Talk

PGR Seminar with Leonid Nosovitsky + Xinya Gong

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 11th April at 2PM in JC 1.33a

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

Leonid Nosovitsky

Title: Bridging Theory and Practice: Advancing Multiparty Session Types for Industry Use

Abstract: Multiparty Session Types (MPST) provide a typing discipline for communication protocols. They allow to statically check that a code implementation conforms to a specified protocol; they can also verify that a protocol satisfies many safety properties like liveness and deadlock freedom, which are crucial in concurrent communicating systems.  Despite huge improvements in MPST research, different extensions have limitations.  For example, one of extensions is crash-handling. This branch was motivated by lack of network reliability to make MPST framework more applicable and usable in industrial scenarios. The crash-semantics theory introduced by Barwell et al. does not involve any constraints relaxations, which makes it very intricate for adoption in practical scenarios.  Our project concentrates on addressing usability limitations to make MPST more integrable into industrial applications.

Xinya Gong

Title and Abstract TBC

Distinguished Lecture Series 2025

This years Distinguished Lecture series was delivered yesterday ( Tuesday 1st April) by Professor Arthur Zimek, University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Denmark.

In his talk on, ‘Data Mining and the “Curse of Dimensionality”’ he considered the challenges of the “curse” from the perspective of data mining. In Talk 1, he discussed the “curse” in more detail, identifying relevant aspects or problems. In Talk 2, he considered clustering facing these problems and discussed some strategies and example methods for subspace clustering. In Talk 3, he discussed outlier detection, considering strategies for improved efficiency, effectiveness, and subspace outlier detection.

FactSet Talk – Insights into Prompt Engineering 25th March

On Tuesday the 25th of March, FactSet will be visiting the School of Computer Science. They will be doing a talk on Insights into Prompt Engineering, before hosting a networking and recruitment session with pizza. This is taking place in JC1.33 A/B from 3:00pm to 5:00pm. This is a free event to attend for all.

They are recruiting for their paid software engineer externship, paid software engineer internship and graduate software engineer roles. The externship is from the 7th to 19th July in London. This is a two-week program with hands-on experience working with Software Engineering teams. The software engineering summer internship is a 12-week program in summer, with interns joining an existing team at FactSet in London. The graduate program begins in September in London.

Hope to see you all there!

Fabrizio Capobianco (The Liquid Factory) Speaker on Friday 28th March

Speaker: Fabrizio Capobianco (Partner, The Liquid Factory)

Date: Friday 28th March

Time: 3:00

Venue: Jack Cole 1.33A/B

The Liquid Factory (www.theliquidfactory.com).

At The Liquid Factory, they support the next generation of European entrepreneurs in successfully bridging the gap to Silicon Valley. They achieve this by investing in talent through a 4M EUR fund, which sponsors four Entrepreneurs in Residence each year who temporarily join them in the Italian Alps.

Fabrizio has given talks across Europe sharing his journey as a European entrepreneur who spent 23 years in Silicon Valley before returning to Europe to contribute what he had learned. His presentation also highlights why Silicon Valley remains relevant, though it’s no longer essential for an entire company to be based there. And of course ends with the reasons why he started the Liquid Factory and why it makes sense to apply. These talks typically spark engaging Q&A sessions.

Seminar, Nobuko Yoshida, Monday 3rd February

Prof. Nobuko Yoshida of Oxford University is visiting us next Monday (3 February).

Nobuko has kindly agreed to give a talk on her work during her visit. The talk will be at 1pm in JC1.33a.

Nobuko Yoshida, University of Oxford, UK
https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/nobuko.yoshida/

Title
Multiparty Session Types: Separation and Encodability Results

Abstract

Multiparty session types (MPST) are a type discipline for enforcing the structured, deadlock-free communication of concurrent and message-passing programs. Traditional MPST have a limited form of choice in which alternative communication possibilities are offered by a single participant and selected by another. Mixed choice multiparty session types (MCMP) extend the choice construct to include both selections and offers in the same choice. This talk first introduces the history and background of types for communications and multiparty session types, relating to the history of Computer Science in Oxford. This talk then presents a mixed choice synchronous multiparty session calculus and its typing system, which guarantees communication safety and deadlock-freedom. We then discuss the expressiveness of nine subcalculi of MCMP-calculus by examining their encodability (there exists a good encoding from one to another) and separation (there exists no good encoding from one calculus to another). The highlight is the binary (2-party) mixed sessions by Casal et al (2022) is strictly less expressive than the MCMP-calculus.

A joint work with Kirstin Peters appeared in LICS’24 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08104)

About the speaker. Nobuko Yoshida is Christopher Strachey Chair of Computer Science in University of Oxford. She is an EPSRC Established Career Fellow and an Honorary Fellow at Glasgow University. Last 10 years, her main research interests are theories and applications of protocols specifications and verifications. She introduced multiparty session types [ POPL’08, JACM ] which received Most Influential POPL Paper Award in 2018 (judged by its influence over the last decade). This work enlarged the community and widened the scope of applications of session types, e.g. runtime monitoring based on Scribble (co-developed with Red Hat) has been deployed to other projects such as cyberinfrastructure in the US Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI); and widened the scope of her research areas. She received the Test-of-time-award from PPDP’24 and the best paper awards from CC’20, COORDINATION’23 and DisCoTech’23. She received the third Suffrage Science Awards for Mathematics and Computing from MRC for her STEM activity. She is an editor of ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, ACM Formal Aspects of Computing, Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, Journal of Logical Algebraic Methods in Programming, and the chief editor of The Computer-aided Verification and Concurrency Column for EATCS Bulletin.

