School Seminar: Programs that Write Programs – Is that Interesting?- by Prof Ron Morrison, …with many ideas from…

This seminar is suitable for CS3053-RPIC

A talk by Prof Ron Morrison …with many ideas from:

Dharini Balasubramaniam, Graham Kirby, Kath Mickan – University of St Andrews, Brian Warboys, R. Mark Greenwood, Ian Robertson, Bob Snowdon – University of Manchester and technologies developed by some of the above and Alfred Brown, Al Dearle, Richard Connor, Quintin Cutts, David Munro and Stuart Norcross – University of St Andrews.

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Event details

  • When: 25th February 2013 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Colloquium

School Seminar: HCI in Health Care by Jill Freyne -ICT Centre,CSIRO

 Abstract
Obesity, poor diet and lifestyle and the associated health care costs are set to cripple the governmental budgets of most Western countries over the coming decades. The facts of the equation are simple. Energy intake must exceed energy output for weight loss, and living within a healthy weight range has a host of benefits. Most communities understand and acknowledge the facts, but despite their understanding continue to live lifestyles that endanger them in the long term. In this talk Jill Freyne will walk us through two case studies for online and mobile dietary interventions and examine the power and weaknesses of the technology in the fight to engage and sustain individuals in lifestyle change.

Event details

  • When: 3rd May 2013 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Colloquium, Seminar

Confessions of a start-up founder

Prof Simon Dobson will be giving a lecture for CS3053 about his experience as founder and CEO of a start-up company spun-out of a university. This will focus on the business aspects — getting the company started, running it, growing, funding it, and eventually winding it down — rather than on the technology, and try to extract some lessons from what went right (and wrong).

Event details

  • When: 11th February 2013 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Maths Theatre C
  • Format: Lecture

A new Interaction Paradigm for Distributed User Interfaces by Prof. Dr. Harald Reiterer, University of Konstanz

This seminar is suitable for CS3053-RPIC

Abstract:

Distributed User Interfaces (DUIs) are typically used in ‘Interactive spaces’ which are physical environments or rooms for collaborative work that are augmented with ubiquitous computing technology. Their purpose is to enable a computer-supported collaboration between multiple users that is based on a seamless use of different devices for natural ‘post-WIMP’ interaction, e.g., multi-touch walls, interactive tabletops, tablet PCs or digital pen & paper. However, to this day, there are still no well-established guidelines or toolkits for designing and implementing such distributed user interfaces (DUIs). Therefore the talk will introduce the Zoomable Object-Oriented Information Landscape (ZOIL), a novel design & interaction paradigm and software framework for post-WIMP DUIs in interactive spaces. Continue reading

Event details

  • When: 11th March 2013 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Colloquium, Seminar

System Seminar: Understanding Ethical Concerns in Social Media Privacy Studies, by Luke Hutton, University of St Andrews

Abstract:

Understanding privacy in social network sites (SNSs) is an area of intense interest in computer science and many other fields. The ethical considerations of such research are numerous and complicated. Our position is that understanding how to address such considerations will improve measurement, and therefore our understanding, of networked social privacy.

In this talk we discuss some empirical work that we have conducted to replicate two existing studies in an attempt to understand SNS users’ privacy concerns about sharing data with researchers, rather than with other SNS users. We will introduce an architecture we are developing to support the execution of privacy-aware social network studies. Finally, we will discuss some of the outstanding challenges in this space, including the difficulty of establishing meaningful cross-study metrics, whether we can apply Nissenbaum’s model of contextual integrity to minimise ethical concerns, and the implications of our results for sharing social network data with other researchers.

Bio of the Speaker:

Luke Hutton is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews, supervised by Tristan Henderson. His research aims to improve understanding of people’s privacy-preserving behaviour through the lens of contextual integrity, with user studies leveraging social network sites, location-based services, and ubiquitous computing environments. Additionally, his research explores the methodological challenges associated with research of this nature, developing tools to support the conduct of privacy-aware social network experiments.

Event details

  • When: 12th February 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Interdependence and Predictability of Human Mobility and Social Interactions by Mirco Musolesi University of Birmingham

Abstract: The study of the interdependence of human movement and social ties of individuals is one of the most interesting research areas in computational social science. Previous studies have shown that human movement is predictable to a certain extent at different geographic scales. One of the open problems is how to improve the prediction exploiting additional available information. In particular, one of the key questions is how to characterise and exploit the correlation between movements of friends and acquaintances to increase the accuracy of the forecasting algorithms. Continue reading

Event details

  • When: 15th April 2013 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Colloquium, Seminar

Systems Seminar: Coupled Adaptive Complex Network, by Saray Shai, University of St Andrews

Abstract:

This talk presents the introduction and our early investigation on coupled adaptive complex networks. Generally an adaptive network is the network whose topology adapts and evolves with the dynamics of the network. At present, adaptive networks are ubiquitous across many disciplines, including technical distribution networks such as road networks and the internet; natural and biological networks; and social science networks. These networks are often interact with or depend upon other networks, resulting in coupled adaptive networks.

In this talk, we present our recent study of susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) epidemic dynamics on coupled adaptive networks, where susceptible nodes are able to avoid contact with infection by rewiring their intra-network connections. However, infected nodes can pass the disease through inter-network connections, which do not change with time: the dependencies between the coupled networks remain constant.

An analytical formalism is developed and validated using extensive numerical simulation. The experiment results show that the stability is increased with the increase in the number of inter-network links, in the sense that the range of parameters over which both endemic and healthy states coexist (both solution branches are stable) becomes smaller. Also we find a new stable solution branch that does not appear in the case of single adaptive network but only in the case of weakly coupled networks, in which the disease is endemic in one network but neither becomes endemic nor dies out in the other. Instead, it persists only at the nodes that are coupled to nodes in the other network through inter-network links.

Event details

  • When: 29th January 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Seminar

Towards reliable and responsible social network research by Tristan Henderson – University of St Andrews

This seminar is suitable for CS3053-RPIC

Abstract
Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook and Twitter are used by hundreds of millions of people daily. As such they represent an attractive source of data for research. Many researchers have crawled these SNSs to collect data for projects involving psychology, sociology, health, and of course computer science. But there are many risks to naively crawling an SNS, ranging from data protection and privacy concerns to the reliability of the collected data.

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Event details

  • When: 11th February 2013 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Colloquium, Seminar