Event

SICSA Workshop on Learning Analytics in Education

The Higher Education Research Group is happy to announce the SICSA-sponsored workshop on learning analytics on Aug 6th 2018.

Goals

The purpose of this SICSA-sponsored workshop is to encourage an evidence-based approach to teaching by leveraging quantitative and qualitative data available to CS schools. Most importantly, we plan to organise a multi-institution study on using machine learning and AI-based techniques on existing data to improve learning outcomes across multiple universities. The workshop will serve to formulate the goals of such a study and forge the necessary collaborations to make this happen.

Format

We are very happy to announce that the chief regulatory adviser at Jisc Technologies Andrew Cormack will give an invited talk about the legal and ethical framework for learning analytics. In addition to the invited talk, the workshop will consist of a set of breakout sessions and a final discussion dedicated to preparing a follow-up study. The breakout sessions will involve discussions about existing quantitative and qualitative data available to educators, how these data influence teaching, what (statistical and other) data procesisng is useful for driving decisions, and which algorithmic approaches could be applied across institutions.

Background

Evidence-based teaching is of particular importance in fast-moving fields like Computer Science, and is therefore of interest to many higher education institutions. We have more data on students and courses than ever before including grades, entry requirements, qualitative and quantitative feedback, and career paths after leaving the university, and as computer scientists we are well equipped to process such data. It is important to measure the positive and negative impact of changes to the delivery (e.g. lecture capture, different lecturers) and content (slides, supporting material, organisation) in order to maintain and hopefully improve learning outcomes over time.

However, measuring how teaching approaches affect learning outcomes can be challenging because of issues such as data protection, small numbers of students, changes in the curriculum, or changes in admission procedures. Measuring differences between institutions is even harder because of differences in course structure, class sizes and marking scales. We believe that computer science techniques such as data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence will become increasingly important in this field, and would like to set up an ambitious study across several universities based on the findings of this workshop. Such a study is only possible if coordinated well across institutions and this workshop aims to provide the basis for such collaboration.

Target Audience

The workshop will involve 24 academics, mainly from SICSA-affiliated institutions, aiming to foster an exchange of ideas and best practice. While the central topic is CS education, we hope to also appeal to CS academics engaged in data ethics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (e.g. for processing data in natural text form) because the topic provides an important application of CS, and has great potential for impact.

To register, contact Kasim at kt54@st-andrews.ac.uk, or go to the Eventbrite page:

http://learning-analytics-workshop.eventbrite.com/

Event details

  • When: 6th August 2018 09:30 - 15:30
  • Where: Gateway Bldg
  • Format: Workshop

Why Homotopy type Theory (HoTT) matters – Professor Thorsten Altenkirch

Abstract:
Dependent types are a wonderful way to construct correct functional programming and specify interfaces as Edwin has shown in his nice book on type driven development using a welsh dragon. But shall we go further in the esoteric world of homotopy type theory? I will try to motivate this and I am looking forward to some discussions with people who have a more pragmatic attitude to dependent types.

Event details

  • When: 25th May 2018 11:00 - 12:30
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

The OpenMP and MPI refactoring with ParaFormance – Turkey Alsalkini

Abstract:

The increasing complexity of codes with the growing number of cores that should be utilised make such codes hard to optimise and maintain. In this talk, we present the OpenMP and MPI refactoring implemented in the ParaFormance tool. This tool transforms the sequential code into parallel code able to run on shared memory machines. Further refactoring is implemented to adapt the source code to exploit a larger number of processors on large HPC clusters with message passing support. In addition, the resulting MPI code can be used by developers as a starting point for further optimisation. Both refactorings are preceded by an advanced safety checking which reports concurrency problems and gives hints and suggestions on how to fix them.

Event details

  • When: 17th May 2018 12:00 - 13:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Talk

SACHI Seminar: Alessio Malizia – User Experience: a step towards Natural User Interfaces.

Title: User Experience: a step towards Natural User Interfaces.

Abstract: The road to natural interfaces is still long and we are now witnessing an artificial naturality. These interfaces are natural, in the sense they employ hand gestures, but they are also artificial, because the system designer imposes the set of gestures. In this lecture we will explore together the benefits and issues of Natural User Interfaces.

Speaker biography: Alessio Malizia is a Professor of UX Design at the University of Hertfordshire and a distinguished speaker of the ACM (the international Association for Computer Machinery); he lives in London but is a “global soul” and has been living in Italy, Spain and US. He is the son of a blacksmith, but thereafter all pretensions of manual skills end. Prof. Malizia began his career as a bearded computer scientist at Sapienza – University of Rome and then, after an industrial experience in IBM and Silicon Graphics, moved on with a career in research. He was visiting researcher at the Xerox PARC where he was appreciated for his skills in neural networks (Multilayer Perceptrons) and as peanut butter and chocolate biscuits eater. He worked as Senior Lecturer at Brunel University London and as Associate Professor (and Spanish tapas aficionado) at the University Carlos III of Madrid. Prof Malizia’s research and teaching interests focus on Human-Centred Systems.

