Seminar

SRG Seminar: New Network Functionality using ILNPv6 and DNS by Khawar Shehzad

This research deals with the introduction of a new network functionality based on Identifier-Locator Network Protocol version 6 (ILNPv6), and Domain Name System (DNS). The chosen area of concern is security and specifically mitigation of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). The functionality proposed and tested deals with the issues of vulnerability testing, probing, and scanning which directly lead to a successful DDoS attack. The solutions presented can be used as a reactive measure to these security issues. The DDoS is chosen because in recent years DDoS have become the most common and hard to defend attacks. These attacks are on the availability of system/site. There are multiple solutions in the literature but no one solution is based on ILNPv6, and are complex in nature. Similarly, the solutions in literature either require modification in the providers’ networks or they are complex if they are only site-based solutions. Most of these solutions are based on IPv6 protocol and they do not use the concept of naming, as proposed by ILNPv6.

The prime objectives of this research are:

  • to defend against DDoS attacks with the use of naming and DNS
  • to increase the attacker’s effort, reduce vulnerability testing, and random probing by attackers
  • to practically demonstrate the effectiveness of the ILNPv6-based solution for security

Event details

  • When: 18th May 2017 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

Translational Research into Common Psychiatric Disorders, Professor Douglas Steele, Professor of Neuroimaging / Consultant Psychiatrist, University of Dundee

Translational Neuroimaging Based Psychiatric Research

Computational methods are having a considerable influence on contemporary neuroscience research: in data collection (non-invasive functional brain imaging), data analysis and computational modelling of healthy and abnormal brain and behaviour. The presentation is in two parts. Part 1 is an overview of the current main computational-neuroscience areas in research. Part 2 focuses on some recent high impact research into potential empirical and mechanistic biomarkers for psychiatric disorders.

Event details

  • When: 24th April 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Colloquium, Seminar, Talk

SRG Seminar: “Evaluating Data Linkage: Creation and use of synthetic data for comprehensive linkage evaluation” by Tom Dalton and “Container orchestration” by Uchechukwu Awada

The abstract of Tom’s talk:

“Data linkage approaches are often evaluated with small or few data sets. If a linkage approach is to be used widely, quantifying its performance with varying data sets would be beneficial. In addition, given a data set needs to be linked, the true links are by definition unknown. The success of a linkage approach is thus difficult to comprehensively evaluate.

This talk focuses on the use of many synthetic data sets for the evaluation of linkage quality achieved by automatic linkage algorithms in the domain of population reconstruction. It presents an evaluation approach which considers linkage quality when characteristics of the population are varied. We envisage a sequence of experiments where a set of populations are generated to consider how linkage quality varies across different populations: with the same characteristics, with differing characteristics, and with differing types and levels of corruption. The performance of an approach at scale is also considered.

The approach to generate synthetic populations with varying characteristics on demand will also be addressed. The use of synthetic populations has the advantage that all the true links are known, thus allowing evaluation as if with real-world ‘gold-standard’ linked data sets.

Given the large number of data sets evaluated against we also give consideration as to how to present these findings. The ability to assess variations in linkage quality across many data sets will assist in the development of new linkage approaches and identifying areas where existing linkage approaches may be more widely applied.”

The abstract of Awada’s talk:

“Over the years, there has been rapid development in the area of software development. A recent innovation in software or application deployment and execution is the use of Containers. Containers provide a lightweight, isolated and well-defined execution environment. Application container like Docker, wrap up a piece of software in a complete file-system that contain everything it needs to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, etc. To support and simplify large-scale deployment, cloud computing providers (i.e., AWS, Google, Microsoft, etc) have recently introduced Container Service Platforms (CSPs), which support automated and flexible orchestration of containerised applications on container-instances (virtual machines).

Existing CSP frameworks do not offer any form of intelligent resource scheduling: applications are usually scheduled individually, rather than taking a holistic view of all registered applications and available resources in the cloud. This can result in increased execution times for applications, and resource wastage through under utilised container-instances; but also a reduction in the number of applications that can be deployed, given the available resources. In addition, current CSP frameworks do not currently support: the deployment and scaling of containers across multiple regions at the same time; merging containers into a multi-container unit in order to achieve higher cluster utilisation and reduced execution times.

Our research aims to extend the existing system by adding a cloud-based Container Management Service (CMS) framework that offers increased deployment density, scalability and resource efficiency. CMS provides additional functionalities for orchestrating containerised applications by joint optimisation of sets of containerised applications and resource pool in multiple (geographical distributed) cloud regions. We evaluate CMS on a cloud-based CSPs i.e., Amazon EC2 Container Management Service (ECS) and conducted extensive experiments using sets of CPU and Memory intensive containerised applications against the custom deployment strategy of Amazon ECS. The results show that CMS achieves up to 25% higher cluster utilisation and up to 70% reduction in execution times.”

