An overview of ALife in general, some of the research–including neuroscience, genetic algorithms, information theory, and animal cognition–leading to my incremental, evolved approach to AI, and the work I (and others) have done in this area.
Slides:
Venue: UCH (Upper College Hall)
The school is hosting a St Andrews Day Graduation reception on Wednesday 30th November from 14:00
Professor Simon Dobson, School of Computer Science, will deliver his Inaugural Lecture “The computer is the new microscope” in the Lecture Theatre, Medical and Biological Sciences Building, on Wednesday 7 December 2011 at 5.15 p.m. PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF VENUE.
The Princpal will take the Chair and the Dean of Science will give the vote of thanks.
The School will host a reception in the coffee area (near the foyer) of the Jack Cole Building.
Abstract: Modern biological research hinges on technologies that are able to generate very large and complex datasets. For example, recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies have led to global collections in the multi-petabyte range that are doubling every five months. These data require organising in a form that allows interpretation by a very large and diverse user community that are interested in everything from human health and disease, through crop and animal breeding to the understanding of ecosystems. In this talk I will first give an overview of core molecular biology concepts and some of the different types of data that are currently collected, I will then focus on work from my group in visualisation and analysis of sequence alignment data before turning to examples of prediction of properties and features from biological data.
Title: Multimodal mobile interaction – making the most of our users’ capabilities
Mobile user interfaces are commonly based on techniques developed for desktop computers in the 1970s, often including buttons, sliders, windows and progress bars. These can be hard to use on the move which then limits the way we use our devices and the applications on them. This talk will look at the possibility of moving away from these kinds of interactions to ones more suited to mobile devices and their dynamic contexts of use where users need to be able to look where they are going, carry shopping bags and hold on to children. Multimodal (gestural, audio and haptic) interactions provide us new ways to use our devices that can be eyes and hands free, and allow users to interact in a ‘head up’ way. These new interactions will facilitate new services, applications and devices that fit better into our daily lives and allow us to do a whole host of new things
I will discuss some of the work we are doing on input using gestures done with fingers, wrist and head, along with work on output using non-speech audio, 3D sound and tactile displays in applications such as for mobile devices such as text entry, camera phone user interfaces and navigation. I will also discuss some of the issues of social acceptability of these new interfaces; we have to be careful that the new ways we want people to use devices are socially appropriate and don’t make us feel embarrassed or awkward
Biography: Stephen is a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, UK. His main research interest is in Multimodal Human-Computer Interaction, sound and haptics and gestures. He has done a lot of research into Earcons, a particular form of non-speech sounds. He completed his degree in Computer Science at the University of Herfordshire in the UK. After a period in industry he did his PhD in the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the University of York in the UK with Dr Alistair Edwards. The title of his thesis is “Providing a structured method for integrating non-speech audio into human-computer interfaces”. That is where he developed his interests in earcons and non-speech sound. After finishing his PhD he worked as a research fellow for the European Union as part of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). From September, 1994 – March, 1995 he worked at VTT Information Technology in Helsinki, Finland. He then worked at SINTEF DELAB in Trondheim, Norway.
Systems software, such as an operating system or a network stack, underlies everything we do on a computer, whether that computer is a desktop machine, a server, a mobile phone, or any embedded device. It is therefore vital that such software operates correctly in all situations. In recent years, dependent types have emerged as a promising approach to ensuring program correctness using languages and verification tools such as Agda and Coq. However, these tools operate at a high level of abstraction and so it can be difficult to map these verified programs to efficient low level code, working with bit-level operations and interacting directly with system services.
In this talk I will describe Idris, a dependently typed programming language implemented with systems programming in mind. I will show how it may be used to implement programs which interact safely with the operating system, in particular how to give precise APIs for verifiable systems programming with external C libraries.
Bio: Edwin Brady is a SICSA Advanced Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews
(http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~eb)
Many ‘failures’ in software-intensive organisational systems result from human actions or inaction so, to reduce the possibility of such ‘failures’ and so improve system dependability, it is important to adopt a holistic view where system designers consider the environment in which a system will be used as well as the technical characteristics of the system itself.
