Internships are fantastic opportunities to gain some practical experience as well as find out what is happening the real world of computer science! Come and hear some our UG students share their experiences of their 2013 summer internships.
Melissa Mozifian: Adobe
Waqas Arshad: AIG
Mariya Hristova: Google STEP
Sam Koch: Facebook
Welcome to the first presentation in the School of Computer Science’s Seminar Series.
Please join us on for a seminar on Skyscanner’s technology this Tuesday (September 24) at 14:00 in Purdie Lecture Theatre C.
The two talks combined will take about 50 minutes with time for questions, and combine two topics presented by Skyscanner experts:
Grzegorz Janas- Project Manager Mobile Applications
Simon Thorogood- Senior Architect Development Engineering
Scott Krueger- Technical Manager Databases
Skyscanner: http://www.skyscanner.net/
Abstract:
Come and hear from Skyscanner Engineers on the Challenges behind engineering the world’s fastest growing Metasearch product and our journey towards being the “most trusted online travel company in the world” Skyscanner has 24 million unique monthly visitors and 25 million installed apps generating one-third of its traffic through mobile.
Everybody welcome.
Speaker:
Prof. Jonathan Seldin, University of Lethbridge, Canada
Abstract:
In this talk it is shown that every intermediate logic obtained from intuitionistic logic by adding a disjunction can be normalized. However, the normalisation procedure is not as complete as that for intuitionistic and minimal logic because some results which usually follow from normalisation fail, including the separation property and the subformula property.
Biography:
Jonathan P. Seldin, now Professor Emeritus, is a well-established senior scientist at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, with an Amsterdam PhD in combinatory logic supervised by Haskell Curry. This logic, together with lambda-calculus (to which it is equivalent) is a prototype for functional languages, such as Haskell, and typed lambda-calculus is a prototype for the typing discipline in programming languages. His work on lambda-calculus, both pure and typed, has applications in formal verification, the use of formal logics to prove properties of programs (e.g., that they satisfy their specifications). He has co-authored works with Curry and Hindley on combinatory logic and lambda calculus. He is also interested in the history and philosophy of mathematics and in proof normalisation and cut-elimination for various systems of formal logic. His visit to Scotland is as a SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow, to work with Prof. Kamareddine at Heriot-Watt University and with Dr Dyckhoff at St Andrews. For details and publications see http://directory.uleth.ca/users/jonathan.seldin
SACHI seminar
Title: Team-buddy: investigating a long-lived robot companion
Speaker: Ruth Aylett, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh
Abstract:
In the EU-funded LIREC project, finishing last year, Heriot-Watt University investigated how a long-lived multi-embodied (robot, graphical) companion might be incorporated into a work-environment as a team buddy, running a final continuous three-week study. This talk gives an overview of the technology issues and some of the surprises from various user-studies.
Bio:
Ruth Aylett is Professor of Computer Sciences in the School of Mathematical and Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University. She researches intelligent graphical characters, affective agent models, human-robot interaction, and interactive narrative. She was a founder of the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents and was a partner in the large HRI project LIREC – see lirec.eu. She has more than 200 publications – book chapters, journals, and refereed conferences and coordinates the Autonomous affective Agents group at Heriot-Watt University- see here
Abstract:
Large text document collections are increasingly important in a variety of domains; examples of such collections include news articles, streaming social media, scientific research papers, and digitized literary documents. Existing methods for searching and exploring these collections focus on surface-level matches to user queries, ignoring higher-level thematic structure. Probabilistic topic models are a machine learning technique for finding themes that recur across a corpus, but there has been little work on how they can support end users in exploratory analysis. In this talk I will survey the topic modeling literature and describe our ongoing work on using topic models to support digital humanities research. In the second half of the talk, I will describe TopicViz, an interactive environment that combines traditional search and citation-graph exploration with a dust-and-magnet layout that links documents to the latent themes discovered by the topic model.
