Event

Seminar by Leo Liberti on “Symmetry in Mathematical Programming”, 19th Nov, 11am

Leo Liberti, the director of the Optimisation and Sustainable Development Chair at Ecole Polytechnique, will be giving a seminar on Monday 19th November, 2012, at 11am-12, in Jack Cole 1.33a.

Symmetry in Mathematical Programming

Abstract: When solving Mathematical Programming (MP) problems (be they linear or nonlinear, continuous or mixed-integer) using Branch-and-Bound (BB), the presence of symmetries of the solution set results in BB taking longer than strictly needed, due to the symmetries induced on the BB tree. I shall illustrate a class of “symmetry breaking” methods based on reformulating the symmetric MPs so that some of the symmetric optima become infeasible. I shall show how to automatically detect MP formulation symmetries by reducing MP to graphs, and how to automatically generate reformulated MPs with (hopefully) fewer symmetric optima. Although computational tests show that reformulations may not always succeed in making BB terminate faster, they can be applied very efficiently – so they can be considered an efficient “pre-solving step” to running BB.

Event details

  • When: 19th November 2012 11:00 - 12:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Graduation November 2012

The School of Computer Science will be holding a Graduation Reception in the Jack Cole Building on Friday 30th November starting at 12:00 for the Masters Class of 2011. Students are invited to attend after their graduation along with any guests attending the event. Current MSc Students are also invited to the reception, which will continue until 17:00, to meet with the graduates and discuss their experiences both during the course and since they have left.

Event details

  • When: 30th November 2012 09:30 - 15:30
  • Where: St Andrews

Computer Gaming Industry careers: Aardvark Swift presentation – Get in the Game

Tuesday 27 November, 1400-1500, 1.33a Jack Cole building (Computer Science)

Aardvark Swift, recruitment agents for the gaming industry, will be talking about how to break into the sector. Get advice from those in the know on the key skills you will need, the common pitfalls, and how to maximise your chances. Ideal for programming enthusiasts of all disciplines, and for anyone interested in a gaming career. http://www.aswift.com/index.jsp#holder1-start

AS will also be giving details of how to enter their nationwide programming competition Search for a Star! SFAS is designed to highlight and reward the UK’s most promising video games developers. The winner will be announced at the Eurogamer 2013, with last years winner securing a job at Sony Evolution . This years competition is being sponsored by Microsoft http://www.aswift.com/searchforastar/

Event details

  • When: 27th November 2012 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Talk

Four Geeks and an Entrepreneur

Al Dearle, Monty Widenius, Steve Linton, Ian Gent

Al Dearle, Monty Widenius, Steve Linton, Ian Gent (left to right), St Andrews, 15 October 2012

We were privileged today to hear three lectures from Monty Widenius, main author of the MySQL database system.   His main focus was on entrepreneurship and being an entrepreneur while giving away source code on an open source basis.

Three staff members from St Andrews are pictured with Monty before the first lecture, in St Salvator’s quad at the University of St Andrews.

Event details

  • When: 15th October 2012
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series

School Seminar – Mari Ostendorf

Professor Mari Ostendorf of the University of Washington is visiting
Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews as part of a SICSA Distinguishing
Fellowship.

Title: Rich Speech Transcription for Spoken Document Processing

Abstract:
As storage costs drop and bandwidth increases, there has been rapid growth of spoken information available via the web or in online archives — including radio and TV broadcasts, oral histories, legislative proceedings, call center recordings, etc. — raising problems of document retrieval, information extraction, summarization and translation for spoken language. While there is a long tradition of research in these technologies for text, new challenges arise when moving from written to spoken language. In this talk, we look at differences between speech and text, and how we can leverage the information in the speech signal beyond the words to provide a rich, automatically generated transcript that better serves language processing applications. In particular, we look at how prosodic cues can be used to recognize segmentation, emphasis and intent in spoken language, and how this information can impact tasks such as topic detection, information extraction, translation, and social group analysis.

Event details

  • When: 27th November 2012 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Format: Seminar

Distinguished Lecture Series: MySQL and Open Source Business, by Monty Widenius

Monty Widenius delivered the Semester 1 Distinguished Lecture Series on Monday 15th October 2012, from 10am to 3.30pm, in Upper College Hall.