Event details

  • When: 20th April 2017 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

SACHI Seminar: Andrés Lucero – Co-Designed, Collocated & Playful Mobile Interactions

Title: Co-Designed, Collocated & Playful Mobile Interactions

Abstract: Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets were originally conceived and have traditionally been utilized for individual use. Research on mobile collocated interactions has explored situations in which collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their mobile devices, thus going from personal/individual toward shared/multiuser experiences and interactions. The Social and Spatial Interactions (SSI) platform extends the current individual use of these devices to support shared collocated interactions with mobile phones. The platform supports shared collocated interactions, using the mobile phone as a physical interface and a sensor network built in the phone to track the position of the phones on a flat surface. The question the platform addresses is if people are willing to share their devices and engage in collaborative interactions. In this talk I will discuss the different methods used to create playful and engaging interactions in the context of the SSI project.

Bio: Andrés Lucero is Associate Professor of Interaction Design at Aalto University. His work focuses on the design and evaluation of novel interaction techniques for mobile devices and other interactive surfaces. He received his MA degree in Visual Communication Design from Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana (1999), PDEng in User-System Interaction from Eindhoven University of Technology (2004), and PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Eindhoven University of Technology (2009). His research interests include human-computer interaction, design, and play.

Event details

  • When: 11th April 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Seeing the Wood for the Trees – Essential Structure in Model-based Search by Prof. John McCall

Problem structure, or linkage, refers to the interaction between variables in a black-box fitness function. Discovering structure is a feature of a range of search algorithms that use structural models at each iteration to determine the trajectory of the search. Examples include Information Geometry Optimisation (IGO), Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES), Bayesian Evolutionary Learning (BEL) and Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDA).

In particular, EDAs use probabilistic graphical models to represent structure learned from evaluated solutions. Various EDA approaches using trees, directed acyclic graphs and undirected graphs have been developed and evaluated on a range of benchmarks with a variety of representations.
Continue reading

Event details

  • When: 4th April 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

SRG Seminar: nMANET, the Name-based Data Network (NDN) for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) by Percy Perez Aruni

The aim of this talk is to introduce the nMANET, the Name-based Data Network (NDN) for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) approach. nMANET is an alternative perspective on utilising the characteristics of NDN to solve the limitations of MANETs, such as mobility and energy consumption. NDN, which is an instance of Information Centric Networking (ICN), provides an alternative architecture for the future Internet. In contrast with traditional TCP/IP networks, NDN enables content addressing instead of host based communication. NDN secures the content instead of securing the communication channel between hosts, therefore the content can be obtained from the intermediate caches or final producers. Although NDN has proven to be an effective design in wired networks, it does not perfectly address challenges arising in MANETs. This shortcoming is due to the high mobilty of mobile devices and their inherent resource constraints, such as remaining energy in batteries.

The implementation of nMANET, the Java based NDN Forwarder Daemon (JNFD), aims to fill this gap and provide a Mobile Name-based Ad-hoc Network prototype compatible with NDN implementations. JNFD was designed for Android mobile devices and offers a set of energy efficient forwarding strategies to distribute content in a dynamic topology where consumers, producers and forwarders have high mobility and may join or leave the network at unpredictable times. nMANET evalues JNFD through benchmarking to estimate efficiency, which is defined as high rates of reliability, throughput and responsiveness with a low energy consumption.

Event details

  • When: 6th April 2017 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

SRG Seminar: Managing Shared Mutable Data in a Distributed Environment (Simone Conte)

Title: Managing Shared Mutable Data in a Distributed Environment

Abstract: Managing data is central to our digital lives. The average user owns multiple devices and uses a large variety of applications, services and tools. In an ideal world storage is infinite, data is easy to share and version, and available irrespective of where it is stored, and users can protect and exert control over the data arbitrarily.

In the real world, however, achieving such properties is very hard. File systems provide abstractions that do not satisfy all the needs of our daily lives anymore. Many applications now abstract data management to users but do so within their own silos. Cloud services provide each their own storage abstraction adding more fragmentation to the overall system.

The work presented in this talk is about engineering a system that usefully approximates to the ideal world. We present the Sea Of Stuff, a model where users can operate over distributed storage as if using their local storage, they can organise and version data in a distributed manner, and automatically exert policies about how to store content.

Event details

  • When: 23rd March 2017 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

SRG Seminar: Cloud scheduling algorithms by Long Thai

“Thanks to cloud computing, accessing to a virtualised computing cluster has become not only easy but also feasible to organisations, especially small and medium-sized ones. First of all, it does not require an upfront investment in building data centres and a constant expense for managing them. Instead, users can pay only for the amount of resources that they actually use. Secondly, cloud providers offer a resource provisioning mechanism which allows users to add or remove resources from their cluster easily and quickly in order to accommodate the workload which changes dynamically in real-time. The flexibility of users’ computing clusters are further increased as they are able to select one or a combination of different virtual machine types, each of which has different hardware specification.

Nevertheless, the users of cloud computing have to face the challenges that they have never encountered before. The monetary cost changes dynamically based on the amount of resources used by the clients. Which means it is no longer cost-effective to adopt a greedy approaches which acquires as much resource as possible. Instead, it requires a careful consideration before making any decision regarding acquiring resources. Moreover, the users of cloud computing have the face that paradox of choice resulted from the high number of options regarding hardware specification offered by cloud providers. As a result, finding a suitable machine type for an application can be difficult. It is even more challenging when a user owns many applications which of which performs different. Finally, addressing all the above challenges while ensuring that a user receives a desired performance further increase the difficulty of effectively using cloud computing resources.

In this research, we investigate and propose the approach that aims to solve the challenge of optimising the usage of cloud computing resource by constructing the heterogeneous cloud cluster which dynamically changes based on the workload. Our proposed approach consists two processes. The first one, named execution scheduling, aims to determine the amount of virtual machines and the allocate of workload on each machine in order to achieve the desired performance with the minimum cost. The second process, named execution management, monitors the execution during runtime, detects and handles unexpected events. The proposed research has been thoroughly evaluated by both simulated and real world experiments. The results have showed that our approach is able to not only achieve the desired performance while minimising the monetary cost but also reduce, or even completely prevent, negative results caused by unexpected events at runtime.”

Event details

  • When: 9th March 2017 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

SACHI Seminar: Dr Hagen Lehmann – Social interaction characteristics for socially acceptable robots

Title: Social interaction characteristics for socially acceptable robots

Abstract: The last decade has seen fast advances in Social Robotic Technology. Social Robots start to be successfully used as robot companions and as therapeutic aids. In both of these cases the robots need to be able to interact intuitively and comfortably with their human users in close physical proximity. In order to achieve a seamless interaction and communication these robots need to coordinate different aspects of their behaviors with their human interlocutors. This behavior coordination of non-verbal and verbal interaction cues requires that the robots can interpret the social behavior of the other and react accordingly. In this talk different ways to (socially) coordinate human and robot behavior will be discussed and illustrated with examples from recent Human-Robot Interaction research.

Biography: Dr. Lehmann is a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher in the iCub Facility at the Italian Institute of Technology, where he develops the SICSAR project, dedicated to generate and test social interaction behaviors for the iCub robot. Dr. Lehmann received his Diploma in Psychology from the Technical University Dresden, his MA degree in Psychology from the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bath. In these years he has worked, from different interdisciplinary perspectives, on Evolution and Social Cognition, examining in particular possible reasons for the evolution of social structures in primates, the role of social dominance in this process, and social gaze behavior and its role in human social evolution. His current work is devoted to the application of this knowledge to the fields of Human-Robot Interaction and Social Robotics, through experimental research and with a particular focus on Robot Assisted Therapy and robotic home companions. Before his work at the IIT, he was part of the Adaptive Systems Research Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire, where he was involved in different European projects, e.g. iTALK, and ACCOMPANY.

Event details

  • When: 3rd April 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Data and the User Experience in Retail

The Hut Group develop and manage a proprietary eCommerce platform that handled over half a billion pounds of revenue last year. UX within the company is responsible for optimising user flows through the website, and working with Design departments to deliver user delight. With over 30 distinct site brands internally, and several external clients, the team attempt to strike a balance between optimising sites for revenue and user delight. This talk is about the challenges of UX within a wider business organisation, and the role that Computer Science graduates can play in a multidisciplinary UX team.

Bio:
Elliott joined The Hut Group in June, starting in the Research and Development department. He worked on developing a dashboard for use inside the business, and developed a series of prototypes to show users Social Media content on-site. He now heads the User Experience (UX) department. Prior to joining THG, Elliott worked at Skyscanner as a front-end developer whilst graduating from St Andrews in Computer Science with several modules in HCI.

Event details

  • When: 6th March 2017 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Honey 110 - John Honey Teaching Lab
  • Format: Seminar