He is interested in the design of Ubiquitous Interactive Systems with a special focus on the End-User Development community. He is particularly interested in systems where the physical and digital become seamlessly intertwined producing a new hybrid landscape and the study of problems arising from designing such complex hybrid environments involving collaboration of various disciplines and stakeholders. In his role at the School of Creative Arts at University of Hertfordshire, he is keen to develop novel approaches and attract funding for improving methods to design almost invisible interfaces embedded in a physical environment naturally exploited by users’ innate interaction modalities.

Event details

  • When: 7th June 2018 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

War Stories: Building new tech products in an uncertain world

Steven Drost (CodeBase Chief Strategy Officer) and Jamie Coleman (CodeBase CoFounder and Chair) will talk about the topics that are rarely discussed in an academic environment around startups, product management, jobs to be done and disruption. Discussing aspects of UX, HCI, AI and systems development this is the stuff that they wish every computer scientist and startup founder knew before trying to create an innovative new business.

What is CodeBase?

CodeBase is the UK’s largest startup incubator, home to around 100 technology companies in Edinburgh and Stirling. It brings together ambitious entrepreneurs, world-class technological talent and top investors, in a creative, collaborative environment designed for the new digital economy. We host a vibrant, open community of experts in a diverse range of fields, with hands-on mentorship, networking and world-class business support. http://www.thisiscodebase.com

Jamie and Steven are quite inspiring speakers and if you are looking for project partners, collaborators or just to learn how to develop your ideas commercially, this could be a good talk for you.

 

Event details

  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

SRG Seminar: “Application of Bayesian Nonparametric in household human activity recognition” by Lei Fang

Abstract

In this talk, I will talk about the possibility of using Bayesian nonparametric clustering, or Dirichlet Process Mixture model to solve human activity recognition problem. In particular, I will discuss how the technique can be useful when the activity labels are not annotated and/or the activity evolves over the time. This initial study is built on an existing work on using directional statistical models (von Mises-Fisher) distribution, called Hierarchical Mixture of Conditional Independent von Mises Fisher distribution (HMCIvMFs), for unknown events detection and learning. Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling based learning algorithm will be presented together with some initial experiment results.

Event details

  • When: 12th April 2018 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

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

A Type-System for describing System-on-a-Chip Architectures – Jan De Muijnck-Hughes

Title:
A Type-System for describing System-on-a-Chip Architectures

Abstract:
The protocols that describe the interactions between IP Cores on System-on-a-Chip (SoC) architectures are well-documented. These protocols described not only the structural properties of the physical interfaces but also the behaviour of the emanating signals. However, there is a disconnect between the design of SoC architectures, their formal description, and the verification of their implementation in known hardware description languages.

Within the Border Patrol project we are investigating how to capture and reason about the structural and behavioural properties of SoC architectures using state-of-the-art advances in programming language research. Namely, we are investigating using dependent types and session types to capture and reason about hardware communication.

In this talk I will discuss my work in designing a dependent type- system and corresponding language that captures and reasons about the topological structure of a System-on-a-Chip. This language provides correct-by-construction guarantees over:

  • the physical structure of an interaction protocol;
  • the adherence of a component’s interface to a given protocol; and
  • the validity of the specified connections made between components.

We provide these guarantees through the (ab)use of dependent types as presented in Idris; and abuse of indexed monads to reason about resource usage.

Given time I will give an account of how this language enables reasoning about SoC behaviour when considered in conjunction with Session Types.ssion Types.

Event details

  • When: 5th April 2018 12:00 - 13:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Talk

Diderot: A Parallel Domain-Specific Language for Image Analysis and Visualization – John Reppy

Diderot: A Parallel Domain-Specific Language for Image Analysis and Visualization

Abstract:
The analysis of structure in three-dimensional images is increasingly valuable for biomedical research and computational science. At the same time, the computational burden of processing images is increasing as devices produce images of higher resolution (e.g., typical CT scans have gone from 128^3 to roughly 512^3 resolutions). With the latest scanning technologies, it is also more common for the the values measured at each sample to be multi-dimensional rather than a single scalar, which further complicates implementing mathematically correct methods.

Diderot is a domain-specific language (DSL) for programming advanced 3D image visualization and analysis algorithms. These algorithms, such as volume rendering, fiber tractography, and particle systems, are naturally defined as computations over continuous tensor fields that are reconstructed from the discrete image data. Diderot combines a high-level mathematical programming notation based on tensor calculus with an abstract bulk-synchronous parallelism model. Diderot is designed to both enable rapid prototyping of new image analysis algorithms and high performance on a range of parallel platforms.

In this talk, I will give an overview of the design of Diderot and examples of its use. I will then describe aspects of its implementation with a focus on how we translate the notation of tensor calculus to efficient code. I will also briefly discuss the automated techniques we use to validate the correctness of the compilation process.

Diderot is joint work with Gordon Kindlmann, Charisee Chiw, Lamont Samuels, and Nick Seltzer.

Bio:
John Reppy is a Professor of Computer Science and a Senior Fellow of the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1992 and spent the first eleven years of his career at Bell Labs in Murray Hill NJ. He has been exploring issues in language design and implementation since the late 1980’s, with a focus on higher-order, typed, functional languages. His work includes the invention of Concurrent ML and work on combining object-oriented and functional language features. His current research is on high-level languages for parallel programming, including the Diderot, Manticore, and Nessie projects.

Event details

  • When: 2nd April 2018 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Seminar