Event

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

Marwan Fayed (St Andrews): Quality of Experience Fairness for Adaptive Video Streams in the Network (School Seminar)

Abstract:

“Why is my kid getting HD on their phone, while I’m stuck with SD on my 50″ TV?” This type of complaint is among the most common directed to streaming services such as Netflix and BBC. Recent studies observe that adaptive video streams, when competing behind a bottleneck link, generate flows that lead to instability, under-utilization, and unfairness. Additional measurements suggest there may also be a negative impact on users’ perceived quality of experience as a consequence. The intuitive response may be, and has been, that application-generated issues should be resolved by the application. In this presentation I shall demonstrate that fairness, by any definition, can only be solved in the network. Moreover, that in an increasingly HTTP-S world, some form of client interaction is required. In support, a new network-layer ‘QoE-fairness’ metric will be be introduced that reflects user experience. Experiments using our open-source implementation in the home environment reinforce the network-layer as the right place to attack the general problem.

Refs-

[1] http://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/networking/networking2015/1570066341.pdf
[2] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2940144

Speaker Bio:
Marwan Fayed joined the University of St Andrews in 2018. He received his MA from Boston University and his PhD from the University of Ottawa, in 2003 and 2009 respectively, and in between worked at Microsoft as a member of the Core Reliability Group. In 2009 he joined the University of Stirling, UK as Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) Lecturer, alongside an appointment to ‘Theme Leader’ for networking research in Scotland, 2014-2016. His current research interests lie in wireless algorithms, as well as general network, transport, and measurement in next generation edge networks. He is a co-founder of HUBS C.i.C., an ISP focussed on rural communities, recipient of an IEEE best paper award, and a Senior Member of both the IEEE and ACM.

Event details

  • When: 17th April 2018 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Compositional Coinduction with Sized Types – Dr. Andreas Abel

Abstract:

Formal languages and automata are taught to every computer science student.  However, the student will most likely not see the beautiful coalgebraic foundations, which use coindutive reasoning.

In this talk, I recapitulate how infinite tries can represent formal languages (sets of strings).  I explain Agda’s coinduction mechanism based on copatterns and sized types demonstrate that it allows an elegant representation of the usual language constructions like union, concatenation, and Kleene star, with the help of Brzozowski derivatives.

Event details

  • When: 16th February 2018 12:00 - 13:00
  • 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

Simplifying ARM concurrency – Prof. Susmit Sarkar

ARM has a relaxed memory model, previously specified in informal prose for ARMv7 and ARMv8. Over time, and partly due to work building formal semantics for ARM concurrency, it has become clear that some of the complexity of the model is not justified by the potential benefits. In
particular, the model was originally non-multicopy-atomic: writes could
become visible to some other threads before becoming visible to all —
but this has not been exploited in production implementations, the
corresponding potential hardware optimisations are thought to have
insufficient benefits in the ARM context, and it gives rise to subtle
complications when combined with other ARMv8 features. The ARMv8
architecture has therefore been revised: it now has a multicopy-atomic
model. It has also been simplified in other respects, including more
straightforward notions of dependency, and the architecture now includes
a formal concurrency model.

This is work presented in POPL this year. I will also present some of
the background and context on relaxed memory which is absent from the
necessarily compressed talk format of POPL.

Event details

  • When: 22nd February 2018 12:00 - 13:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Talk

DLS: Functional Foundations for Operating Systems

Biography: Dr. Anil Madhavapeddy is a University Lecturer at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and a Fellow of Pembroke College where he is Director of Studies for Computer Science. He has worked in industry (NetApp, Citrix, Intel), academia (Cambridge, Imperial, UCLA) and startups (XenSource, Unikernel Systems, Docker) over the past two decades. At Cambridge, he directs the OCaml Labs research group which delves into the intersection of functional programming and systems, and is a maintainer on many open source projects such as OpenBSD, OCaml, Xen and Docker.

Timetable
9:30: Introduction by Professor Saleem Bhatti
9:35: Lecture 1
10:35: Break with tea and coffee
11:15: Lecture 2
12:15: Lunch (not provided)
14:00: Lecture 3
15:00: Close by Professor Simon Dobson

Lecture 1: Rebuilding Operating Systems with Functional Principles
The software stacks that we deploy across computing devices in the world are based on shaky foundations. Millions of lines of C code crammed into monolithic operating system kernels, mixed with layers of scheduling logic, wrapped in a hypervisor, and served with a dose of nominal security checking on the side. In this talk, I will describe an alternative approach to constructing reliable, specialised systems with a familiar developer experience. We will use modular functional programming to build several services such as a secure web server that have no reliance on conventional operating systems, and explain how to express their logic in a high level, functional fashion. By the end of it, everyone in the audience should be able to build their own so-called unikernels!

Lecture 2: The First Billion Real Deployments of Unikernels
Unikernels offer a path to a more sane basis for driving applications on hardware, but will they ever be adopted for real? For the past fifteen years, an intrepid group of adventurers have been developing the MirageOS application stack in the OCaml programming language. Along the way, it has been deployed in many unusual industrial situations that I will describe in this talk, starting with the Docker container stack, then moving onto the Xen hypervisor that drives billions of servers worldwide. I will explain the challenges of using functional programming in industry, but also the rewards of seeing successful deployments quietly working in mission-critical areas of systems software.

Lecture 3: Programming the Next Trillion Embedded Devices
The unikernel approach of compiling highly specialised applications from high-level source code is perfectly suited to programming the trillions of embedded devices that are making their way around the world. However, this raises new challenges from a programming language perspective: how can we run on a spectrum of devices from the very tiny (with just kilobytes of RAM) to specialised hardware? I will describe the new frontier of functional metaprogramming (programs which generate more programs) that we are using to compile a single application to many heterogenous devices, and a Git-like model to coordinate across thousands of nodes. I will conclude with by motivating the need for a next-generation operating system to power new exciting applications such as augmented and virtual reality in our situated environments, and remove the need for constant centralised coordination via the Internet.

Event details

  • When: 13th February 2018 09:30 - 15:15
  • Where: Byre Theatre
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series, Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Distinguished lecture

Matthew Rice (Open Rights Group): Do we need the Third Sector in the debate about technology and ethics? (School Seminar)

Abstract:

Matthew Rice, Scotland Director for the Open Rights Group, the digital rights campaigning organisation, will lead a seminar discussing the role of civil society organisations in the discourse of technology, rights, regulation, and norms. Computer Scientists sit at an important point in this debate, as individuals affected by changes in norms, but more importantly as builders of the applications and the infrastructure that reflect these norms.

The seminar will discuss the impact civil society has on changing norms and laws around the world, and why these actors matter in the space between governments, companies, and wider society. It will introduce students to the Open Rights Group, the UK’s only technology and human rights grassroots campaigning organisation on t, and its current work in the area of technology and human rights.

Digital technology has transformed the way we live and opened up limitless new ways to communicate, connect, share and learn across the world. But for all the benefits, technological developments have created new threats to our human rights. The Open Rights Group raise awareness of these threats and challenge them through public campaigns, legal actions, policy interventions and tech projects.

Event details

  • When: 1st May 2018 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar