Earlier this week Professor Joe Armstrong from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, delivered the second set of distinguished lectures for 2015, in the Byre Theatre. The three topical, well attended and interesting lectures centred around the question “Scalability and fault-tolerance, are they the same?”
Images courtesy of Saleem Bhatti.
The School of Computer Science is delighted to announce that President Maria Klawe will be speaking at our Distinguished Lecture Series on March 31st 2016 in St Andrews. This event will consist of a series of talks from 9am with a tea/coffee break, a lunch break, afternoon talk and Q&A session. 
There will be a Q & A session between 15:00hrs and 15:30hrs, followed by the opportunity to meet President Klawe informally in the foyer.
The first of this academic year’s distinguished lectures will be given by Professor Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, on Monday 16th November 2015 at The Byre Theatre.
Abstract:
To build a scalable system the important thing is to make small isolated independent units. To scale up we just add more units. To build a fault-tolerant system the important thing to do is make small isolated independent units…. Does that sound familiar? Haven’t I seen that somewhere before? Oh yes, in the first paragraph! So maybe scalability and fault tolerance are really different names for the same thing.
This property of systems, namely that fault-tolerant systems were also scalable, was noticed years ago, notably in the design of the Tandem computer system. The Tandem was design for fault tolerance but rapidly became a leading supplier of scalable computer platforms. Thus it was with Erlang.
Erlang followed a lot of the Tandem design, it was built for fault-tolerance but some of the most successful applications (such as WhatsApp) use it for its scalability.
In this lecture I’ll talk about the intimate relationship between scalability and fault-tolerance and why they are architecturally the same thing.
I’ll talk about the design of Erlang and why scalable systems have to be built on non-shared memory abstractions.
Bio:
Joe Armstrong has been programming since 1967. He invented the programming language Erlang. He has worked as a programmer, founded a few successful companies and written a few books. He has a PHD in Computer Science from KTH. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Earlier this month Prof. Mothy Roscoe from ETH Zürich delivered the first set of distinguished lectures for 2015 in the Byre Theatre. The three highly accessible, well attended and engaging lectures centred around the question “What’s happening to computer hardware, and what does it mean for systems software?”
Images courtesy of Saleem Bhatti.
Lecture materials are available to University of St Andrews staff and students.
The first set of Computer Science Distinguished Lectures in 2015 will
be given by Prof Mothy Roscoe of ETH Zurich, 09:15–15:30 on Thursday 2nd April
in the Byre Theatre.
Computer systems are not what they used to be, and the days when a
machine could be described as a processor, some memory, and some I/O
devices are long gone. Modern machines, from Systems-on-a-Chip in
phones to rack-scale data appliances, are themselves complex networks
of heterogeneous processing elements, different kinds of memory, and
diverse communication links.
Continue reading
The 2014 Distinguished Lecture Series took place on Tuesday in Lower College Hall. This year’s speaker Prof Luca Cardelli of Microsoft Research and the University of Oxford, delivered three lectures involving Morphisms of Reaction Networks that Couple Structure to Function.
Slides from the lectures are now available: http://lucacardelli.name/indexTalks.html
Luca pictured in Lower College Hall on Tuesday
Abstract
The mechanisms underlying complex biological systems are routinely represented as networks. Network kinetics is widely studied, and so is the connection between network structure and behavior. But it is the relationships between network structures that can reveal similarity of mechanism.
We define morphisms (mappings) between reaction networks that establish structural connections between them. Some morphisms imply kinetic similarity, and yet their properties can be checked statically on the structure of the networks. In particular we can determine statically that a complex network will emulate a simpler network: it will reproduce its kinetics for all corresponding choices of reaction rates and initial conditions. We use this property to relate the kinetics of many common biological networks of different sizes, also relating them to a fundamental population algorithm. Thus, structural similarity between reaction networks can be revealed by network morphisms, elucidating mechanistic and functional aspects of complex networks in terms of simpler networks.