PGR Seminar with Zhongliang Guo

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

Below is a title and Abstract for Zhongliang’s talk– Please do come along if you are able.

Title: Adversarial Attack as a Defense: Preventing Unauthorized AI Generation in Computer Vision

Abstract: Adversarial attack is a technique that generate adversarial examples by adding imperceptible perturbations to clean images. These adversarial perturbations, though invisible to human eyes, can cause neural networks to produce incorrect outputs, making adversarial examples a significant security concern in deep learning. While previous research has primarily focused on designing powerful attacks to expose neural network vulnerabilities or using them as baselines for robustness evaluation, our work takes a novel perspective by leveraging adversarial examples to counter malicious uses of machine learning. In this seminar, I will present two of our recent works in this direction. First, I will introduce the Locally Adaptive Adversarial Color Attack (LAACA), which enables artists to protect their artwork from unauthorized neural style transfer by embedding imperceptible perturbations that significantly degrade the quality of style transfer results. Second, I will discuss our Posterior Collapse Attack (PCA), a grey-box attack method that disrupts unauthorized image editing based on Stable Diffusion by exploiting the common VAE structure in latent diffusion models. Our research demonstrates how adversarial examples, traditionally viewed as a security threat, can be repurposed as a proactive defense mechanism against the misuse of generative AI, contributing to the responsible development and deployment of these powerful technologies.

Distinguished Lecture series 2024

This years Distinguished Lecture series was delivered yesterday ( Tuesday 12th March) by Professor Neil Lawrence, University of Cambridge

In his talk on, ‘The Atomic Human Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI’ he gave an overview of where we are now with machine learning solutions, and what challenges we face both in the near and far future. These include the practical application of existing algorithms in the face of the need to explain decision-making, mechanisms for improving the quality and availability of data and dealing with large unstructured datasets.

Welcoming Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo for our DLS on Tuesday 9 November

As part of the schools Distinguished Lecture Series we look forward to welcoming Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo on Tuesday 9 November.

Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo  received her Ph.D. in Software Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 1999. After spending two years at CERN (the European Center for Nuclear Research) and 5 years in the UK as Lecturer, she became full professor at the University of Geneva in 2010. Since 2016, she is the Director of the Computer Science Center of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She has been nominated in 2018 among the 100 digital shapers in Switzerland. Her research interests relate to the engineering of decentralised software with self-organising and emergent behaviour. This involves studying natural systems, designing and developing artificial collective systems, and verifying reliability and trustworthiness of those systems. Giovanna co-founded the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organising Systems (SASO) and the ACM Transactions on Autonomous Adaptive Systems (TAAS), for which she served as EiC from 2005 to 2011.

This event will be held on Teams with further details to follow.

Modern practices of sharing computational research

As a part of the Love Data Week, Olexandr Konovalov will give a talk on Tuesday 11 February, 3pm, Physics Lecture Theatre C.

Abstract: Have you been frustrated by trying to use someone else’s code which is non-trivial to install? Have you tried to make supplementary code for your paper to be easily accessible for the reader? If so, you certainly know that this may require non-trivial efforts. I will demonstrate some tools that may help to create reproducible computational experiments, and will explain which skills will be needed to use these tools. The talk will demonstrate examples in Python and R runnable in Jupyter notebooks. You are welcome to bring your laptop to try these examples online. No prior knowledge of programming is required.

Links:

  • Templates for reproducible experiments in GAP, Python and R
  • Code4REF guidance on recording research software in Pure

References:

Event details

  • When: 11th February 2020 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Format: Talk

St Andrews Bioinformatics Workshop 10/06/19

Next Monday is the annual St Andrews Bioinformatics workshop in Seminar Room 1, School of Medicine. Some of the presentations are very relevant to Computer Science, and all should be interesting. More information below:

Agenda:

14:00  – 14:15: Valeria Montano: The PreNeolithic evolutionary history of human genetic resistance to Plasmodium falciparum

14:15 – 14:30: Chloe Hequet: Estimation of Polygenic Risk with Machine Learning

14:30 – 14:45: Roopam Gupta: Label-free optical hemogram of granulocytes enhanced by artificial neural networks

15:00 – 15:15: Damilola Oresegun: Nanopore: Research; then, now and the future

15:15 – 15:30: Xiao Zhang: Functional and population genomics of extremely rapid evolution in Hawaiian crickets

15:30 – 16:00: Networking with refreshments

16:00 – 17:00: Chris Ponting: The power of One: Single variants, single factors, single cells

You can register your interest in attending here.

Event details

  • When: 10th June 2019 14:00 - 17:00
  • Format: Lecture, Talk, Workshop