PGR Seminar – Sharon Pisani & Mirza Hossain

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 3rd October 11:00-12:00 in JC 1.33A.

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Sharon and Mirza’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Sharon Pisani

Title: Building Sustainable Heritage Virtual Museums for Communities using Sociodata

Abstract: Virtual museums are moving beyond simple digitisation of artefacts to become dynamic platforms for community engagement and sustainable development. This talk introduces the VERA Platform, which combines a flexible Virtual Museum Infrastructure with a new layer of sustainability-oriented contextual data called sociodata. Sociodata links heritage objects to their cultural landscapes, local communities, and relevant Sustainable Development Goals, enabling richer discovery, analysis, and reuse. In this talk, I will outline the platform’s architecture and metadata model. The talk will highlight technical challenges such as interoperability with European data spaces, and supporting interactive storytelling at scale—issues highly relevant to digital infrastructure and data-driven research in the heritage sector.

Bio: Sharon is a PhD researcher examining the role of emergent digital technologies in preserving and engaging with cultural heritage while supporting sustainable development. Her research focuses on digitising cultural landscapes—both natural and cultural heritage—to assess various impacts on heritage and community identities. She explores how digital tools, including 3D scanning, 3D modeling, and mixed reality, can aid in recreating and safeguarding heritage at risk.

Mirza Hossain

Title: Fishing for monosemantic neurons in histopathology foundation models

Abstract: This early-stage study introduces Histoscope, an interactive system for examining sparse autoencoders (SAEs) that are trained on top of the UNI pathology encoder. Vision transformers for histopathology often exhibit superposition, where single neurons respond to multiple distinct tissue patterns, making interpretation difficult. Histoscope provides quantitative metrics and visualisations to assess whether neurons are monosemantic—associated with a single concept—or polysemantic—associated with multiple concepts. The work highlights methods for analysing internal representations of histopathology foundation models and contributes to efforts toward more transparent AI in pathology.

Bio: Mirza Hossain is a second-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on multimodal AI in medical imaging with an emphasis on mechanistic interpretability of large foundation models. He is supervised by Dr. David Harris-Birtill.

 

School Seminar – Peter Macgregor “Fast Dynamic Algorithms for Modern Clustering”

You are warmly invited to the second School Seminar:

Speaker: Peter Macgregor

Title: Fast Dynamic Algorithms for Modern Clustering

Abstract: Spectral clustering and DBSCAN both have long histories as theoretically grounded, general-purpose clustering algorithms. However, they face practical challenges when scaling to large datasets which have limited their adoption in practice.

In recent work, we have developed several improvements to these algorithms which improve their running time and space complexity while preserving their performance guarantees and generalising them to dynamically changing datasets. We make use of several algorithmic techniques including sparsification, dimensionality reduction, and random sampling. In this talk, I will present the recent progress and make the case that it’s time to challenge k-means’ dominance as the ‘default’ clustering algorithm.

Date & Time: Thursday 16/10/2025 11am-12pm

Location: JC 1.33A

Please do come along and join us! 🙂

School Seminar – Ian Gent, “How Not To Do It”

You are warmly invited to the next School Seminar:

Speaker: Ian Gent

Title: How Not To Do It

Abstract: Empirical methods are a vital part of a researcher’s toolbox. Which means that the more senior a researcher is, the more tools they have dropped on their feet!  I will share real mistakes which I or my colleagues made in analysing SAT and CP algorithms, and which we are prepared to own up to! Hopefully, you can learn from our mistakes instead of being doomed to repeat them.  As an old academic I’ll also take the chance to offer some advice on being an academic. Like most advice given by old people this advice is valued principally by the person giving it and may be worthless to anyone else.

Date & Time: Tuesday 30/09/2025 11am-12pm

Location: JC 1.33A

Please do come along and join us 🙂

 

Research Software Group Seminar: talk by Volodymyr Kharchenko

Timer clock 3pm

Tear off calendar Thursday 19th June

Pin JC 1.33A

Please join us for a talk at Research Software Group seminar by our guest Dr Volodymyr Kharchenko from the Department of Economic Cybernetics at the Faculty of Information Technologies, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (https://nubip.edu.ua/en).