Tuesday’s Programme:
09:15-09:30 Introduction by Prof Simon Dobson
09:39-10:30 Lecture 1 – Molecular Programming
11:00-12:00 Lecture 2 – The Cell Cycle Switch Computes Approximate Majority
13:30-14:30 Lecture 3 – Morphisms of Chemical Reaction Networks
14:30-15:30 Q & A Session
Image courtesy of Prof Saleem Bhatti
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.
These lectures will take place in Lower College Hall, North Street. The lectures will discuss the close relationship between how knowledge and problems may be represented and how people and computers use these representations to guide their reasoning about the problems.
Prof Steve Linton, Prof Alan Bundy and Prof Ian Sommerville
Distinguished lectures, 27th November 2013
10.00 1. Title: The Interaction of Representation and Reasoning
Abstract: Successful reasoning is dependent on appropriate representation of both knowledge and of successful methods of reasoning. A change of representation can change an intractable problem into an easy one. Failures of reasoning can suggest changes of representation. Reasoning failures can, for instance, take the form of proofs of false conjectures, failures to prove true conjectures or inefficient inference. I will illustrate these interactions by drawing on work in my research group.
11.30 2. Title: Theory Evolution in Physics
Abstract: We investigate the problem of automatically repairing a faulty Physics theory when it conflicts with experimental evidence. We introduce novel strategies for fault diagnosis and for representation repair. Diagnosis and repair are composed into general-purpose repair plans. We will illustrate this with two such plans, where theory and experiment conflict over (a) the value and (b) the dependence of a function, respectively. We represent both physical concepts and the repair plans using higher-order logic. This is because many physical concepts are most naturally represented as higher-order functions and because polymorphic higher-order functions are required to enable the repair plans to be applied to diverse situations.
14.00 3. Title: Reformation: A Domain-Independent Algorithm for Theory Repair
Abstract: We describe and invite discussion on work in progress on reformation, a new algorithm for the automated repair of faulty logical theories. A fault is revealed by a reasoning failure: either the proof of a false theorem or the failure to prove a true conjecture. Repair suggestions are systematically extracted via analysis of the attempted unification of two formulae. These suggestions will either block an unwanted but successful unification or unblock a wanted but failed unification attempt. In contrast to traditional belief revision and abduction mechanisms, the repairs are to the language of the theory as well as to the deletion or addition of axioms.
Professor Alan Bundy
Professor Alan Bundy is Professor of Automated Reasoning in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Bundy is a world-leader in the area of artificial intelligence called Mathematical Reasoning and has held more than 50 research grants in this area since the 1970s , has published more than 200 research papers and has been awarded the 2007 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence and Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automated Deduction. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineers and, in 2012, was awarded a CBE for services to computing science. As well as his research work, Professor Bundy has played an active role in the British Computer Society and has been instrumental in supporting changes to the computer science curriculum in schools.
Slides:
Title
Formal Modelling and Analysis of Deployed Systems
Professor Steve Linton and Dr Adam Barker with Professor Muffy Calder.
Abstract
Formal methods are traditionally used for specification and implementation in a waterfall model. In contrast, I am interested in formal models of concurrent, interactive systems that may/may not be in software, and may already be deployed, i.e. they are systems to be observed. Can formal models and reasoning expose how a system actually works? Can formal models and reasoning suggest improvements based on how a system is actually used?
In these talks I will investigate these questions through case studies, from biochemical signalling pathways, to wireless home networks and (shock horror) mobile app games.
Biography
I have been at the Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow since January 1988. Until 2012 I was Dean of Research in the College of Science and Engineering and Senate Assessor on Court and before that I was Head of Department of Computing Science for four years, from 2003 to 2007. I currently work for the Scottish Government 60% of the time, as the Chief Scientific Adviser. Continue reading
Al Dearle, Monty Widenius, Steve Linton, Ian Gent (left to right), St Andrews, 15 October 2012
We were privileged today to hear three lectures from Monty Widenius, main author of the MySQL database system. His main focus was on entrepreneurship and being an entrepreneur while giving away source code on an open source basis.
Three staff members from St Andrews are pictured with Monty before the first lecture, in St Salvator’s quad at the University of St Andrews.
