Event

Doors Open @ CS, 11th April (10am-4pm)

On 11th April, the School of Computer Science at St Andrews will host for our first ever Doors Open event. We will be thrilled to welcome any and all visitors from outwith the School, whether you are locally based, from elsewhere in the UK or from overseas.

As a rapidly growing school, we are looking to build relationships with new partners and are keen to find out how we can help you, your companies and/or organisations to solve problems and improve processes.

Our Doors Open day will have over 60 individual exhibits and activities. Our presenters will be our staff and students, with representation from 1st year undergrad through to PhD students, academic and technical members of staff.

Please register here if you would like to attend to enable us to order sufficient pizza!

 

Computer Science Offer Holder Days

The School of Computer Science will hold its Offer Holder days for September 2023 entry on Saturdays 18th and 25th March 2023. These events are open only to undergraduate applicants who have received an offer to study Computer Science at St Andrews. Along with your offer to study an undergraduate programme involving Computer Science, you will receive an email with details of how to sign up for one of the offer holder days.

Our Computer Science Offer Holder events allow you to see more of St Andrews and the School while also learning more about the great experience we offer. We have a full programme of exciting and stimulating events, including talks from lecturers and some of our current students, and the chance to try out our state-of-the-art teaching labs by participating in a coding activity. No prior CS or programming experience is required for the activity. We will provide you with lunch and refreshments during the day. Parents, guardians, carers or companions are welcome to attend the day with you. Please provide the necessary information when you register for the event.

At the end of the Offer Holder day, prospective students also have the option to attend a dinner with some of the other applicants, and current undergraduate and postgraduate students. This gives offer-holders the opportunity to ask any remaining questions in an informal setting.

The events will run from 10am until 8pm (including the evening meal), so we do recommend that you plan to spend the majority of your day in St Andrews.

 

Please email admissions.events@st-andrews.ac.uk with any queries.

Distinguished Lecture Series: Computer Science and the Environment -14 March 2023

Professor Gordon Blair

Prof. Gordon Blair is Head of Environmental Digital Strategy at UKCEH. He is also a Distinguished Professor of Distributed Systems at Lancaster University where he holds a part-time post (20%). He is also Co-Director of the Centre of Excellence in Environmental Data Science (CEEDS), a joint initiative between UKCEH and Lancaster University. His current research interests focus on the role of digital technology in supporting environmental science. This includes new forms of environmental monitoring and data acquisition, including the role of Internet of Things technology, new forms of computational infrastructure to support the storage and processing of such data, specifically using cloud computing, and new forms of analysing and making sense of this data using data science and AI. This all builds on a strong legacy of research in distributed systems, having been involved since the inception of the field in the early 1980s, including research in the area of middleware architectures that underpin complex distributed systems applications and services.

Abstract:

Computer Science innovation has revolutionised many areas of society including the way we work, play, shop and indeed study. Computer science also has enormous potential in environmental science, including supporting scientists in understanding the impacts of climate change and developing mitigation and adaptation policies and approaches. Examples include new forms of environmental monitoring and data acquisition, including the role of Internet of Things technology, new forms of computational infrastructure to support the storage and processing of such data, specifically using cloud computing, and new forms of analysing and making sense of this data using data science and AI. This series of talks will examine the role of computer science in addressing the massive challenges associated with a changing climate. The first talk will examine the opportunities in this area in some depth, also considering for balance the negative impacts of computing technology on the environment, highlighting the need for responsible innovation in this area. The second talk will zoom in on the nature of environmental data and the unique challenges in terms analysing and making sense of these unique data sets. The final talk will then look at one grand challenge in the environmental space – what does it mean to build digital twins of aspects of the environment.