Talk title: Current research and collaboration opportunities with the Faculty of Information Technologies, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (https://nubip.edu.ua/en)

Abstract: Dr Volodymyr Kharchenko is the Head of the Department of Economic Cybernetics at the Faculty of Information Technologies, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (https://nubip.edu.ua/en). The scientific and innovative work of the faculty focuses on the areas of design, creation and implementation of modern information technologies in society and environmental management, in particular, on the development of methods and information technologies of agromonitoring using satellite image processing systems, the creation of a hybrid cloud-based informational and educational environment of the university, development and introduction of electronic agricultural advisory system of Ukraine, research of methods of processing big data, development of applied information systems in various subject areas. He will present these directions and outline opportunities for potential collaborations.

PGR Seminar – Lina Hadji-Kyriacou + Victor Yuan

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 30th May at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Lina and Victor’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Lina Hadji-Kyriacou

Title: Context-PEFT: Efficient Cross-Domain Transfer Learning

Abstract: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques such as LoRA, BitFit and IA3 have demonstrated comparable performance to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models for specific downstream tasks, all while demanding significantly fewer trainable parameters and reduced GPU memory consumption. However, in the context of cross-domain transfer learning, the need for architectural modifications or full fine-tuning often becomes apparent. To address this we propose Context-PEFT, which learns different groups of adaptor parameters based on the current input domain. This approach enables LoRA-like weight injection without requiring additional architectural changes. Our method is evaluated on the COCO captioning task, where it outperforms full fine-tuning under similar data constraints while simultaneously offering a substantially more parameter-efficient and computationally economical solution.

Victor Yuan

Title: Methodologies for Creating Interactive and Lifelike Historical Characters Based on MetaHuman

Abstract: Virtual characters have long held promise as pedagogical tools in heritage education, particularly for creating immersive interactions with historical figures. Researchers have envisioned systems capable of emulating these figures, enabling users to engage in life-like, face-to-face dialogues over time. While technological constraints historically limited such applications, recent advancements in computational graphics and language models have now made them viable. This paper presents a framework for constructing interactive virtual character systems, outlining their core components through two critical dimensions: photorealism and interaction. The photorealism dimension leverages modern graphics tools to achieve high-fidelity visual representation, while the interaction dimension utilizes language models to enable socially believable and contextually responsive dialogue. We examine the necessity of each component and analyze available technological solutions with their respective trade-offs. Beyond the technical framework, we discuss potential future improvements and address ethical and practical concerns inherent to such systems. By synthesizing current technologies and their applicability, this work provides institutions with practical guidance for developing customized interactive systems that balance functionality with cost-efficiency.

PGR Seminar with Thomas Martin + Charis Hanna

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 23rd May at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Thomas and Charis’ talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Thomas Martin

Title: From Isolated to Continuous Automated Sign Language Recognition

Abstract: Sign languages are full-fledged visual natural languages combining manual and non-manual features. As the name suggests, Automated Sign Language Understanding (ASLU) aims to automate tasks involving sign language. A primary obstacle to ASLU is the creation of appropriate datasets. Indeed, most datasets focus on materials gathered from TV broadcasts covering limited topics, which fail to accurately reflect sign language in the wild. Moreover, annotating such datasets is a prohibitively costly process. With the end goal of Sign Language Translation (written/spoken language to sign language) in mind, ASLU research has transitioned from Isolated to Continuous Sign Language Recognition. However, sign language intricacies have made this transition non-trivial.

Charis Hanna

Title: Enhancing Deep Learning Approaches for the Automated Monitoring of Dense Seabird Colonies

Abstract: Cliff-nesting birds serve as valuable indicators of marine ecosystem health, yet dense populations and remote habitats present significant challenges for automated monitoring. With current state-of-the-art object detectors often failing under the conditions of extreme crowding and occlusion, this project aims to develop and refine deep learning techniques that enable the fine-grained, automated analysis of seabird colonies. Current work explores semi-supervised learning strategies that leverage domain-shifted knowledge to reduce the need for exhaustive annotation across complex image datasets. These methods not only reduce the laborious process of manual annotation but also demonstrate promising improvements in performance across the long-tailed species distribution. While ongoing efforts are directed at further optimising these models, future work will leverage additional spatial information with the aim of supporting richer insights into behavioural dynamics within these populations.

