Workshop

Curious Workshop Success

On Saturday 13th September, the Royal Society of Edinburgh hosted a workshop titled: “Your Data, Your Story” as part of their Curious festival of knowledge. The event was led by a group of experts in data visualisation and data ethics, including three of our own, Dr Areti Manataki, Dr Tristan Henderson and Tilcia Woodville-Price.

The interactive workshop was designed for the general public, in particular for non-experts that are curious about data visualisation and data ethics. Participants were prompted to reflect on their own examples of personal data and think about the ethics behind the collection of personal data. This was followed by a brief introduction into data visualisation and physical representations of data (also called data physicalisations). Lastly came a hands-on activity which featured the use of everyday objects, such as string, pasta and Lego, to create physical representations of our data.

It was fascinating to speak with participants and learn what aspects of their personal data were important to them. Participants physicalized data ranging from their social media usage to the quality of interactions with their children, to the data about emails received versus responded and everything in between.

What about you? What kind of data is meaningful to you? Have you thought about how visualising data may help your daily activities or give you an opportunity for reflection?

Workshop team:

Dr Areti Manataki, Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews

Dr Uta Hinrichs, Reader in Data Visualisation, University of Edinburgh

Dr Tristan Henderson, Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews

Dushani Perera, Research Associate, University of Edinburgh

Tilcia Woodville-Price, Doctoral Candidate, University of St Andrews

St Andrews Computer Science makes big splash at Digital Heritage 2025

Sharon Pisani, Maria Andrei, Junyu Zhang and Alan Miller travelled to Siene for Digital Heritage 2025. Four paper presentations, project workshops and much networking later we reflect on a successful conference.

We are proud to announce that Sharon Pisani from Open Virtual Worlds has received the Best Paper Award for her wonderful work “Introducing Sociodata in Virtual Museums: A Holistic Approach for Sustainable Development in Cultural Landscapes”, at the leading international conference of Digital Heritage Congress 2025! The conference was inspiringly hosted in the beautiful medieval city of Siena. Congratulations to Sharon on her well-deserved achievement!

The papers presented included:

Remaking Lost Communities in Virtual Cultural Landscapes
Junyu Zhang, Miriam Sturdee, Perin Westerhof Nyman, Iain Oliver, Jacquie Aitken , Alan Miller

Designing a Virtual Museum Ecosystem for the Cloud
Alan Miller , Catherine. Cassidy Sharon. Pisani , Maria. Andrei  Junyu. Zhang , Sarah. Kennedy , Iain. Oliver , Jacquie. Aitken, Raymond . Williams,, and Vanessa. Martin,

Introducing Sociodata in Virtual Museums: A Holistic Approach for Sustainable Development in Cultural Landscapes
Sharon Pisani , Alan Miller , Catherine Cassidy , Loraine Clarke , Iain Oliver , and Gonçalo Gomes

Bridging Psychological Distance from Climate Change through Experiential Learning with Heritage Organisations
Maria Andrei, Sonja Heinrich, Jason Jacques, Iain Oliver, Sharon Pisani, Alan Miller, Richard Bates

We also participated in a workshop lead by HERITALISE Horizon Europe project developing tools for the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage.

Thank you to the Timespan Museum and West Highland Museum for their support and participation as well as the Schools of Earth and Environmental Sciences, History and Biology for contributions.

Thanks also to the School of Computer Science, and  Innovate UK for funding the presentations and to the HERITALISE project https://heritalise-eccch.eu/ and the CULTURALTY project https://culturality.museum/, for supporting  work reported in two of the papers.

Royal Society of Edinburgh Curious Festival Workshop

RSE are running a workshop this Saturday as part of their festival of knowledge. Tickets are free, but booking is essential https://rse.org.uk/event/your-data-your-story/

Tear off calendar Saturday 13th September 2025

Timer clock 16:30 – 18:00

Pin The Royal Society of Edinburgh, 22-26 George Street, Edinburgh, EH2 2PQ

Connect through curiosity and join a celebration of ideas, conversation, and discovery. From science to society, arts to innovation, no two events are the same – and everyone’s welcome to take part. Whether you’re a first-timer or a lifelong learner, meet brilliant thinkers, and explore the topics shaping Scotland today.

