Event

New Chair in Artificial Intelligence

Professor Lars Kotthoff has been appointed as the Johann and Gaynor Rupert Chair in Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the University of St Andrews.

The role, based in the School of Computer Science, is a crucial appointment to explore and advance the critical role of AI, both now and in the future.

Professor Kotthoff completed his PhD at St Andrews and returns to his alma mater from the University of Wyoming where he was Templeton Chair in Computer Science, Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, Founding Adjunct Professor in the School of Computing, and Presidential Faculty Fellow.

He has held postdoctoral appointments at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and University College Cork, Ireland. Professor Kotthoff also holds a Diploma from the University of Leipzig, Germany.

His research focuses on developing approaches in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning that empowers domain scientists and practitioners to apply state-of-the-art methods to solve real-world problems. Part of this is making cutting-edge research available to, and usable by, non-experts. His contributions span foundational AI, applications of AI in other areas such as materials science, and the development and support of AI tools that are widely used across a broad range of areas.

Of his appointment as The Johann and Gaynor Rupert Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the University of St Andrews, he said: “I very much look forward to re-joining St Andrews after a 13-year absence. AI is becoming increasingly important in all areas of science, and I am excited to explore opportunities with my colleagues in Computer Science and beyond. St Andrews’ world-class staff and collaborative environment make it an ideal location for advancing AI and its application in other areas.”

This position was made possible by a donation from regular participants of the Dunhill Links Championship who collectively donated £3m for an endowed chair in Johann and Gaynor Rupert’s name, as a thank you for the years of participation in the Dunhill Links Championship, and also in thanks for what Mr Rupert has done for golf and St Andrews since the original Alfred Dunhill Cup in 1985.  This new academic Chair is part of the University’s Making Waves Campaign, a £300-million fundraising initiative to foster world-leading research, attract and retain talented academics and students. It also aims to address global challenges by developing new infrastructure and expanding academic and entrepreneurial initiatives.

 

 

 

Young Software Engineer of the Year 2025 Awards

Huge congratulations to Verity Powel, a winner at last night’s Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards (https://www.scotlandis.com/blog/rugby-video-tech-scores-top-award-for-st-andrews-student/). Her final year project “Video Analytics For Rugby Skills Training” was nominated by the school (https://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/csblog/2025/07/28/nomination-to-young-software-engineering-of-the-year-awards-2025/) in June. The awards were announced at the ScotSoft 2025 (https://www.scotlandis.com/scotsoft-2025/), Scotland’s leading tech conference at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

The Young Software Engineer of the Year accolades are awarded to the best undergraduate software projects from students studying computer science and software engineering in Scotland. Over the years, St Andrews has many finalists and prize winners.

PGR Seminar – David Morrison

You are warmly invited to the next PRG Seminar.

Date & Time: Monday 06/10/2025 14:00-14:40

Location: JC 1.33A

Speaker: David Morrison

Title: Synthetic Whole Slide Image Patch Embeddings for Multiple Instance Learning

Abstract: Obtaining high-quality data is a persistent challenge for the training of computational pathology models. As medical data, Whole-slide images (WSIs) are often held under restrictive terms by medical institutions and, as a result, are hard to access by researchers. Where data is available, the number of whole slide images can be limited and skewed towards common pathology types. In addition, there can be issues with labelling: slide-level labels may lack information about specific pathologies, for example, they may be limited to binary labels of normal or malignant, while annotations at the level of patches are rarely available.

Synthetic data generation is a possible solution to these problems by allowing researchers to produce data on demand that can be used in an unrestricted manner with high-quality labels. I have previously presented on the generation of synthetic patch data. In this talk, I will discuss an extension to this work in which this approach is combined with models trained to characterise the slide as a whole in order to provide a synthesis process for data for use with multiple instance learning techniques, commonly used in whole slide image classification.

We hope you can join us!

