Author: amb24

Successful Technology Through The Ages Event with Madras College

The school hosted a highly successful outreach event on May 8th, welcoming S1 pupils from Madras College to the school. Attendees had the opportunity to explore the development of computing technology through the ages and interact with a large number of interactive technology demonstrations and exhibits. It was lovely to see how well behaved and engaged they all were with Computing, which is a real credit to Madras College and its values, and it was great to see everyone having fun, including the older kids too i.e., CS staff 🙂

Special thanks to all staff in CS who got involved with this, volunteering their equipment and time to talk to the S1 pupils, testing, setting up, and clearing away

Also, special thanks to the S1 pupils for joining us and to Janice Patterson, Stephen Forbes, and Keith Maskell at Madras for all their work organising the trip from the Madras end.

 

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

Repairing a Commodore PET 4032

Jason Jaques explains the various repairs needed on the Commodore PET 4032 in his YouTube video 

The computer was reported to be exhibiting a troubling screen wobble, an intermittent keyboard, and a broken cassette unit. However, on initial inspection, the unit was actually entirely non-functional. As the machine had been imported from the USA, the computer was expecting a ~117 V, 60 Hz mains supply. When used previously, with a step-down transformer, the screen had shown a significant wobble. Unfortunately, the unit was now entirely dead. Initial exploration indicated that it may have been plugged directly into the UK 240 V 50 Hz supply. Fortunately, while the fuse had been sacrificed, the machine had survived. Once powered up, again with a step-down transformer, the unit’s own power supply was indeed causing significant interference for the built-in display. To resolve the screen wobble, it was eventually decided to replace the transformer with a modern switching power supply. The keyboard suffered from the common hardening of the carbon pads, which made most of the keys inoperable. This was resolved by resurfacing the contacts to restore conductivity. Equally, the cassette unit was brought back to life by a minor repair to an intermittent power connection. Once operational, the unit was “tested” by (among other things) playing a quick round of Satoshi Matsuoka’s Space Invaders, loaded from cassette as demonstrated in this video.

Additional links: Commodore PET Schematics: https://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/c…

Vintage Computer Federation Forums: https://forum.vcfed.org/

MOS 6502 Pinout (by Bill Bertram / Pixel8): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:…

Fully funded PhD scholarship in Multi-agent Path Planning

Lead supervisor: Professor Ian Miguel

Application deadline: 1 March 2025

Project description:

Planning is a fundamental discipline of Artificial Intelligence, which asks us to find a sequence of actions transforming an initial state into a goal state. This project focuses on multi-agent path planning (also known as multi-agent path finding), where a set of mobile agents is navigated from starting positions to target positions. MAPP is the focus of intense research effort because it has many challenging real-world applications in robotics, navigation, the video game industry, and automatic warehousing. Automatic warehousing is one of the most challenging domains and the focus of the greatest investment. For example, Amazon have invested heavily in robot-equipped warehouses. It is performed on a huge scale (thousands of robots in warehouses containing many thousands of shelves and products) with the need to find an efficient solution quickly so that the robots are always safely moving towards their goals. The typical layout of a warehouse increases difficulty further: shelves are packed tightly into the space, reducing the capacity for movement of the robots.

MAPP is inherently very difficult — there is no known “cheap” method to produce high quality solutions quickly at the scale required. Current approaches fall into two categories, both relying on AI techniques that search through the vast space of possible solutions. Those that guarantee optimality struggle to scale, while approaches that scale do so at the cost of reduced solution quality. This proposal is to advance the state of the art in optimal MAPP significantly through a novel combination of path planning and constraint programming. Constraint programming is a powerful automated reasoning technique that allows us to model a complex decision-making problem such as MAPP by describing the set of choices that must be made (e.g. which path a robot should take) and the set of constraints that specify allowed combinations of choices (e.g. robots cannot collide). This model is presented to a constraint solver, which searches for solutions automatically, using powerful deduction mechanisms to reduce search considerably.

The project includes the following objectives:

A New Modelling Perspective: The model input to a constraint solver is crucial to the efficiency with which solutions can be found. Our proposed innovation is in how MAPP is modelled. We will exploit the many equivalencies in these problems, for example equivalent routes between locations, and equivalent resources in terms of the robots. While these remain in the model they must potentially all be explored, wasting enormous effort. Instead of modelling the warehouse layout at a fine level of detail, the current default leading to the consideration of a vast number of equivalent paths, we will abstract the fine-grained grid representation into larger regions, for example representing an entire corridor between two shelves.

Ensuring Validity: The research challenge in adopting this more abstract modelling perspective is to ensure that plans found with this reduced representation are valid in the real warehouse by, for example, constraining these regions so that their capacities are respected and the flow of traffic within them is such that collisions and deadlocks cannot occur.

