Event

March 10th, seminar by Nick Taylor: Sustaining Civic Engagement in Communities

Speaker: Nick Taylor, University of Dundee
Date/Time: 2-3pm March 10, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews

Abstract:
Engagement with local issues is typically very low, despite digital technologies opening up more channels for citizens to access information and get involved than ever before. This talk will present research around the use of simple physical interfaces in public spaces to lower barriers to participation and engage a wider audience in local issues. It will also explore the potential for moving beyond top-down interventions to support sustainable grassroots innovation, in which citizens can develop their own solutions to local issues.

Bio:
Nick Taylor is a Lecturer and Dundee Fellow in the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee. His research interests involve the use of novel technologies in social contexts, particularly in communities and public spaces. This has involved the exploration of technologies to support civic engagement in local democracy, public displays supporting community awareness and heritage, as well as methods of engaging communities in design.

This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

Event details

  • When: 10th March 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

School Seminars: Building the News Search Engine – Bloomberg

Building the news search engine, by Ramkumar Aiyengar, Bloomberg
Abstract:
This talk provides an insight into the challenges involved in providing near real-time news search to Bloomberg customers. Our News team is in the process of migrating to using Solr/Lucene as its search and alerting backend. This talk starts with a picture of what’s involved in building such a backend, then delves into what makes up a search engine, and then discusses the challenges of scaling up for low-latency and high-load.
Bio:
Ramkumar leads the News Search backend team at the Bloomberg R&D office in London. He joined Bloomberg from his university in India and has been with the News R&D team for 7 years now. For the last couple of years, his team has focussed on rewriting almost the entire search/alert backend, used by almost every Bloomberg user to get near-real time access to news with sub-second latencies. A geek at heart, he considers himself a Linux evangelist, an open source enthusiast, and one of those weird creatures who believes that Emacs is an operating system and had once got his music player and playlists to be controlled through a library written in Lisp.

Event details

  • When: 3rd March 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series, School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

What’s happening to computer hardware, and what does it mean for systems software?

Mothy RoscoeThe first set of Computer Science Distinguished Lectures in 2015 will
be given by Prof Mothy Roscoe of ETH Zurich, 09:15–15:30 on Thursday 2nd April
in the Byre Theatre.

Computer systems are not what they used to be, and the days when a
machine could be described as a processor, some memory, and some I/O
devices are long gone. Modern machines, from Systems-on-a-Chip in
phones to rack-scale data appliances, are themselves complex networks
of heterogeneous processing elements, different kinds of memory, and
diverse communication links.
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Event details

  • When: 2nd April 2015 09:15 - 15:30
  • Where: St Andrews
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Distinguished lecture

School Seminar Series: Matching in Practice: Junior Doctor Allocation and Kidney Exchange

Matching in Practice: Junior Doctor Allocation and Kidney Exchange by Dr. David Manlove

Abstract:
Matching problems typically involve assigning agents to commodities, possibly on the basis of ordinal preferences or other metrics. These problems have large-scale applications to centralised matching schemes in many countries and contexts. In this talk I will describe the matching problems featuring in two such schemes in the UK that have involved collaborations between the National Health Service and the University of Glasgow. One of these dealt with the allocation of junior doctors to Scottish hospitals (1999-2012), and the other is concerned with finding kidney exchanges among incompatible donor-patient pairs across the UK (2007-date). In each case I will describe the applications, present the underlying algorithmic problems, outline the computational methods for their solution and give an overview of results arising from real data connected with the matching schemes in recent years.

BIO:
David Manlove is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, where he has been since 1995. His research interests lie mainly in the field of algorithms and complexity, and include algorithms for matching problems involving preferences. These arise in applications such as the assignment of school leavers to universities, kidney patients to donors and junior doctors to hospitals. He and his colleagues have been involved in collaborations with the NHS in relation to the Scottish Foundation Allocation Scheme (for matching junior doctors to hospitals) and the National Living Donor Kidney Sharing Schemes (for enabling kidney “swaps” between incompatible donor-patient pairs) where optimal matching algorithms developed by him and colleagues have been deployed. He has over 50 publications in this area including his book “Algorithmics of Matching Under Preferences”, published in 2013.

Event details

  • When: 3rd February 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Talk

School Seminar Series: Statistically Consistent Estimation and Efficient Inference for Natural Language Parsing

Statistically Consistent Estimation and Efficient Inference for
Natural Language ParsingBy Shay Cohen, University of Edinburgh.

Abstract:
In the past few years, there has been an increased interest in the machinel earning community in spectral algorithms for estimating models with latent variables. Examples include algorithms for estimating mixture of Gaussians or for estimating the parameters of a hidden Markov model.