In this talk, I will introduce the notion of responsibility modelling, which aims to represent the responsibilities of human and automated agents in a complex system, where the system may be created by integrating different systems from different agencies. The motivation for the work is that many ‘system failures’ are actually failures of agents in the system to fulfil their expected responsibilities and so responsibility modelling offers the opportunity to analyse how responsibilities are distributed and to identify responsibility vulnerabilities, before these lead to system failure.
Bio
Ian Sommerville has been Professor of Computer Science at St Andrews University since 2006. For more details see http://www.software-engin.com.
The University of St Andrews is hosting a 2-day workshop on Computational Logic in honour of Roy Dyckhoff, who has retired this year.
The workshop will be held in Parliament Hall at the University of St Andrews on November 18-19, 2011, and is very generously sponsored by the SICSA Modelling and Abstraction Theme. Topics include Proof Theory, Natural Deduction, Verification, Combinatory Logic and Semantics.
More details, including the programme can be found at: http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~lengrand/Events/Dyckhoff/index.php?page=programme
Attendance at the workshop is free to SICSA researchers, but we do ask you to register through the web site so that we can arrange catering.
Thirty five years ago computers made a dramatic debut in mathematics with the famous proof of the Four Color Theorem by Appel and Haken. Their role has been expanding recently, from computational devices to tools that can tackle deduction and proofs too complex for (most) human minds, such as the Kepler conjecture or the Classification of Finite Simple Groups.
These new “machine” proofs entail fundamental changes in the practice of mathematics: a shift from craftsmanship, where each argument is a tribute to the ingenuity of the mathematician that perfected it, to a form of engineering where proofs are created more systematically. In addition to formal definitions and theorems, mathematical theories also contain clever, context-sensitive notations, usage conventions, and proof methods. To mechanize advanced mathematical results it is essential to capture these more informal elements, replacing informal and flexible usage conventions with rigorous interfaces, and exercise apprenticeship with precise algorithms. This can be difficult, requiring an array of techniques closer to software engineering than formal logic, but it is essential to obtaining formal proofs of graduate-level mathematics, and can give new insight as well.
In this talk we will give several examples of such empirical formal mathematics that we have encountered in the process of mechanizing a large corpus of Combinatorics and Algebra required by the proofs of the Four Colour and Odd Order Theorem.
Bio:Georges Gonthier is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Dr. Gonthier has worked on the Esterel reactive programming language, techniques for the optimal computation of functional programs, the design and formal verification of a concurrent garbage collector, the join calculus model of concurrency, concurrency analysis of the Ariane 5 flight software, using full abstraction in the analysis of security properties, and a fully computer-checked proof of the famous Four Colour Theorem. He now heads the Mathematical Components project at the MSR Inria Joint Center, following up on the latter work with the development of a comprehensive library of formalized abstract algebra.
Georges Gonthier – Head of the Mathematical Components team Microsoft Research-INRIA joint centre http://www.msr-inria.inria.fr/
There will be bisquits from 3:45 downstairs
Sword Ciboodle will be visiting the University of St. Andrews on Tuesday 1st November between 1pm and 2pm. Come and join us in Jack Cole 1.33A to gain an insight into the Company and for information about graduate opportunities within the Research & Development and Professional Services teams. Opportunities exist for summer placements and full time roles following graduation. You will also be able to meet some of our most recent graduates to understand their experiences of working with the Company. Lunch will be provided.
Sword Ciboodle, with over 300 staff based in five offices around the world (Chicago, Sydney, Jakarta, Johannesburg and Glasgow), has its headquarters in Renfrewshire, near Glasgow in the India of Inchinnan building, the only commercially used Grade-A listed building in Scotland. Apart from the impressive surroundings, Sword Ciboodle employees also benefit from a competitive salary, excellent benefits and the opportunity to work with some of the best Software Engineers in the industry.
Further information can be found at www.sword-ciboodle.com.
Please register your interest with Jenna at Jenna.Currie@sword-ciboodle.com. Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions.
