Author: csblog

SRG Seminar: “Introduction to Apache Mesos and the DataCenter Operating System” by Matt Jarvis

Abstract
Data processing paradigms are undergoing a paradigm shift as we move more and more towards real time processing. Emerging software models such as the SMACK stack are at the forefront of this change, focused on a pipeline processing model, but are also introducing new levels of operational complexity in running multiple complex distributed systems such as Spark, Kafka and Cassandra. In this talk, I’ll introduce both Apache Mesos and DC/OS as a solution to this growing problem, and describe the benefits are of running these new kinds of systems for emerging cloud native workloads.
 
Bio
Matt Jarvis is Senior Director of Community and Evangelism at Mesosphere, engaging with the communities around DC/OS and Mesos. Matt has spent more than 15 years building products and services around open source software, on everything from embedded devices to large scale distributed systems. Most recently he has been focused on the open cloud infrastructure space, and in emerging patterns for cloud native applications. 

Event details

  • When: 24th April 2018 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

SRG Seminar: “On Engineering Unikernels” by Ward Jaradat

We have explored data coordination techniques that permit distributed systems to be constructed by interconnecting services. In such systems the network latency is often a problem. For example, large data volumes might have to be transmitted across the network if computation cannot be co-located close to data sources. One solution to this problem is the ability to deploy services in appropriate geographical locations and compose them together to create distributed ecosystems. Hence we seek to be able to deploy such services rapidly and dynamically enact and orchestrate them. However, this goal is hindered by the size of the deployments. Currently, virtual machine appliances that host such services on top of monolithic kernels are very large, thus are potentially slow to deploy as they may need to be transmitted across a network.

Our principles led us to take the route of re-engineering the standard software stack to create self-contained applications that are less-bloated and consequently much smaller based on Unikernels. Unikernels are compact library operating systems that enable a single application to be statically linked against a simple kernel that manages the underlying resources presented by a hypervisor. In this talk I will present Stardust – a specialised Unikernel that aims to support the deployment of application services based on the Java programming language.

Event details

  • When: 15th March 2018 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

SACHI Seminar: Matjaž Kljun – Large scale studies of habit changing interface design

SACHI Seminar – Large scale studies of habit changing interface design

Speaker: Matjaž Kljun

Abstract:

Various technologies can be used in persuading people to change their habits, behaviours or attitudes. Such technologies are defined as persuasive and they are used in a variety of fields such as marketing, public health and education.

We are daily exposed to persuasion through different visualizations and triggers on all our devices. For example, a social networking application tries to persuade us in opening the app with a push notification and once the app is opened other hooks are placed so we spend more time in it. However, such applications are usually installed by us and we are inclined in using them. But could we persuade highly busy professionals in completing a training course or just about everybody to read terms of service? We will discuss these issues through large-scale studies that have been in done in the wild.

Speaker biography:  Matjaž Kljun is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies at University of Primorska and is co-directing the HICUP lab (Humans Interacting with Computers at University of Primorska) and a research associate at the Faculty of Information studies, Slovenia. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Lancaster University, UK. His research interests span across various fields related to Human-Computer Interaction, Personal Information Management and the use of technologies in teaching and learning.

Event details

  • When: 12th April 2018 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Seminar

SACHI Seminar: Klen Čopič Pucihar – The Missing Interface: Micro Gestures on Objects for Augmented Reality Interaction

SACHI Seminar – The Missing Interface: Micro Gestures on Objects for Augmented Reality Interaction

Speaker: Klen Čopič Pucihar

Abstract:

Augmented reality technology can introduce digital elements to arbitrary objects. However, these objects were never designed to incorporate the digital component, hence do not provide the necessary interface. To overcome this limitation, AR Interaction systems add sensors to objects, use additional handheld hardware or perform hand and body tracking. These methods are not optimal for direct interaction with physical objects  because they:

  • require modification of existing objects,
  • require the the user to hold the controller in their hand,
  • are based on synthesis of captured RGB or RGB-D data streams imposing the following limitations: (i) gestures need to be performed within the view of the camera; (ii) the gestures include reasonable large hand or finger movements (e.g. pinching the fingers, blooming gesture of opening the palm; (iii) the hand performing gesture is not occluded (e.g. cannot detect gestures if performed whilst grasping an object).

In this talk Klen will look at alternative methods which try to overcome such limitations and make inconspicuous, precise and flexible object oriented interaction possible for both augmented and mediated reality applications.