Time: 12:00 – 17:00

Date: Tuesday 14th March

Place: Medical Booth Lecture Theatre 

  • 12:00 – Welcome
  • 12:15 – Lecture 1 with Q&A  
  • 13:15 – Uncatered lunch break
  • 14:30 – Reconvening remarks
  • 14:35 – Lecture 2 with Q&A
  • 15:30 – Catered coffee break
  • 16:00 – Lecture 3 with Q&A
  • 16:55 – Concluding remarks

WICS Coffee Break

WICS hosted another coffee break today in the School Coffee Area, It was great to see lots of interest!

 

WICS are also hosting a blog competition, sponsored by Google.  Your blog post submission has the chance to be featured on our website as well as shared on our social media pages.

There will be two winners, one decided by Google and a public vote by our members. Each winner will receive a prize from the Google store.

The prompt for the contest is anything related to WICS. This could be

  • Notes of gender bias in the world.
  • Exciting research in technology.
  • Personal experience in a male-dominated field.

The prompt for the competition is quite vague, so be as creative as you like. For more inspiration, visit the about us section of our website. There is an advisory word count of 500 words.

This competition is open to anyone. To submit your blog, fill out the information via our website under the blog submission tab.

Competition blog submissions close on Friday 17th February at 9.00 pm.

If you have any questions reach out to us on either our social media channel or our email: wics@st-andrews.ac.uk

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Kind regards,

Alice Lin (she/her)

Vice President

Women in Computer Science at St Andrews | standrewswomenincs.com

SICSA DVF Seminar – Dr André G. Pereira

We had our first School seminar of the semester today. The speaker was André G. Pereira visiting Scotland on a SICSA DVF Fellowship. André is working on AI Planning problems, an area that is closely related to the work of our own Constraint Programming research group.

Title: Understanding Neuro-Symbolic Planning

Abstract: In this seminar, we present the area of neuro-symbolic planning, introducing fundamental concepts and applications. We focus on presenting recent research on the problem of learning heuristic functions with machine learning techniques. We discuss the distinctions and particularities between the “model-based” and “model-free” approaches, and the different methods to address the problem. Then, we focus on explaining the behavior of “model-free” approaches. We discuss the generation of the training set, and present sampling algorithms and techniques to improve the quality of the training set. We also discuss how the distribution of samples over the state space of a task, together with the quality of its estimators, are directly related to the quality of the learned heuristic function. Finally, we empirically detail which factors have the greatest impact on the quality of the learned heuristic function.

Biography: Dr. André G. Pereira is a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. His research aims to develop and explain the behavior of intelligent systems for sequential decision-making problems. Dr. Pereira has authored several papers on top-tier venues such as IJCAI, AAAI, and ICAPS. These papers contribute towards explaining the behavior of heuristic search algorithms, how to use combinatorial optimization-based reasoning to solve planning tasks, and how to use machine learning techniques to produce heuristic functions. Dr. Pereira is a program committee member of IJCAI and AAAI. His doctoral dissertation was awarded second place in the national Doctoral Dissertation Contest on Computer Science (2017), and first place in the national Doctoral Dissertation Contest on Artificial Intelligence (2018). Dr. Pereira advised three awarded students on national events, including first place and finalist in the Scientific Initiation Work Contest (2018, 2022), and finalist in the Master Dissertation Contest on Artificial Intelligence (2020).

Workshop on Teaching and Assessing Technology Ethics, Tuesday 6 Dec

If you are currently teaching or interested in teaching anything to do with ethics and technology, then please consider attending a half-day workshop that Dharini Balasubramaniam and Tristan Henderson are holding in JC 1.33 on Tuesday 6 Dec.

The aim is to discuss challenges, share syllabi and best practices, and ideally to build a shared repository of teaching resources.

This event is kindly sponsored by the SICSA Education theme.

Teaching and Assessing Technology Ethics

November Graduation

The School of Computer Science will host a small graduation reception in the JC coffee area on Tuesday 29th November between 14:00-16:00.

Graduating students and their guests are invited to come along and celebrate with a glass of bubbly.

Computer Science degrees will be conferred in an afternoon ceremony in the Younger Hall. Family and friends who can’t make it on the day can watch a live broadcast of graduation.