PGR Seminar with Tilcia Woodville-price + Thu Nguyen

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 16th May at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Tilcia and Thu’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Tilcia Woodville-price

Title: Definitely, Maybe? Communicating Uncertainty In Medicine

Abstract: An inherent aspect of healthcare and data science alike, uncertainty is present at every step of data utilisation, including its collection, analysis and dissemination. Accounting for and disclosing uncertainty is an ongoing challenge faced by many disciplines. In medicine, effective communication of uncertainty is essential for shared decision-making, with important considerations surrounding the user (patients, clinicians, policymakers), the underlying information, and the means of communicating it (data visualisation). Current medical research has focused on risk communication, often failing to evaluate more complex aspects of uncertainty. In contrast, the information visualisation community has more widely researched uncertainty visualisation in other domains, but insights remain limited regarding best practice. This interdisciplinary research aims to empirically assess different forms of visualising uncertainty in medicine, evaluate how user characteristics influence comprehension, and explore new forms of communicating it through data-driven storytelling.

Thu Nguyen

Title: Multimorbidity Dynamics in Scotland: Health inequality and Trajectories in chronic disease accrual and mortality across the lifespan

Abstract: Multimorbidity – the co-occurrence of two or more chronic diseases – is a growing global concern, and is associated with higher risk of mortality, worse quality of life and substantial financial burden. About one third of the world’s population has multimorbidity. Care for multimorbid patients in the UK accounts for more than 55% of NHS costs and 75% of primary care prescription costs. The focus of multimorbidity epidemiology so far has largely been on the static clustering of diseases through cross-sectional analyses, with less emphasis on the trajectories of disease onset and the sequence in which conditions develop. Understanding the order in which diseases occur and its impact on patient outcomes can help identify high-risk trajectories and aid healthcare resource planning by identifying target populations for preventive interventions, ultimately leading to earlier diagnosis and management. Using linked electronic health records (EHRs) on 858789 individuals (2005-2021), this study aims to employ multistate modelling to explore the dynamics of multimorbidity trajectories, measure chronic disease accrual, incorporating social factors to unveil the health inequality in Scotland.

Research Software Group Lunchtime Seminar – Friday 23rd May

There will be a Research Software Group Lunchtime Seminar on Friday May 23rd at 1pm, in room 1.33B.

Talk Title: “People First: Sustaining Research Software by Sustaining the People Who Build It”

Speakers are Software Sustainability Institute Fellows: Deborah Udoh (OLS) and Olexandr Konovalov (St Andrews)

– https://www.software.ac.uk/fellowship-programme/deborah-udoh

– https://www.software.ac.uk/fellowship-programme/olexandr-konovalov

Abstract

What does it mean to build sustainable research software—and sustainable research software communities?

Too often, sustainability is framed in terms of clean code, reproducibility, funding and long-term maintenance. But sustainability is also about people: who gets to stay, who gets to lead, and who burns out or leaves before their potential is fully realised.

This talk invites us to look beyond technical best practices and consider the human infrastructure that truly sustains research software: the developers, contributors, maintainers, and collaborators who often work in the margins of recognition. We’ll explore how issues like burnout, impostor syndrome, and lack of psychological safety threaten not just individual wellbeing, but the continuity and health of the software ecosystems we care about.

Using real-world examples from both academic and open-source contexts, we’ll share practices and small culture shifts that have helped sustain people in research software roles.

This session will include a short, interactive exercise where participants will reflect on their own sustainability needs, and collectively brainstorm people-first practices for healthier RSE communities.

PGR Seminar with Duong Phuc Tai Nguyen + Thomas Metcalfe

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 9th May at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Duong and Tom’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Duong Phuc Tai Nguyen

Title: Enhancing Dynamic Algorithm Configuration via Theory-guided Benchmarks.

Abstract: Algorithms play a vital role in numerous domains, ranging from machine learning to optimization and simulation. Developing an algorithm typically requires making multiple design choices and fine-tuning parameters, a process that can be both labor-intensive and complex. This project seeks to automate this process by employing machine learning techniques, particularly deep reinforcement learning (deep-RL). By leveraging theoretical insights from evolutionary computation, we establish new benchmarks to assess RL methods for dynamic algorithm configuration and propose enhancement techniques to increase their effectiveness

Thomas Metcalfe

Title: Listening to Rhythms: Exploring Human-Phenology Attunement through Research Products and Decentralised Computing

Abstract: Humanity and the planet are in an epoch of ecological breakdown. Modern technological cultures have severed human awareness from the living rhythms of more-than-human worlds. This research explores how decentralised, situated technologies might foster embodied attunement between humans and the phenological rhythms of place.

This seminar is a work-in-progress. 7 months into his PhD, Tom will present his journey and current thinking on the foundations and potential direction of his project. You can expect to hear how he’s trying to shift research paradigms; the profound change in the project’s onto-epistemological perspectives; and how he hopes to make a contribution to the design and HCI communities.