

As part of the Designing and Delivering an Inclusive Curriculum STARIS project, we are excited to introduce the Figure of the Season showcase—an effort to highlight diverse contributions to the field of computer science.

Why This Initiative Matters

Representation plays a crucial role in fostering a sense of belonging, yet Computer Science has historically lacked visibility for many of its diverse pioneers. This initiative aims to shed light on these figures by celebrating how their work has shaped technology, and by recognising the role that diversity has played in their success.

How It Works

Every few months, we will feature an individual whose contributions have had a lasting impact on Computer Science or technology. This will be done in tandem with the University of St Andrews Diversity Calendar, which will inspire the theme of each showcase. Through visually engaging poster displays, we hope to provide students and staff with insight into these figures’ achievements, challenges, and the significance of their work.

Each showcase will be displayed in the Jack Cole coffee area—be sure to check them out next time you grab a tea or coffee!

Spotlight on Dr. Ruchi Sanghvi

Our first honouree is Dr. Ruchi Sanghvi, the first female engineer at Facebook and a leader in the tech industry. From playing a key role in developing Facebook’s News Feed to advocating for diversity in tech, Dr. Sanghvi exemplifies the innovation and leadership we aim to celebrate.

By sharing stories like hers, we hope to inspire future generations of computer scientists, challenge stereotypes, and reinforce that computer science is for everyone.

Stay tuned as we continue to showcase incredible, diverse figures who have shaped the field!

 

By Jade Adedokun

PGR Seminar with Dhananjay Saikumar

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 25th April at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Title and Abstract for Dhananjay’s talk – Please do come along if you are able.

Title: Signal Collapse in One-Shot Pruning: When Sparse Models Fail to Distinguish Neural Representations

Abstract: The deep learning breakthrough in 2012, marked by AlexNet’s success on the ImageNet challenge, ushered in an era of increasingly large neural networks. Modern models now hold tens of millions to billions of parameters, enabling remarkable capabilities but creating serious challenges for deployment in real-world, resource-constrained environments. This has led to growing interest in model compression, with network pruning emerging as a widely adopted method to reduce computational and memory demands. Iterative pruning—based on repeated prune-retrain cycles—can retain accuracy but becomes infeasible at scale due to high computational cost. One-shot pruning, which removes parameters in a single step without retraining, offers a more scalable alternative but often results in severe accuracy degradation. For instance, pruning 80% of the parameters from RegNetX-32GF (a 100M+ parameter model) drops ImageNet accuracy from 80% to 1%, rendering the model unusable. This talk uncovers a new and fundamental bottleneck behind such failures: signal collapse, a previously overlooked phenomenon that disrupts the network’s ability to distinguish between inputs. To address this, a simple and efficient method called REFLOW is introduced, enabling sparse networks to recover strong performance without retraining or gradient computation. On RegNetX-32GF, REFLOW lifts accuracy from 1% to 73% at 80% sparsity—in under 15 seconds. These findings reframe the challenges of one-shot pruning and open new opportunities for practical and efficient deployment of deep learning models.

Doors Open @ Computer Science, St Andrews on Thursday 1 May 2025, 10am-4pm (drop in)

We are holding a Doors Open event on Thursday, 1 May 202,5 and would love for you and your colleagues to visit us at this event.  

Our school is growing, and we want to make sure we are listening to organisations locally, nationally, and internationally. Our hope is that the day is a chance to share and discuss some of the exciting projects going on by our staff and students. We’d love to hear about what you are doing and see if there are any interesting ways to work together.  

We have created an events webpage with details and outlines of the projects which will be on show; we are adding more every day (Doors Open @ CS). We will also have our Hot Tattie sessions upstairs in 1.33b at various times during the day. 

So we can plan refreshments, it would be great if you could register: Doors Open @ Computer Science 2025  

If you have any questions, please get in touch. 

We are hiring a Professor in Artificial Intelligence

The University of St Andrews wishes to make an appointment to the Johann and Gaynor Rupert Chair in Artificial Intelligence in the School of Computer Science.

You will be an outstanding scholar of international standing in Artificial Intelligence with a proven track record of securing significant grant funding and leading high-quality externally funded research projects. The successful candidate will be expected to have a range of interests, be able to work across disciplines, and strengthen and complement existing work within the School to make an outstanding contribution to the field’s advancement through research outputs.

See full advert here: Professor in Artificial Intelligence (Chair) – AC2605LS

PGR Seminar with Leonid Nosovitsky + Xinya Gong

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 11th April at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Leonid and Xinya’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Leonid Nosovitsky

Title: Bridging Theory and Practice: Advancing Multiparty Session Types for Industry Use

Abstract: Multiparty Session Types (MPST) provide a typing discipline for communication protocols. They allow to statically check that a code implementation conforms to a specified protocol; they can also verify that a protocol satisfies many safety properties like liveness and deadlock freedom, which are crucial in concurrent communicating systems.  Despite huge improvements in MPST research, different extensions have limitations.  For example, one of extensions is crash-handling. This branch was motivated by lack of network reliability to make MPST framework more applicable and usable in industrial scenarios. The crash-semantics theory introduced by Barwell et al. does not involve any constraints relaxations, which makes it very intricate for adoption in practical scenarios.  Our project concentrates on addressing usability limitations to make MPST more integrable into industrial applications.

