The first Away Day between Constrained Programming group from the Computer Science department and Statistical Ecology group from the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental modeling (https://www.creem.st-andrews.ac.uk/) was organized over the summer on May 7th, 2024 from 9:30 to 3:00 p.m. It was organised by Ian Miguel and Özgür Akgün from the constraint programming group and by David Borchers and Chris Sutherland from the statistical ecology group. The event was attended by 20 people including faculty members and PhD students from both the departments. The title of the Away Day was “Exploring the connection between constraint programming and statistical ecology”.
This was the first event from the School of Computer Science to be held in the Boiler Room, House Education Centre in the Botanic Gardens in St Andrews. It makes a beautiful location for an Away Day. The room used to be a storage house but has recently been converted to a meeting room that can be booked for free by all students and staff.
The Away Day was opened by two talks from the constraint programming group. The first one was delivered by Özgür Akgün with the title “A short survey of work on Statistics & Constraint programming”. The second talk was “A quick introduction on automated algorithm configuration and selection” by Nguyen Dang.
These were followed by two talks from the statistical ecology group. The first speaker was Prof. David Borchers who was recently awarded the RSS Barnett Award for 2024 by the Royal Statistics Society (RSS) for his work in developing new methodologies and spatial capture-recapture. He presented a talk on “Dealing with recapture uncertainty in spatial capture-recapture”. The second speaker was Chris Sutherland who talked about “Optimal sampling in ecological monitoring”.
The event concluded by open discussions on opportunities for collaboration between the two groups and funding opportunities. The Away Day was a success since it confirmed statistical ecology as a potential application area for constraint programming. On the other side, it identified the potential of constraint programming for providing computational efficiency in dealing with spatial capture-recapture problems for statistical ecology.
Blog post written by science communicator Qurat Ul Ain Shaheen