SRG Seminar: Cloud scheduling algorithms by Long Thai

“Thanks to cloud computing, accessing to a virtualised computing cluster has become not only easy but also feasible to organisations, especially small and medium-sized ones. First of all, it does not require an upfront investment in building data centres and a constant expense for managing them. Instead, users can pay only for the amount of resources that they actually use. Secondly, cloud providers offer a resource provisioning mechanism which allows users to add or remove resources from their cluster easily and quickly in order to accommodate the workload which changes dynamically in real-time. The flexibility of users’ computing clusters are further increased as they are able to select one or a combination of different virtual machine types, each of which has different hardware specification.

Nevertheless, the users of cloud computing have to face the challenges that they have never encountered before. The monetary cost changes dynamically based on the amount of resources used by the clients. Which means it is no longer cost-effective to adopt a greedy approaches which acquires as much resource as possible. Instead, it requires a careful consideration before making any decision regarding acquiring resources. Moreover, the users of cloud computing have the face that paradox of choice resulted from the high number of options regarding hardware specification offered by cloud providers. As a result, finding a suitable machine type for an application can be difficult. It is even more challenging when a user owns many applications which of which performs different. Finally, addressing all the above challenges while ensuring that a user receives a desired performance further increase the difficulty of effectively using cloud computing resources.

In this research, we investigate and propose the approach that aims to solve the challenge of optimising the usage of cloud computing resource by constructing the heterogeneous cloud cluster which dynamically changes based on the workload. Our proposed approach consists two processes. The first one, named execution scheduling, aims to determine the amount of virtual machines and the allocate of workload on each machine in order to achieve the desired performance with the minimum cost. The second process, named execution management, monitors the execution during runtime, detects and handles unexpected events. The proposed research has been thoroughly evaluated by both simulated and real world experiments. The results have showed that our approach is able to not only achieve the desired performance while minimising the monetary cost but also reduce, or even completely prevent, negative results caused by unexpected events at runtime.”

Event details

  • When: 9th March 2017 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

SACHI Seminar: Dr Hagen Lehmann – Social interaction characteristics for socially acceptable robots

Title: Social interaction characteristics for socially acceptable robots

Abstract: The last decade has seen fast advances in Social Robotic Technology. Social Robots start to be successfully used as robot companions and as therapeutic aids. In both of these cases the robots need to be able to interact intuitively and comfortably with their human users in close physical proximity. In order to achieve a seamless interaction and communication these robots need to coordinate different aspects of their behaviors with their human interlocutors. This behavior coordination of non-verbal and verbal interaction cues requires that the robots can interpret the social behavior of the other and react accordingly. In this talk different ways to (socially) coordinate human and robot behavior will be discussed and illustrated with examples from recent Human-Robot Interaction research.

Biography: Dr. Lehmann is a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher in the iCub Facility at the Italian Institute of Technology, where he develops the SICSAR project, dedicated to generate and test social interaction behaviors for the iCub robot. Dr. Lehmann received his Diploma in Psychology from the Technical University Dresden, his MA degree in Psychology from the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bath. In these years he has worked, from different interdisciplinary perspectives, on Evolution and Social Cognition, examining in particular possible reasons for the evolution of social structures in primates, the role of social dominance in this process, and social gaze behavior and its role in human social evolution. His current work is devoted to the application of this knowledge to the fields of Human-Robot Interaction and Social Robotics, through experimental research and with a particular focus on Robot Assisted Therapy and robotic home companions. Before his work at the IIT, he was part of the Adaptive Systems Research Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire, where he was involved in different European projects, e.g. iTALK, and ACCOMPANY.

Event details

  • When: 3rd April 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Data and the User Experience in Retail

The Hut Group develop and manage a proprietary eCommerce platform that handled over half a billion pounds of revenue last year. UX within the company is responsible for optimising user flows through the website, and working with Design departments to deliver user delight. With over 30 distinct site brands internally, and several external clients, the team attempt to strike a balance between optimising sites for revenue and user delight. This talk is about the challenges of UX within a wider business organisation, and the role that Computer Science graduates can play in a multidisciplinary UX team.

Bio:
Elliott joined The Hut Group in June, starting in the Research and Development department. He worked on developing a dashboard for use inside the business, and developed a series of prototypes to show users Social Media content on-site. He now heads the User Experience (UX) department. Prior to joining THG, Elliott worked at Skyscanner as a front-end developer whilst graduating from St Andrews in Computer Science with several modules in HCI.

Event details

  • When: 6th March 2017 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Honey 110 - John Honey Teaching Lab
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: Slave to the Algo-Rhythm? Awaiting the Law Cavalry (Professor Lilian Edwards, Strathclyde)

The School of Computer Science welcomes Lilian Edwards, Professor of Internet Law at the University of Strathclyde.

