Author: sd

A highly commended project

Congratulations to our recent graduate Aleksejs Sazonovs, who’s won a Highly Commended place at this year’s Undergraduate Awards.

The Undergraduate Awards are an international and cross-disciplinary prize that aims to recognise highly creative individuals at undergraduate level. Typically this is demonstrated through excellent project work, and Aleks’ project on “A metapopulation model for predicting the success of genetic control measures for malaria” was ranked in the top 10% of submissions in the computer science category.

Aleks’ project used techniques from network science to explore what happens when mosquitoes modified to be unable to carry the malaria parasite are introduced into a wild population. Experiments like these are an essential precursor to any actual field trials. Together with supervisors from the School of Computer Science (Prof Simon Dobson) and School of Biology (Prof Oscar Gaggiotti), Aleks simulated malarial outbreaks involving different mosquito populations. He used a real geography for his experiments, taking the road network of Sierra Leone from the Open Street Map project and using this to build models of human and mosquito distributions and movement. “It’s been exciting to combine real network data with large-scale simulations,” said Prof Dobson. “It also opens-up several ideas for how to make models like this easier to build and interact with, so they could be used by experimental scientists directly and not just by computer scientists.”

The commendation comes with an invitation to all the highly commended individuals to the awards dinner in Dublin later this month, where the overall winners of the different categories will be announced.

Distinguished lecture 2014

The first of this academic year’s distinguished lectures will be given by Prof Luca Cardelli of Microsoft Research and the University of Oxford, 0930–1600 on Tuesday 25 November in Lower College Hall.

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Event details

  • When: 25th November 2014 09:15 - 16:00
  • Where: Lower College Hall
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Distinguished lecture, Lecture

Honorary degree for Professor Dana Scott

We’re delighted that the University will be awarding the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, to Professor Dana Scott at the graduation ceremony on Wednesday 25th June.

What does it mean to describe a computation? For Turing, it meant designing an ideal machine whose small set of simple operations could perform calculations: the operational view of computing that allows machines to perform tasks previously thought to require humans. Set against this is a view that is independent of mechanisation, where the calculations, rather than the machines that perform them, take centre stage. When we take this view, we are making use of ideas that owe their modern existence to the work of Dana Scott.

Working at Oxford in the 1970s, Scott developed the mathematical structures now known as Scott domains that provide a way of precisely describing how recursive functions make progress towards their final result. This led directly to an approach for describing the meanings of programs and programming languages — the Scott-Strachey approach to denotational semantics — and indirectly both to approaches to proving programs correct, and to the development of the lazy functional programming languages that today form a major strand of computer science research.

Dana Scott is a Turing Award recipient (jointly with Michael Rabin), a winner of the International Bolzano Prize, and a supervisor of over 50 PhD students. His contributions to the foundations of computer science have been immense, and we’re very excited to be having his company alongside our graduating class.

Sapere project comes to a successful end

Over the past three years the School has been involved in the Sapere project, funded by the European Commission. Sapere has been looking at new ways to build large-scale pervasive systems, moving away from traditional client/server approaches to explore biochemically-inspired system models in which services and users can “bond” spontaneously as they encounter each other in the real world. Sapere was co-ordinated by the University of Modena Reggio Emilia and — as well as St Andrews — involved the University of Bologna, University of Geneva, and Johannes Kepler University of Linz. Sapere had its final review this week and was ranked as “excellent … the project has even exceeded expectations”.

The project achieved considerable visibility by being deployed at the Vienna City Marathon to provide services including runner tracking and guiding spectators to possible viewing opportunities. The deployment had several thousands users downloading and using a smartphone app throughout the event, as well as several large attention-sensing public displays that responded directly to people stopping to look at them.

The scientific highlights of Sapere include developing a formal model of spontaneous interactions; building a middleware platform based on these ideas; developing a catalogue of useful patterns that describe co-ordinated interactions at a high level; and creating several exciting new algorithms for context awareness and situation recognition. This last activity was led from St Andrews by Simon Dobson, Juan Ye, and Graeme Stevenson, and allowed us to recognise activities going on in “busy” spaces where multiple things are happening simultaneously — a problem that has been extremely resistant to solution until now.

Sapere shows that pervasive systems are now “ready for prime time,” and that even research that seems highly speculative and challenging can lead to results that affect people’s lives directly. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with our collaborators, and we’ll certainly be looking to take these ideas forward in new projects and directions.

Here’s a non-technical overview video introducing Sapere:

 

Confessions of a start-up founder

Prof Simon Dobson will be giving a lecture for CS3053 about his experience as founder and CEO of a start-up company spun-out of a university. This will focus on the business aspects — getting the company started, running it, growing, funding it, and eventually winding it down — rather than on the technology, and try to extract some lessons from what went right (and wrong).

Event details

  • When: 11th February 2013 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Maths Theatre C
  • Format: Lecture

Best student poster award at IWSOS

Congratulations to Lei Fang, one of our SICSA postgrads, on winning the best student poster award at the recent International Workshop on Self-Organising Systems (IWSOS) in Delft NL.

The poster (PDF), entitled “Towards self-management in WSNs by exploiting a spatio-temporal model”, presents early work on using statistical methods to find and exploit correlations between the observations made by nodes in a wireless sensor network. The aim is to use these correlations to detect errors, improve calibration and reduce data traffic.