Speakers will be:

Dr Areti Manataki, Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews

Dr Uta Hinrichs, Reader in Data Visualisation, University of Edinburgh

Dr Tristan Henderson, Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews

 

Permutation Patterns 2025

The University is hosting the 23rd International Conference on Permutation Patterns https://sites.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/pp25/

It is a series of annual conferences on permutation patterns that have been held annually since 2003.

Last time the conference was held in St Andrews was in 2007.

This year the conference is organised by Ruth Hoffmann (CS, St Andrews) and Christian Bean (Maths, Keele).

The conference features research on permutation patterns and their applications.

Permutation patterns is an interdisciplinary area with roots in both theoretical computer science and combinatorics.

There are applications to other areas of mathematics and computer science as well as to biology.

Research in permutation patterns ask whether a sequence consisting of unique elements (a permutation) avoids a smaller sequence of unique elements. This in particular is of interest when looking at sets or classes of permutations that avoid a set of permutations in different ways.

In ‘festive’ we can find the pattern ‘eve’ but not ‘see’ because the letters for ‘see’ are not in the right order.

Another analogy is finding constellations in the night-sky. We are looking for the right dots in the right places amongst many other dots.

This year the conference also has a pre-conference workshop which is held at the School of Computer Science. The workshop provides an opportunity for the community’s large cohort of PhD students, and early career researchers the chance to share their work and talk to other members of the community.

Participants shared an open question or avenue of their research during the workshop that they would be willing to work on with the other participants during the brainstorming sessions.

GAP Days Summer 2024 @ St Andrews

The School of Computer Science hosted this years Summer GAP Days between 26th August and 30th August.

GAP Days are workshops where developers and users with programming experience are invited to influence the future development of [GAP] by initiating and contributing to discussions and coding sprints.

These GAP Days have been special as we celebrated 10 years of the [Digraphs] package as well as 10 years of [GAP Days] (to the week!).

We had a great selection of speakers and attendees from varied backgrounds, which cumulated in the release of the re-vamped GAP webpage, and over 30 new versions of packages!

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

Software Carpentry Workshop

Registration is open for the next Software Carpentry workshop in St Andrews on September 23-24 in the Parliament Hall. We will teach UNIX shell, version control with Git and programming with Python. Please see the workshop page for further details and the link to registration via PDMS.

Event details

  • When: 23rd September 2019 - 24th September 2019
  • Where: Parliament Hall
  • Format: Workshop

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

Workshop on Using Video in CS Education

The Higher Education Research Group is happy to announce the workshop on using video on Computer Science education on Aug 7th 2018.

Goals

Participants of this full-day workshop will look at the role of video in education in general, and specifically:

* Discussing opportunities and challenges that are specific for use of video in teaching and learning

* Connecting practitioners to share contextual experiences in using video in education

* Discussing curriculum design implications to include the use of technology

* Generating a collection of good practice “tips” and lessons learned for the benefit of those willing to start using video in learning, assessment and feedback, and seek to disseminate them afterwards in a practitioners’ focused publication, e.g. http://collections.plos.org/ten-simple-rules

* Reconciling practice-based with theoretical approaches to construct a vision of the current state-of-the-art learning technologies to then identifying future challenges.

Format

We are very happy to announce that the Director of Computational Foundry at Swansea University, Alan Dix, will give the keynote. He has worked in human–computer interaction research since the mid 1980s, is the author of one of the major international textbooks on Human-Computer Interaction and author of approximately 500 research publications covering topics from formal methods to creativity. In 2013 he produced an HCI MOOC that is now hosted at InteractionDesign.org and the materials reused for flip class teaching. In the same year he walked 1000 miles round the coast of Wales; the outcomes of which have included a case study of the educational use of the data gathered during the walk in the Open Knowledge Foundation book on “Open Data as Open Educational Resources”. The talk will include the use of fine-grained learning analytics of video and related educational resources.