Abstract:

There is considerable current concern about the decisions made wholly or partly by algorithms in our digital “big data society”: decisions which now include –

  • hiring, promoting and firing in the employment arena
  • profiling for surveillance by law enforcement as well as by private companies for tracking and marketing
  • dynamic alteration of pricing and access to goods
  • assessment of worth for admission to school, college or professions
  • health interventions and welfare distributions
  • access to news and political comment on social media

And many more.

This talk will discuss the underlying problems around algorithmic governance, including inter alia discrimination, social sorting, lack of transparency, restriction of human agency, acontextuality and other possibilities for error, which have received a great deal of publicity lately; and then more unusually, starts to conjecture what legal solutions may be available in the UK and EU to complement technological and other governance solutions.

Some attention has been attracted by an alleged new “right to an explanation” in the General Data Protection Regulation, art 13, which is in fact not new but has existed in the DPD since 19952. The problems with the right are twofold, one legal, one practical. First, there has always been a carve out from the right for the protection of trade secrets and intellectual property. This probably explains the absolute history of lack of use of this right throughout the EU. Recital 63 of the GDPR does however now counsel that this should not justify “a refusal to provide all information to the data subject” [emphasis added]. A second even more difficult obstacle is simply that no-one really knows how to present what goes on in the innards of a modern big data machine learning algorithm, which largely runs on correlation rather than causation, to non-experts.

While the latter may be seen as mainly a technological problem, a number of key legal issues have not yet really been ventilated. Are legal remedies concerning algorithmic transparency really best found in data protection law? Is transparency a useful remedy at all given the historic failure of notice and choice in privacy? Are individualistic legal remedies suitable for problems causing harms to society as a whole rather than noticeable harms to discrete individuals (another problem of which privacy scholars already have much experience?) Can better models for remedies be drawn from media, competition, employment or environmental law? Does the problem in the end fall so awkwardly between the stools of technological fixes and policy concern that neither camp really has the expertise or ability to produce solutions?

Bio:

Lilian Edwards is a leading academic in the field of Internet law. She has taught information technology law, e-commerce law, and Internet law at undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1996 and been involved with law and artificial intelligence since 1985. Her current research interests, while broad, revolve around the topics of online privacy, intermediary liability, cybercrime, Internet pornography, digital assets and digital copyright enforcement.

She worked at Strathclyde University from 1986–1988 and Edinburgh University from 1989 to 2006. She became Chair of Internet Law at the University of Southampton from 2006–2008, and then Professor of Internet Law at the University of Sheffield until late 2010, when she returned to Scotland to become Professor of E-Governance at Strathclyde University,while retaining close links with the renamed SCRIPT (AHRC Centre) at Edinburgh. Since 2011, she has been Chair of E-Governance at Strathclyde University.

She has co-edited (with Charlotte Waelde) three editions of a textbook, Law and the Internet; the third edition appeared in 2009.She won the Barbara Wellberry Memorial Prize in 2004 for work on online privacy. A sole edited collection of her essays, The New Legal Framework for E-Commerce in Europe, was published in 2005. She is Associate Director, and was co-founder, of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Centre for IP and Technology Law (now SCRIPT). Edwards has consulted inter alia for Google, Symantec, McAfee, the EU Commission, the OECD, and WIPO. Edwards co-chairs GikII, a annual series of international workshops on the intersections between law, technology and popular culture.

Since 2012, Edwards has been Deputy Director of CREATe, the Centre for Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology, a £5m Research Councils UK research centre about copyright and business models. She is also a frequent speaker in the media and has been invited to lecture in many universities in Europe, Asia, America, Australasia and most recently, South Africa.

Event details

  • When: 17th March 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Seminar

Implementing Event-Driven Microservices Architecture using Functional programming

*PLEASE NOTE THIS TALK WILL TAKE PLACE IN BMS BUILDING – SEMINAR ROOM 113*

BIO: Nikhil Barthwal is a polyglot programmer currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at Jet.com, an e-commerce startup recently acquired by Walmart. He works in the Tools & Productivity team with the aim of making developers more productive, as well as improving the quality of the code. Outside of work, he is involved with local meetups in New York city where he gives talks on various topics related to technology. He holds a Master’s in Computer Science with special focus on Distributed Systems and a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering.

ABSTRACT: Web services are typically stateless entities, that need to operate at scale at large. Functional paradigm can be used to model these web services work and offer several benefits like scalability, productivity, and correctness.

This talk describes how Jet.com implemented their Event-Driven Microservices using F#. It covers topics like their Microservices, Event-Sourcing, Kafka, Build & Deployment pipeline. The objective of the talk is show how to create a scalable & highly distributed web service in F#, and demonstrate how various characteristics of functional paradigm capture the behavior of such services architecture very naturally.

Event details

  • When: 8th March 2017 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: TBA
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Colloquium, Seminar

SACHI Seminar: Dr Alice Toniolo – An argumentation-based approach to facilitate and improve human reasoning

Title:  An argumentation-based approach to facilitate and improve human reasoning.