Evaluation and refinement: We will evaluate our new model on benchmark problems drawn from the competitions where state of the art MAPP solvers compete. This will allow us to gauge progress and refine and improve our new approach.

The result of this research will be to improve the scalability of optimal solvers, producing better quality solutions, increasing the throughput of a warehouse, and reducing operational costs.

Eligibility Criteria

We are looking for highly motivated research students willing to be part of a diverse and supportive research community. Applicants must hold a good Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a related area appropriate for their proposed topic of study.

International applications are welcome. We especially encourage female applicants and underrepresented minorities to apply. The School of Computer Science was awarded the Athena SWAN Silver award for its sustained progression in advancing equality and representation, and we welcome applications from those suitably qualified from all genders, all races, ethnicities and nationalities, LGBT+, all or no religion, all social class backgrounds, and all family structures to apply for our postgraduate research programmes.

Value of Award
  • Tuition scholarships cover PhD fees irrespective of country of origin.
  • Stipends are valued at £19,795 per annum (or the standard UKRI stipend, if it is higher).
To apply:

Interested applicants can contact Professor Ian Miguel with an outline proposal.

Full instructions for the formal application process can be found at How to apply – School of Computer Science – University of St Andrews

 

Fully funded PhD scholarship in Algorithms for Data Science

Lead supervisor: Dr Peter Macgregor

Application deadline: 1 March 2025

Project description:

Modern data science and machine learning applications involve datasets with millions of data points and hundreds of dimensions. For example, deep learning pipelines produce massive vector datasets representing text, image, audio and other data types. The analysis of such datasets with classical algorithms often requires significant time and/or computational resources which may not be available in many applications.

This motivates the development of a new generation of fast algorithms for data analysis, running in linear or sub-linear time and often producing an approximate result rather than an exact one. Moreover, the dataset may change over time, requiring dynamic algorithms which handle updates efficiently.

This project will tackle aspects of the design, analysis, and implementation of algorithms for processing large dynamic datasets, with the aim to develop new algorithms with state-of-the-art practical performance and/or theoretical guarantees. This could involve performing new analysis of existing algorithms, designing new algorithms with provable guarantees, or implementing heuristic algorithms with state-of-the-art empirical performance.

Possible Directions

Potential areas of research, depending on the interests of the candidate include:

  • Developing improved nearest-neighbour search algorithms (e.g., based on kd-trees, HNSW, locality-sensitive hashing).
  • Exploring any connection between hierarchical clustering algorithms and nearest-neighbour search algorithms.
  • Creating new dynamic or hierarchical clustering algorithms (e.g. based on spectral clustering or DBSCAN).
  • Creating dynamic algorithms for numerical linear algebra. For example, maintaining the PCA of a dynamically changing dataset.
  • Any other project in the area of algorithmic data science and machine learning.

Applicants should have a strong interest in the mathematical analysis of algorithms, knowledge of topics in discrete mathematics and linear algebra, and some familiarity with existing algorithms for data analysis and machine learning. Strong programming skills would also be desirable.

The scholarship:

We have one fully-funded scholarship available, starting in September 2025. The scholarship covers all tuition fees irrespective of country of origin and includes a stipend valued at ÂŁ19,705 per annum. More details of the scholarship can be found here: https://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/csblog/2024/10/24/phd-studentships-available-for-2025-entry/, but please note the different application deadline.

Eligibility criteria:

We are looking for highly motivated research students keen to be part of a diverse and supportive research community. Applicants must hold a good Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a related area appropriate for the topic of this PhD.

International applications are welcome. We especially encourage female applicants and underrepresented minorities to apply. The School of Computer Science was awarded the Athena SWAN Silver award for its sustained progression in advancing equality and representation, and we welcome applications from those suitably qualified from all genders, all races, ethnicities and nationalities, LGBT+, all or no religion, all social class backgrounds, and all family structures to apply for our postgraduate research programmes.

To apply:

Interested applicants can contact Peter Macgregor with an outline proposal.

Full instructions for the formal application process

The deadline for applications is 1 March 2025.

GAP Days Summer 2024 @ St Andrews

The School of Computer Science hosted this years Summer GAP Days between 26th August and 30th August.

GAP Days are workshops where developers and users with programming experience are invited to influence the future development of [GAP] by initiating and contributing to discussions and coding sprints.

These GAP Days have been special as we celebrated 10 years of the [Digraphs] package as well as 10 years of [GAP Days] (to the week!).

We had a great selection of speakers and attendees from varied backgrounds, which cumulated in the release of the re-vamped GAP webpage, and over 30 new versions of packages!