In addition to the invited talk, the workshop will consist of a set of presentations followed by a world-café activity, producing practical tips in using video in education with a focus on assessment and feedback.

Background

Although video has historically played an important part on teaching and learning, only recently video-making and editing technologies have become accessible in an unprecedented way, allowing students to become proficient video “prosumers” (producers and consumers). Further, there are numerous educational gains to be had through these technologies. This interactive workshop explores how can video be used in practice to leverage skills and foster creativity whilst facilitating knowledge acquisition.

Target Audience

The workshop will involve 24 participants, who have experience or an interest in using video in education. While the central topic is video for assessment, we hope to also appeal to practitioners using video in a wider sense (e.g. in lecture capture, MOOCs, video feedback).

In order to register, contact Adriana at agw5@st-andrews.ac.uk, or visit the Eventbrite page:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/workshop-on-using-video-in-computer-science-education-tickets-48131928895

Event details

  • When: 7th August 2018 10:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Gateway Bldg
  • Format: Workshop

SICSA Workshop on Learning Analytics in Education

The Higher Education Research Group is happy to announce the SICSA-sponsored workshop on learning analytics on Aug 6th 2018.

Goals

The purpose of this SICSA-sponsored workshop is to encourage an evidence-based approach to teaching by leveraging quantitative and qualitative data available to CS schools. Most importantly, we plan to organise a multi-institution study on using machine learning and AI-based techniques on existing data to improve learning outcomes across multiple universities. The workshop will serve to formulate the goals of such a study and forge the necessary collaborations to make this happen.

Format

We are very happy to announce that the chief regulatory adviser at Jisc Technologies Andrew Cormack will give an invited talk about the legal and ethical framework for learning analytics. In addition to the invited talk, the workshop will consist of a set of breakout sessions and a final discussion dedicated to preparing a follow-up study. The breakout sessions will involve discussions about existing quantitative and qualitative data available to educators, how these data influence teaching, what (statistical and other) data procesisng is useful for driving decisions, and which algorithmic approaches could be applied across institutions.

Background

Evidence-based teaching is of particular importance in fast-moving fields like Computer Science, and is therefore of interest to many higher education institutions. We have more data on students and courses than ever before including grades, entry requirements, qualitative and quantitative feedback, and career paths after leaving the university, and as computer scientists we are well equipped to process such data. It is important to measure the positive and negative impact of changes to the delivery (e.g. lecture capture, different lecturers) and content (slides, supporting material, organisation) in order to maintain and hopefully improve learning outcomes over time.

However, measuring how teaching approaches affect learning outcomes can be challenging because of issues such as data protection, small numbers of students, changes in the curriculum, or changes in admission procedures. Measuring differences between institutions is even harder because of differences in course structure, class sizes and marking scales. We believe that computer science techniques such as data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence will become increasingly important in this field, and would like to set up an ambitious study across several universities based on the findings of this workshop. Such a study is only possible if coordinated well across institutions and this workshop aims to provide the basis for such collaboration.

Target Audience

The workshop will involve 24 academics, mainly from SICSA-affiliated institutions, aiming to foster an exchange of ideas and best practice. While the central topic is CS education, we hope to also appeal to CS academics engaged in data ethics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (e.g. for processing data in natural text form) because the topic provides an important application of CS, and has great potential for impact.

To register, contact Kasim at kt54@st-andrews.ac.uk, or go to the Eventbrite page:

http://learning-analytics-workshop.eventbrite.com/

Event details

  • When: 6th August 2018 09:30 - 15:30
  • Where: Gateway Bldg
  • Format: Workshop