Xinya Gong

Title and Abstract TBC

Thanks to Dr Nnamdi Ekwe-Ekwe

Staff gathered in the coffee area of Jack Cole on Thursday 3rd April to bid farewell to Dr Nnamdi Ekwe-Ekwe on his departure from the University.

Nnamdi had been at our University since he was 21 and spent most of his university life here. Nnamdi arrived in St Andrews in 2016 to complete his Masters and PhD here and subsequently took up a lecture position in 2022 in the School of Computer Science.

The School would like to thank Nnamdi for his contributions to the School. He will be missed by all and we wish him the best of luck in his next venture!

PGR Seminar with Zihan Zhang + Berné Nortier

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 4th April at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Zihan and Berné’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Zihan Zhang

Title: FedOptima: Optimizing Resource Utilization in Federated Learning

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) systems facilitate distributed machine learning across a server and multiple devices. However, FL systems have low resource utilization limiting their practical use in the real world. This inefficiency primarily arises from two types of idle time: (i) task dependency between the server and devices, and (ii) stragglers among heterogeneous devices. We propose FedOptima, a resource-optimized FL system designed to simultaneously minimize both types of idle time; existing systems do not eliminate or reduce both at the same time. FedOptima offloads the training of certain layers of a neural network from a device to server using three innovations. First, devices operate independently of each other using asynchronous aggregation to eliminate straggler effects, and independently of the server by utilizing auxiliary networks to minimize idle time caused by task dependency. Second, the server performs centralized training using a task scheduler that ensures balanced contributions from all devices, improving model accuracy. Third, an efficient memory management mechanism on the server increases scalability of the number of participating devices. Four state-of-the-art offloading-based and asynchronous FL methods are chosen as baselines. Experimental results show that compared to the best results of the baselines on convolutional neural networks and transformers on multiple lab-based testbeds, FedOptima (i) achieves higher or comparable accuracy, (ii) accelerates training by 1.9x to 21.8x, (iii) reduces server and device idle time by up to 93.9% and 81.8%, respectively, and (iv) increases throughput by 1.1x to 2.0x.

Berné Nortier

Title: Shortest paths and optimal transport in higher-order systems

Abstract: One of the defining features of complex networks is the connectivity properties that we observe emerging from local interactions. Nevertheless, not all networks describe interactions which are merely pairwise. Recently, different frameworks for modelling non-dyadic, higher-order, interactions have been proposed, garnering much attention. Of these, hypergraphs have emerged as a versatile and powerful tool to model such higher-order networks. However, the connectivity properties of real-world hypergraphs remain largely understudied. A first, data-driven, work introduces a measure to characterise higher-order connectivity and quantify the relevance of non-dyadic ties for efficient shortest paths in a diverse set of empirical networks with and without temporal information. The analysis presents a nuanced picture.

A second work (in progress) considers higher-order simplicial networks within the context of optimal transport, where shortest paths do not always lead to optimal resource allocation. We extend the existing framework to the higher-order setting to explore to what degree this additional degree of freedom influences the flux of resources in a system of interest.

Distinguished Lecture Series 2025

This years Distinguished Lecture series was delivered yesterday ( Tuesday 1st April) by Professor Arthur Zimek, University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Denmark.

In his talk on, ‘Data Mining and the “Curse of Dimensionality”’ he considered the challenges of the “curse” from the perspective of data mining. In Talk 1, he discussed the “curse” in more detail, identifying relevant aspects or problems. In Talk 2, he considered clustering facing these problems and discussed some strategies and example methods for subspace clustering. In Talk 3, he discussed outlier detection, considering strategies for improved efficiency, effectiveness, and subspace outlier detection.

SACHI Seminar, Stavroula Pipyrou – Radical Imagination: Knowledge Through Generations

We are pleased to share our upcoming SACHI seminar this week by Dr Stavroula Pipyrou, a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and Founding Director of the Centre for Minorities Research.

📅 Wednesday 2nd April  | 🕛 13:00 – 14:00 PM | 📍 JCB, Room 1.33A

Title:

Radical Imagination: Knowledge Through Generations

Abstract:

“Today we will engage with insights from a young Greek interlocutor who did not live the Cold War period firsthand. She relates to the legacies of the Cold War through radical imagination, projecting that it is only logical that the affects of the era have left irreversible psychological marks on the people who experienced it. The talk proposes a theory of psychic time and generational battles for belonging. There is a critique of history as taught in school textbooks when compared to the lived experiences of history in the present.”

Bio:

Stavroula is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, Founding Director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Minorities Research and editor of the interdisciplinary book series Routledge Advances in Minority Studies. She works on minority politics, displacement, governance, and the Cold War. She is the author of “The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Minority Politics” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and “Lurking Cold War: Life Through Historical Communion” (Berghahn 2025). Lurking Cold War explores the entangled registers of the Cold War that continue to stalk the social landscape in Italy and Greece. Critiquing the connections between global categories and individual experiences, Lurking foregrounds Cold War resonances through materiality, imagination, speculation and affect, in literature, bureaucracy and in the family. A theory of methexi illustrates how people and history are brought into communion, blurring the boundaries between known and unknown, reality and imagination, and form and interpretation. The result is an articulation of history that matters in a way that matters.