This work is in collaboration with:
Polo Chau, Jaegul Choo, Niki Kittur, Chang-Hyun Lee, Lauren Klein, Jarek Rossignac, Haesun Park, Eric P. Xing, and Tina Zhou
Bio:
Jacob Eisenstein is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He works on statistical natural language processing, focusing on social media analysis, discourse, and latent variable models. Jacob was a Postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2008, winning the George M. Sprowls dissertation award.
Teaching discussion on assessment, feedback and moderation.
SACHI the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group and the Big Data Lab St Andrews are pleased to announce they will jointly run a SICSA supported “Big Data Information Visualisation” summer school in 2013. This summer school is concerned with the processing, management and hence presentation of “big data”, in an intelligible form with information visualisation techniques and methods. Data-intensive researchers talk about the “three Vs” of Big Data: Volume, Velocity and Variety (see CACM post). In this summer school we aim to demystify the concept of big data by introducing a systematic, scientific and rigorous approach to tackling it. We take a blended theory and practice approach here, by providing both theoretical underpinnings and practical use of the infrastructure to process big-data and the means to understand it with information visualisation.
See the SACHI website for more details.
Abstract:
Contemporary ICT infrastructures are trending towards a pervasive substrate of internet-connected sensors, actuators and human interfaces. Effective use of this pervasive infrastructure is key to solving 21st century challenges such as: mass transportation, energy conservation and environmental monitoring. Building effective applications that execute on this infrastructure requires advanced middleware support that respects the resource constraints of embedded devices. In this talk, I will present recent work from KU Leuven in the area of middleware support for sensing applications, with a focus on the Loosely-coupled Component Infrastructure (LooCI). I will then discuss emerging opportunities for ‘social sensing’ wherein online social networks are used to source and configure participatory sensor networks.
Bio:
Dr. Danny Hughes is an Assistant Professor with the iMinds-DistriNet group of the department of Computer Science at KU Leuven, Belgium. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University in 2007. He has since worked as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley (USA) and Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) and as a lecturer at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (China). His research interests are in distributed systems, with a focus on middleware support for dynamic systems such as wireless sensor networks, peer-to-peer networks and online social networks. You can find out more about his research at: https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/people/showMember.do?memberID=u0061846
Abstract
Wireless sensor networks are attracting increasing interest but suffering from severe challenges such as power constraints and low data reliability. Sensors are often energy-hungry and cannot operate over a long period, and the data they collect are frequently erroneous due to complex causes. Thus a challenging research question is how to optimise energy consumptions on sensors while keeping the collected sensor data accurate. The current literature often treat these two problems separately, however, in this talk we will present an integrated self-organising solution for model-based data collection that can preserve sensors’ energy by reducing the amount of communications and as well as deal with sensor errors.
Bio
Lei Fang is a PhD student supervised by Prof. Simon Dobson and Dr Dharini Balasubramaniam. He received his first degree in Information and Computing Science from the University of Liverpool. His research interests reside in sensor data modelling, fault detection and inference.
Title: Innovation Begins at Home
Abstract:
Prof Andy Stanford-Clark, Chief Technologist for Smarter Energy at IBM UK, will discuss the journey from Smart Metering to a future Smart Grid, incorporating the challenges of microgeneration, electric vehicles, intermittent generation, and demand-side management. Focusing specifically on energy saving in the home, Andy will talk about his own home automation system, and aspects of consumer behaviour change linked with that technology. The talk will also give details of a community energy-saving project, and the Isle of Wight EcoIsland project.
Bio:
Professor Andy Stanford-Clark is the Chief Technologist for IBM’s consulting business in Energy and Utilities for the UK and Ireland. He is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, and “Master Inventor” with more than 40 patents. Andy is based at IBM’s Hursley Park laboratories in the UK, and specialises in remote telemetry, energy monitoring and management, Smart Metering and Smart Grid technologies. He has a particular interest in home energy monitoring, home automation, demand-side management, and driving consumer behaviour change. Andy has a BSc in Computing and Mathematics, and a PhD in Computer Science. He is a visiting professor at the University of Newcastle and a Fellow of the British Computer Society.