The EM algorithm has been the mainstay for estimation with latent variables, but because it is guaranteed to converge to a local maximum of the likelihood, it is not a consistent estimator. Spectral algorithms, on the other hand, are often shown to be consistent. They are often more computationally efficient than EM.

In this talk, I am interested in presenting two types for spectral algorithms for latent-variable PCFGs, a model widely used in the NLP community for parsing. One algorithm is for consistent estimation of L-PCFGs, and the other is for efficient inference with L-PCFGs (or PCFGs). Both algorithms are based on linear-algebraic formulation of L-PCFGs and PCFGs.

BIO:
Shay Cohen is a Chancellor’s fellow (assistant professor) at the University of Edinburgh (School of Informatics). Before that, he was a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, and held an NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellowship. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Tel Aviv University in 2000 and 2004, and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2011. His research interests span a range of topics in natural language processing and machine learning, with a focus on structured prediction. He is especially interested in developing efficient and scalable parsing algorithms as well as learning algorithms for probabilistic grammars.

Event details

  • When: 21st January 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Talk

School Seminar: Cloud Platform in Financial Services – Allan Beck, J.P. Morgan

Title: Cloud Platform in Financial Services

Presenter: Allan Beck, Cloud Platform and Strategy Lead from JPMorgan Chase

Abstract: Cloud Computing is revolutionising the delivery of compute services and driving the next generation of web-scale application design. This presents enormous opportunities but also challenges, particularly in heavily regulated sectors such as Financial Services.
Allan Beck, Cloud Platform and Strategy Lead from JPMorgan Chase, will discuss the current approach and challenges to Cloud in Financial Services. This will include an overview of available Cloud services and capabilities, the specific challenges to Cloud in Financial Services (private and public Cloud) and an overview of the next-generation Cloud platform and developer experience at JPMorgan Chase.

Event details

  • When: 18th November 2014 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Thursday Seminar from Japan – Prof. Yoshifumi Kitamura – Interactive Content Design and 3D Interactions

Date: 2014-11-13
Time: 14:00 to 15:00
Location: Maths Lecture Theatre A, North Haugh, University of St Andrews.

Title: Interactive Content Design and 3D Interactions

Abstract: Good media content has the power to enrich our lives. We focus on non-traditional content other than movies, music and games, conducting comprehensive research on a variety of interactive content which creates new value through interactions with humans. In this talk I will introduce a series of my group’s recent research projects involving technologies for interactive content design and 3D interactions.
Web: http://www.icd.riec.tohoku.ac.jp/index-e.html

Bio: Yoshifumi Kitamura is a Professor at Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University. He received the B.Sc., M.Sc. and PhD. degrees in Engineering from Osaka University in 1985, 1987 and 1996, respectively. Prior to Tohoku University, he was an Associate Professor at Graduate School of Engineering and  Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University (1997-2010), and before that he was a researcher at ATR Communication Systems Research Laboratories (1992-1996) and Canon Inc. (1987-1992).

Event details

  • When: 13th November 2014 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Maths Theatre A
  • Format: Seminar, Symposium, Talk

Distinguished lecture 2014

The first of this academic year’s distinguished lectures will be given by Prof Luca Cardelli of Microsoft Research and the University of Oxford, 0930–1600 on Tuesday 25 November in Lower College Hall.

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Event details

  • When: 25th November 2014 09:15 - 16:00
  • Where: Lower College Hall
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Distinguished lecture, Lecture

Supporting the Design of Shape-Changing Interfaces by Jason Alexander, Lancaster University

Abstract:

Shape-changing interfaces physically mutate their visual display surface to better represent on-screen content, provide an additional information channel, and facilitate tangible interaction with digital content. The HCI community has recently shown increasing interest in this area, with their physical dynamicity fundamentally changing how we think about displays. This talk will describe our current work supporting the design and prototyping of shape-changing displays: understanding shape-changing application areas through public engagement brainstorming, characterising fundamental touch input actions, creating tools to support design, and demonstrating example implementations. It will end with a look at future challenges and directions for research.

Bio:

Jason is a lecturer in the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University. His primary research area is Human-Computer Interaction, with a particular interest in bridging the physical-digital divide using novel physical interaction devices and techniques. He was previously a post-doctoral researcher in the Bristol Interaction and Graphics (BIG) group at the University of Bristol. Before that he was a Ph.D. student in the HCI and Multimedia Lab at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. More information can be found at http://www.scc.lancs.ac.uk/~jason/

This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

Event details

  • When: 11th November 2014 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar