Event

Lasers, nanoparticles and cancer: fighting cancer using medical imaging by David Harris-Birtill, University of St Andrews

Abstract:
This talk outlines David Harris-Birtill’s previous research (at the Institute of Cancer Research and Imperial College London) focusing on applications in detecting and treating cancer. The talk will discuss photoacoustic imaging in the clinic, photothermal therapy with gold nanorods, and the advantages of imaging in a variety of settings and in it’s many forms from a nano to a macro scale to help the fight against cancer. This talk will also touch on the importance of displaying the right type of information to the right type of user and why data analysis skills are so important in efficient scientific research.
For any questions please email David on dcchb@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Bio:
Dr David Harris-Birtill is a Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. His current research is in human computer interaction and information visualisation, and is particularly interested in data analysis, sensors and automising research.

David’s work has been published in journals including Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Journal of Biomedical Optics, and has presented his research across the globe at conferences including San Francisco (SPIE Photonics WEST) and Hong Kong (Acoustics 2012). He has created open source image analysis programs which have been downloaded by over 100 researchers all over the globe, has run a course on “Introduction to Matlab for busy researchers and clinicians” and supervised research by Masters and PhD students.

This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

Event details

  • When: 23rd September 2014 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Maths Theatre D
  • Format: Seminar

Enterprise NoSQL in the BBC

Hear why MarkLogic was chosen as the 2012 Olympic website content store to ingest, store and deliver the data and content assets to the BBC¹s mobile app and thousands of web pages.
Speaker: Paul Preuveneers, Director, Sales Engineering, MarkLogic

Paul Preuveneers has more than 9 years of development experience with MarkLogic, with expertise in running software teams as well as spearheading the European office of MarkLogic UK. Paul Preuveneers joined MarkLogic from Elsevier Science, where he led the Agile Development Team, working on leading edge products including the many CONSULT sites and the main strategic elsevierhealth.com site. Trained in Extreme Programming and Agile Techniques, Paul has been on the forefront of many of the most innovative applications using MarkLogic in Europe. Prior to Elsevier Science, Paul held positions at Action Information Management and gained his Bsc in Computer Science at Southampton University.

Event details

  • When: 16th September 2014 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar by John Slaney

What is Meyer’s E1 problem?

John Slaney, Australian National University

The E1 problem is a rather specialised question concerning propositional logic. It was posed by R. K. Meyer almost 50 years ago, and is still open. In this talk, I undertake to explain the problem, to review progress towards its solution and possibly even to make it look less eccentric than it might at first seem. The talk is accessible to anyone with an interest in computer science or logic, as it does not presuppose any great technicalities.

John Slaney is Professor of Computer Science at Australian National University, Canberra.

His research has focussed on many aspects of logic and artificial intelligence, sometimes from a very philosophical standpoint but also from a very practical one of building better solvers. He also wrote Logic4Fun, an interactive logic modelling and solving website.

John Slaney has never denied rumours that he was a professional ice hockey player in North America, including scoring the winning goal in a Canada-USSR match. However, if asked he probably will deny them (since he was never a hockey player).

Event details

  • When: 1st September 2014 11:00 - 12:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Big data, the Cloud and the future of computing by Dr Kenji Takeda, Microsoft Research

Abstract: We live in an information society, with cloud computing is changing the way we live, work and play in a world of devices and services. In this talk we’ll explore what, why and how this new era of computing is changing the way we think about conceiving, developing and delivering software and services. We’ll then look at how the concept of Big Data is transforming science, and the opportunities it presents for the future.

Bio: Dr Kenji Takeda is Solutions Architect and Technical Manager in Microsoft Research. He is currently focussed on Azure for Research and Environmental Science tools and technologies. The Azure for Research programme currently supports over 300 projects worldwide, including two at the University of St Andrews – see

http://www.azure4research.com

Kenji has extensive experience in Cloud Computing, High Performance and High Productivity Computing, Data-intensive Science, Scientific Workflows, Scholarly Communication, Engineering and Educational Outreach. He has a passion for developing novel computational approaches to tackle fundamental and applied problems in science and engineering.

Event details

  • When: 5th August 2014 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

MSc in Dependable Software Systems (DESEM) Summer School

The summer school has the purpose of gathering together the students, lecturers, scholars and industries involved in DESEM, and provide a framework for interaction through talks, presentations, field-trips and social activities.

This year’s summer school is hosted by the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, from the Tuesday 1st July, to the Monday 7th July.

http://desem.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/index.html

Event details

  • When: 1st July 2014 09:15 - 7th July 2014 12:30
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Summer School

Design Frontiers in Parallel Languages: The Role of Determinism

Constraints can be a source of inspiration; their role in creative art forms is well-recognized, with poetry as the quintessential example.  We argue that the requirement of determinism can play the same role in the design of parallel programming languages. This talk describes a series of design explorations that begin with determinism as the constraint, introduce the concept of monotonically-changing concurrent data structures (LVars), and end in some interesting places—flirting with the boundaries to yield quasideterminism, and revealing synergies between parallel effects, such as cancelation and memoization, when used in a deterministic context.

Our goal is for guaranteed-deterministic parallel programming to be practical and efficient for a wide range of applications. One challenge is simply to integrate the known forms of deterministic-by-construction parallelism, which we overview in this talk: Kahn process networks, pure data-parallelism, single assignment languages, functional programming, and type-effect systems that enforce limited access to state by threads. My group, together with many others around the world, are developing libraries such as LVish and Accelerate that add these capabilities to the programming language Haskell. It is early days yet, but already possible to build programs that mix concurrent, lock-free data structures, blocking data-flow, callbacks, and GPU-based data-parallelism, without ever compromising determinism or referential transparency.

Event details

  • When: 12th June 2014 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

LIFT OFF to Success

This sessions is run as part of the LIFT OFF to Success (LO2S) programme and is aimed at giving school pupils an insight into what it would be like to study computer science at university.

During the session, pupils take part in a practical programming exercise, where they learn about software development techniques and gain experience writing and developing code.

Event details

  • When: 14th July 2014 15:00 - 17:00
  • Where: Honey 110 - MSc Lab
  • Format: Summer School

Sutton Trust Summer School

The School of Computer Science runs daily sessions as part of the Sutton Trust summer school. The sessions are aimed at giving school pupils an insight into what it would be like to study computer science at university.

During the sessions, pupils take part in practical programming exercises and attend lectures similar to those they would receive in their first year studying with us.

Event details

  • When: 30th June 2014 09:00 - 4th July 2014 10:30
  • Where: Honey 110 - MSc Lab
  • Format: Summer School