 

Seminar series on computing intelligence

There will be a series of talks at the Global Research Centre for Diverse Intelligences which might be interesting to staff in the School.

It will be a mix of discussions about how different fields (i.e., not just CS) think about intelligence and some talks about various sub-fields of AI presented by CS staff.

Talks by Ruth Hoffmann, Nguyen Dang, and Phong Le will be about foundational AI topics: https://diverseintelligences.st-andrews.ac.uk/events/

 

PGR Seminar – Sharon Pisani & Mirza Hossain

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 3rd October 11:00-12:00 in JC 1.33A.

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Sharon and Mirza’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Sharon Pisani

Title: Building Sustainable Heritage Virtual Museums for Communities using Sociodata

Abstract: Virtual museums are moving beyond simple digitisation of artefacts to become dynamic platforms for community engagement and sustainable development. This talk introduces the VERA Platform, which combines a flexible Virtual Museum Infrastructure with a new layer of sustainability-oriented contextual data called sociodata. Sociodata links heritage objects to their cultural landscapes, local communities, and relevant Sustainable Development Goals, enabling richer discovery, analysis, and reuse. In this talk, I will outline the platform’s architecture and metadata model. The talk will highlight technical challenges such as interoperability with European data spaces, and supporting interactive storytelling at scale—issues highly relevant to digital infrastructure and data-driven research in the heritage sector.

Bio: Sharon is a PhD researcher examining the role of emergent digital technologies in preserving and engaging with cultural heritage while supporting sustainable development. Her research focuses on digitising cultural landscapes—both natural and cultural heritage—to assess various impacts on heritage and community identities. She explores how digital tools, including 3D scanning, 3D modeling, and mixed reality, can aid in recreating and safeguarding heritage at risk.

Mirza Hossain

Title: Fishing for monosemantic neurons in histopathology foundation models

Abstract: This early-stage study introduces Histoscope, an interactive system for examining sparse autoencoders (SAEs) that are trained on top of the UNI pathology encoder. Vision transformers for histopathology often exhibit superposition, where single neurons respond to multiple distinct tissue patterns, making interpretation difficult. Histoscope provides quantitative metrics and visualisations to assess whether neurons are monosemantic—associated with a single concept—or polysemantic—associated with multiple concepts. The work highlights methods for analysing internal representations of histopathology foundation models and contributes to efforts toward more transparent AI in pathology.

Bio: Mirza Hossain is a second-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on multimodal AI in medical imaging with an emphasis on mechanistic interpretability of large foundation models. He is supervised by Dr. David Harris-Birtill.

 

Curious Workshop Success

On Saturday 13th September, the Royal Society of Edinburgh hosted a workshop titled: “Your Data, Your Story” as part of their Curious festival of knowledge. The event was led by a group of experts in data visualisation and data ethics, including three of our own, Dr Areti Manataki, Dr Tristan Henderson and Tilcia Woodville-Price.

The interactive workshop was designed for the general public, in particular for non-experts that are curious about data visualisation and data ethics. Participants were prompted to reflect on their own examples of personal data and think about the ethics behind the collection of personal data. This was followed by a brief introduction into data visualisation and physical representations of data (also called data physicalisations). Lastly came a hands-on activity which featured the use of everyday objects, such as string, pasta and Lego, to create physical representations of our data.

It was fascinating to speak with participants and learn what aspects of their personal data were important to them. Participants physicalized data ranging from their social media usage to the quality of interactions with their children, to the data about emails received versus responded and everything in between.

What about you? What kind of data is meaningful to you? Have you thought about how visualising data may help your daily activities or give you an opportunity for reflection?

Workshop team:

Dr Areti Manataki, Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews

Dr Uta Hinrichs, Reader in Data Visualisation, University of Edinburgh

Dr Tristan Henderson, Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews

Dushani Perera, Research Associate, University of Edinburgh

Tilcia Woodville-Price, Doctoral Candidate, University of St Andrews

School Seminar – Peter Macgregor “Fast Dynamic Algorithms for Modern Clustering”

You are warmly invited to the second School Seminar:

Speaker: Peter Macgregor

Title: Fast Dynamic Algorithms for Modern Clustering

Abstract: Spectral clustering and DBSCAN both have long histories as theoretically grounded, general-purpose clustering algorithms. However, they face practical challenges when scaling to large datasets which have limited their adoption in practice.

In recent work, we have developed several improvements to these algorithms which improve their running time and space complexity while preserving their performance guarantees and generalising them to dynamically changing datasets. We make use of several algorithmic techniques including sparsification, dimensionality reduction, and random sampling. In this talk, I will present the recent progress and make the case that it’s time to challenge k-means’ dominance as the ‘default’ clustering algorithm.

Date & Time: Thursday 16/10/2025 11am-12pm

Location: JC 1.33A

Please do come along and join us! 🙂

St Andrews Computer Science makes big splash at Digital Heritage 2025

Sharon Pisani, Maria Andrei, Junyu Zhang and Alan Miller travelled to Siene for Digital Heritage 2025. Four paper presentations, project workshops and much networking later we reflect on a successful conference.

We are proud to announce that Sharon Pisani from Open Virtual Worlds has received the Best Paper Award for her wonderful work “Introducing Sociodata in Virtual Museums: A Holistic Approach for Sustainable Development in Cultural Landscapes”, at the leading international conference of Digital Heritage Congress 2025! The conference was inspiringly hosted in the beautiful medieval city of Siena. Congratulations to Sharon on her well-deserved achievement!

The papers presented included:

Remaking Lost Communities in Virtual Cultural Landscapes
Junyu Zhang, Miriam Sturdee, Perin Westerhof Nyman, Iain Oliver, Jacquie Aitken , Alan Miller

Designing a Virtual Museum Ecosystem for the Cloud
Alan Miller , Catherine. Cassidy Sharon. Pisani , Maria. Andrei  Junyu. Zhang , Sarah. Kennedy , Iain. Oliver , Jacquie. Aitken, Raymond . Williams,, and Vanessa. Martin,

Introducing Sociodata in Virtual Museums: A Holistic Approach for Sustainable Development in Cultural Landscapes
Sharon Pisani , Alan Miller , Catherine Cassidy , Loraine Clarke , Iain Oliver , and Gonçalo Gomes

Bridging Psychological Distance from Climate Change through Experiential Learning with Heritage Organisations
Maria Andrei, Sonja Heinrich, Jason Jacques, Iain Oliver, Sharon Pisani, Alan Miller, Richard Bates

We also participated in a workshop lead by HERITALISE Horizon Europe project developing tools for the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage.

Thank you to the Timespan Museum and West Highland Museum for their support and participation as well as the Schools of Earth and Environmental Sciences, History and Biology for contributions.

Thanks also to the School of Computer Science, and  Innovate UK for funding the presentations and to the HERITALISE project https://heritalise-eccch.eu/ and the CULTURALTY project https://culturality.museum/, for supporting  work reported in two of the papers.

School Seminar – Ian Gent, “How Not To Do It”

You are warmly invited to the next School Seminar:

Speaker: Ian Gent

Title: How Not To Do It

Abstract: Empirical methods are a vital part of a researcher’s toolbox. Which means that the more senior a researcher is, the more tools they have dropped on their feet!  I will share real mistakes which I or my colleagues made in analysing SAT and CP algorithms, and which we are prepared to own up to! Hopefully, you can learn from our mistakes instead of being doomed to repeat them.  As an old academic I’ll also take the chance to offer some advice on being an academic. Like most advice given by old people this advice is valued principally by the person giving it and may be worthless to anyone else.

Date & Time: Tuesday 30/09/2025 11am-12pm

Location: JC 1.33A

Please do come along and join us 🙂