Speaker Biography

Klen Čopič Pucihar is assistant professor at the Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies at University of Primorska. Klen’s research vision is to look for new ways in which one could augmented, modify and mediate rich sources of visual, auditory and tactile stimuli that fabricate our everyday life experiences. The goal is to augment human abilities with new ways of using computational resources. This is important because the interface presents itself as the bottleneck between us humans and the benefit ever increasing computational resources could have on our everyday life. This makes the interfaces the core challenge for the future and the essence of Klen’s research which is currently mainly concentrated on augmented reality, mobile computing and human-computer interaction focusing on different perceptual issues that arise whilst interacting with various computer systems which lead to innovative user interface designs. Klen’s work was published as high ranked scientific publications and won him best poster award at ISMAR 2014.

Event details

  • When: 12th April 2018 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Seminar

Impact Talk: Xelect Ltd

This is Impact talk as a “brown bag lunch” (i.e. you bring your lunch if you wish) and the school will provide cakes.

Xelect Ltd

– a successful spin-out from the University of St Andrews

Xelect was founded 5 years ago by Professor Ian Johnston and Dr Tom Ashton to provide genetic services to the global aquaculture industry. The company built on several decades of research in fish physiology and genetics which was funded by BBSRC through to the stage of commercialisation. Xelect develops genetic selection technology and provides associated laboratory support to breeders of finfish, shellfish and shrimps and to date has served 52 customers in 17 countries. We currently manage broodstock genetics programs for producers in Chile, Scotland (Atlantic salmon), Croatia, Greece (seabass and sea bream), New Zealand (King salmon) and Vietnam (Barramundi). The company started out in incubation space at the Scottish Oceans Institute before moving to independent premises in 2016. Xelect also has sales offices in Puerto Montt, Chile and in Hong Kong. The company employs 12 people, mostly PhDs, and is account managed by Scottish Enterprise. Xelect’s shareholders are the founders, the University, SalmoBreed A/S and the EOS Technology Investment Syndicate.

About Ian Johnston

Ian Johnston is former Chandos Professor, Head of the School of Biology and Director of the Scottish Oceans Institute. He currently works full-time for Xelect but retains a 0 FTE position as Professor of Biology.

Event details

  • When: 8th February 2018 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

“Sensing and topology: some ideas by other people, and an early experiment” by Simon Dobson

Abstract
The core problem in many sensing applications is that we’re trying to
infer high-resolution information from low-resolution observations —
and keep our trust in this information as the sensors degrade. How can
we do this in a principled way? There’s an emerging body of work on
using topology to manage both sensing and analytics, and in this talk I
try to get a handle on how this might work for some of the problems
we’re interested in. I will present an experiment we did to explore
these ideas, which highlights some fascinating problems.

Event details

  • When: 30th November 2017 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

SRG Seminar: “Interactional Justice vs. The Paradox of Self-Amendment and the Iron Law of Oligarchy” by Jeremy Pitt

Self-organisation and self-governance offer an effective approach to resolving collective action problems in multi-agent systems, such as fair and sustainable resource allocation. Nevertheless, self-governing systems which allow unrestricted and unsupervised self-modification expose themselves to several risks, including the Suber’s paradox of self-amendment (rules specify their own amendment) and Michel’s iron law of oligarchy (that the system will inevitably be taken over by a small clique and be run for its own benefit, rather than in the collective interest). This talk will present an algorithmic approach to resisting both the paradox and the iron law, based on the idea of interactional justice derived from sociology, and legal and organizational theory. The process of interactional justice operationalised in this talk uses opinion formation over a social network with respect to a shared set of congruent values, to transform a set of individual, subjective self-assessments into a collective, relative, aggregated assessment.

Using multi-agent simulation, we present some experimental results about detecting and resisting cliques. We conclude with a discussion of some implications concerning institutional reformation and stability, ownership of the means of coordination, and knowledge management processes in ‘democratic’ systems.

Biography
Photograph of Professor Jeremy Pitt
Jeremy Pitt is Professor of Intelligent and Self-Organising Systems in the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London, where he is also Deputy Head of the Intelligent Systems & Networks Group. His research interests focus on developing formal models of social processes using computational logic, and their application in self-organising multi-agent systems, for example fair and sustainable common-pool resource management in ad hoc and sensor network. He also has strong interests in human-computer interaction, socio-technical systems, and the social impact of technology; with regard to the latter he has edited two books, This Pervasive Day (IC Press, 2012) and The Computer After Me (IC Press, 2014). He has been an investigator on more than 30 national and European research projects and has published more than 150 articles in journals and conferences. He is a Senior Member of the ACM, a Fellow of the BCS, and a Fellow of the IET; he is also an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and an Associate Editor of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.

Event details

  • When: 15th November 2017 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

“Ambient intelligence with sensor networks” by Lucas Amos and “Location, Location, Location: Exploring Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing Across Geographical Regions” by Nnamdi Ekwe-Ekwe

Lucas’s abstract

“Indoor environment quality has a significant effect on worker productivity through a complex interplay of factors such as temperature, humidity and levels of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs).

In this talk I will discuss my Masters project which used off the shelf sensors and Raspberry Pis to collect environmental readings at one minute intervals throughout the Computer Science buildings. The prevalence of erroneous readings due to sensor failure and the strategy used for the identification and correction of such faults will be presented. Identifiable correlations between environmental variables and attempts to model these relationships will be discussed

Past studies identifying the ideal environmental conditions for human comfort and productivity allow for the objective assessment of indoor environmental conditions. An adaptation of Frešer’s environment rating system will be presented, showing how VOC levels can be incorporated into assessments of environment quality and how this can be communicated to building users.”

Nnamdi’s abstract

“Cloud computing is becoming an almost ubiquitous part of the computing landscape. For many companies today, moving their entire infrastructure and workloads to the cloud reduces complexity, time to deployment, and saves money. Spot Instances, a subset of Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure (EC2), expands on this. They allow a user to bid on spare compute capacity in Amazon’s data centres at heavily discounted prices. If demand was ever to increase such that the user’s maximum bid is exceeded, their compute instance is terminated.

In this work, we conduct one of the first detailed analyses of how location affects the overall cost of deployment of a spot instance. We simultaneously examine the reliability of pricing data of a spot instance, and whether a user can be confident that their instance has a low risk of termination.

We analyse spot pricing data across all available Amazon Web Services regions for 60 days on a variety of instance types. We find that location does play a critical role in spot instance pricing and also that pricing differs depending on the granularity of the location – from a more coarse-grained AWS region to a more fine-grained Availability Zone within a region. We relate the pricing differences we find to the price’s stability, confirming whether we can be confident in the bid prices we make.

We conclude by showing that it is very possible to run workloads on Spot Instances achieving
both a very low risk of termination as well as paying very low amounts per hour.”

Event details

  • When: 9th November 2017 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

SACHI Seminar: Alix Goguey (University of Saskatchewan) – Augmenting touch expressivity to improve the touch modality

 

Title

Augmenting touch expressivity to improve the touch modality

Abstract

During the last decades, touch surfaces have become more and more ubiquitous. Whether on tablets, on smartphones or on laptops, touch surfaces are used by a majority of us on a daily basis. However, the limited expressivity – the different channels used to convey information to the system – of the touch modality restricts drastically the amount of features that can be controlled via touch only. For instance, a typical smartphone touchscreen only provides the absolute position of a contact on the screen, thus applications usually offer only one way to carry out tasks (which can augment user frustration or cap performances) or restrict possibilities (e.g. Photoshop on desktop offers more than 600 commands but only about 40 on smartphones and tablets). In this talk, I will present an overview of my on-going research and discuss different ways to tackle this problem, augment touch expressivity and user efficiency: from tools that helps better designing touch interfaces to the use of new input dimensions in original interaction techniques.

Speaker biography

Alix Goguey is a post postdoctoral fellow working with Carl Gutwin in the Interaction Lab at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in October 2016 in the Mjolnir research group at Inria Lille – Nord Europe, France, under the supervision of Géry Casiez. His work focuses on understanding and designing interaction techniques on touch input devices and particularly through the use of new information such as finger identification. To learn more about Alix’s work: www.alixgoguey.fr

Event details

  • When: 1st November 2017 13:15 - 14:15
  • Where: Honey 103 - GFB
  • Format: Seminar

SACHI Seminar – Florian Echtler (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar): Instant Interaction

Title:

Instant Interaction

Abstract:

Although Mark Weiser’s original vision of “ubiquitous computing” has all but arrived due to the wide availability of smartphones, tablets and interactive screens, the envisioned ease of use is still mostly lacking. This is particularly apparent when we consider interaction and collaboration between multiple persons and their personal mobile devices. These issues can be partly mitigated by relying on cloud services for data exchange, but this approach opens up multiple other issues regarding data safety and privacy. In this talk, I will present the concept of “instant interaction”, which aims to enable ad-hoc interaction between multiple persons, their individual mobile devices, and fixed infrastructure, without requiring any prior exchange of account data or PINs. The only prerequisite for immediate interaction is physical proximity. Examples from my current research will illustrate this  concept.

Speaker Biography:

Florian Echtler is junior professor for mobile media at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. His research interests focus on interaction and collaboration using peer-to-peer communication technologies available in today’s mobile devices. Additional topics covered by his research include computer vision for HCI applications, sensor technology and gesture recognition.

Event details

  • When: 16th November 2017 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Seminar