Monty is CEO & CTO at Monty Program Ab, and is perhaps best known as founder of MySQL, the world’s most used open source.

Monty delivered three lectures on MySQL and Open Source Business.  He has kindly made the slides available – linked to from the titles.

The lectures were  introduced by the Dean of Science, Prof Al Dearle, and refreshments were provided at 11am.

These lectures were open to all.

The detailed programme is available as a pdf: Monty Widenius DLS Programme

Event details

  • When: 15th October 2012 10:00 - 15:30
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Seminar

Professor Aaron Quigley Inaugural lecture

Professor Aaron Quigley will be giving his Inaugural Lecture in School III on Wednesday 31st October at 5:15 p.m.

Billions of people are using interconnected computers and have come to rely on the computational power they afford us, to support their lives, or advance our global economy and society. However, how we interact with this computation is often limited to little “windows of interaction” with mobile and desktop devices which aren’t fully suited to their contexts of use. Consider the surgeon operating, the child learning to write or the pedestrian navigating a city and ask are the current devices and forms of human computer interaction as fluent as they might be? I contend there is a division between the physical world in which we live our lives and the digital space where the power of computation currently resides. Many day to day tasks or even forms of work are poorly supported by access to appropriate digital information. In this talk I will provide an overview of research I’ve been pursuing to bridge this digital-physical divide and my future research plans. This talk will be framed around three interrelated topics. Ubiquitous Computing, Novel Interfaces and Visualisation. Ubiquitous Computing is a model of computing in which computation is everywhere and computer functions are integrated into everything. Everyday objects are sites for sensing, input, processing along with user output. Novel Interfaces, which draw the user interface closer to the physical world, both in terms of input to the system and output from the system. Finally, the use of computer-supported interactive visual representations of data to amplify cognition with visualisation. In this talk I will demonstrate that advances in human computer interaction require insights and research from across the sciences and humanities if we are to bridge this digital-physical divide.

Event details

  • When: 31st October 2012 17:15 - 18:15
  • Where: Various
  • Format: Lecture

School Seminar – Andy Gordon

Reverend Bayes, meet Countess Lovelace: Probabilistic Programming for Machine Learning

Andrew D. Gordon, Microsoft Research and University of Edinburgh

Abstract: We propose a marriage of probabilistic functional programming with Bayesian reasoning. Infer.NET Fun turns the simple succinct syntax of F# into an executable modeling language – you can code up the conditional probability distributions of Bayes’ rule using F# array comprehensions with constraints. Write your model in F#. Run it directly to synthesize test datasets and to debug models. Or compile it with Infer.NET for efficient statistical inference. Hence, efficient algorithms for a range of regression, classification, and specialist learning tasks derive by probabilistic functional programming.

Bio: Andy Gordon is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Andy wrote his PhD on input/output in lazy functional programming, and is the proud inventor of Haskell’s “>>=” notation for monads. He’s worked on a range of topics in concurrency, verification, and security, never straying too far from his roots in functional programming. His current passion is deriving machine learning algorithms from F# programs.

Event details

  • When: 8th October 2012 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Format: Seminar

School Seminar – Barry Brown

Mobility in vivo

Barry Brown, Co-director Mobile Life, University of Stockholm

barbro.tumblr.com
The Mobile VINN Excellence Centre

Abstract
Despite the widespread use of mobile devices, details of mobile technology use ‘in the wild’ have proven difficult to collect. For this study we uses video data to gain new insight into the use of mobile computing devices. Screen-captures of smartphone use, combined with video recordings from wearable cameras, allow for the analysis of the detail of device use in a variety of activity and settings. We use this data to describe how mobile device use is threaded into other co-present activities, focusing on the use of maps and internet searches to support users on a day-trip. Close analysis of the video data reveals novel aspects of how gestures are used on touch screens, in that they form a resource for the ongoing coordination of joint action. We go on to describe how the local environment and information in the environment are combined to guide and support action. In conclusion, we argue for the mobility of mobile devices being as much about this interweaving of activity and device use, as it is about physical portability.

Barry Brown

Event details

  • When: 1st October 2012 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Format: Seminar