Abstract:  The ability of understanding and reasoning about different alternatives for a decision is fundamental for making informed choices. Intelligent autonomous systems have the potential to improve the quality of human-decision making but the use of such systems may be hampered by human difficulties to interact and trust their outputs. This talk will focus on the potential of argumentation-based models of reasoning to support users in making sense of incomplete and inconsistent information.   I will present a tool called CISpaces (Collaborative Intelligence Spaces) that combines a graphical representation of arguments and autonomous reasoning to facilitate collaboration in the context of intelligence analysis. I will present initial results from a few follow-up studies showing that argumentation may help bridge the gap between human and autonomous reasoning.

Biography:  Dr Alice Toniolo has joined the School of Computer Science as a lecturer in October 2016. Previously Alice was a Research Fellow in the Agent, Reasoning and Knowledge group in the Computing Science Department at the University of Aberdeen, where she was also awarded her PhD. Her research interests are within multi-agent systems to support human reasoning and decision-making. In particular, she is interested in computational argumentation-based models of reasoning with recent applications in intelligence analysis, social media and the built environment. Alice has also worked with researchers within Philosophy to investigate rich forms of deliberation dialogue.

Event details

  • When: 28th February 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

The technology driving the evolution of internet advertising, targeted advertising or intrusive surveillance?

BIO

 Tim Palmer read Computational Science in St Andrews graduating in 1993.

 Initially working for Oracle in London then San Francisco, he went on to work in Investment Banking Technology for over a decade.

 Most recently Tim was CTO for The Exchange Lab – a programmatic marketing company.

 He is now Senior Partner in Digiterre, a technology consultancy working for a wide variety of software projects across London.

 

ABSTRACT

 In 1997 internet advertising consisted of simple “click me” banner adverts.

 By 2011 around two hundred digital marketing firms followed us around the internet encouraging us to “complete that purchase”.

 Today more than four thousand technology firms provide marketing technology seemingly to help us keep track of The Kardashians.

 In the seminar, a simple HTML and JavaScript snippet will be used to explain the basics of digital marketing; how these building blocks are making fortunes for some and providing free internet for everyone; and how the technology presents a real challenge to protect our online privacy.

 Or to put it another way, the 8 Most Shocking Secrets of Digital Marketing – you won’t believe the 7th one.

 

Event details

  • When: 27th February 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Colloquium, Seminar

 “Unfrying your brain with F#”  Andrea Magnorsky, Workday Software Ltd

Abstract

 F#, just like other non-pure functional languages, allows you find the sweet spot between FP practices and OO language pragmatism. Most of the advanced features of F# give you the power to change the language and to introduce a higher level of abstraction to your code. In this talk, we will discuss active patterns, computation expressions, parsers, using type providers and more. These language features help you make your code simpler and easier to maintain.

 

Bio

 I ended up as a Software Developer, I am pretty sure there was no other viable option. My current technical interests are F#, games, programming languages and philosophy of computing .

I really enjoy finding different ways to write code, sometimes for performance, other times for succinctness, sometimes, just because you can, there is no better way to learn than trying.

When I am not working I tend to play with Haskell or other languages or cats

Event details

  • When: 6th March 2017 16:00 - 17:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Colloquium, Seminar

Seminar: The technology driving the evolution of internet advertising, targeted advertising or intrusive surveillance?

“The technology driving the evolution of internet advertising, targeted advertising or intrusive surveillance?”

 Tim Palmer, Senior Partner, Digiterre (http://www.digiterre.com)

 

Event details

  • When: 27th February 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Seminar

SACHI Seminar: The design of digital technologies to support transitional events in the human lifespan

Title:  The design of digital technologies to support transitional events in the human lifespan

Abstract:  This talk will focus on (i) qualitative research undertaken to understand how digital technologies are being used during transitional periods across the human lifespan, such as becoming an adult, romantic breakup, and end of life, and (ii) the opportunities for technology design that have emerged as a result. Areas of focus include presentation of self online, group social norms, and the problematic nature of ‘ownership’ of digital materials.

Biography – Professor Wendy Moncur, FRSA:  I hold an Interdisciplinary Chair in Digital Living at the University of Dundee, where I work across Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and the School of Nursing and Health Sciences. I am also a Visiting Scholar at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, and an Associate of the Centre for Death and Society (University of Bath).

The work of my group, Living Digital (www.livingdigital.ac.uk) is grounded in Human Computer Interaction, and focuses on human experiences enacted in a digital age – for example, becoming an adult, becoming a parent, relationship breakdown, and the end of life.

I have been involved in grants totalling £2.7 Million since 2011, through an EPSRC Personal Fellowship and as a Principal Investigator/Co-investigator. Full details of my publications can be found at http://bit.ly/1kQx2zH. My next large research project, ‘TAPESTRY’, is funded under the EPSRC TIPS program, and explores normative online behaviour in social groups.

Event details

  • When: 14th February 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar