Event

StACS Hackathon hosted by Witlr

StACS will be holding its first big event of the year! It will take place in the MSc Lab in the John Honey building between 7pm and 2am on November 14th. The topic will be data visualization and will be sponsored by Witlr (http://witlr.com/).

There will be free pizza, free hard and soft refreshments, a game room, and snacks available for everybody who participates. This event is open to PAID StACS members only and the challenge will be suitable for all skill levels. Membership may be paid for at the door and costs 3 pounds.

Event details

  • When: 14th November 2013 19:00 - 15th November 2013 02:00
  • Where: Honey 110 - MSc Lab

Intellectual Property – What, why, and how?

Dr Alan Boyd and Dr Nicholas Malden, D Young & Co LLP (Patent Attorneys)
Intellectual Property – What, why, and how?
In many technological fields, especially computer science, output isn’t a physical object that can be sold, but is an idea or an expression of an idea that comes from your mind. But how can industry take advantage of such ideas or expressions, and what’s to stop a competitor from simply copying your hard work and benefiting from it at your expense? In this talk, we’ll take you through the basics of Intellectual Property (IP) and look at how it can be used by a computer scientist, its importance to new start-ups and large multinationals alike, and also introduce you to the patent attorney profession. We’ll give you a chance to try your hand at writing a patent claim, and we’ll give a prize to the best one!

Event details

  • When: 5th November 2013 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Purdie Theatre C
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

The Interaction of Representation and Reasoning by Professor Alan Bundy, University of Edinburgh

These lectures will take place in Lower College Hall, North Street. The lectures will discuss the close relationship between how knowledge and problems may be represented and how people and computers use these representations to guide their reasoning about the problems.

Prof Steve Linton, Prof Alan Bundy and Prof Ian Sommerville

Prof Steve Linton, Prof Alan Bundy and Prof Ian Sommerville
Distinguished lectures, 27th November 2013

10.00 1. Title: The Interaction of Representation and Reasoning

Abstract: Successful reasoning is dependent on appropriate representation of both knowledge and of successful methods of reasoning. A change of representation can change an intractable problem into an easy one. Failures of reasoning can suggest changes of representation. Reasoning failures can, for instance, take the form of proofs of false conjectures, failures to prove true conjectures or inefficient inference. I will illustrate these interactions by drawing on work in my research group.

11.30 2. Title: Theory Evolution in Physics

Abstract: We investigate the problem of automatically repairing a faulty Physics theory when it conflicts with experimental evidence. We introduce novel strategies for fault diagnosis and for representation repair. Diagnosis and repair are composed into general-purpose repair plans. We will illustrate this with two such plans, where theory and experiment conflict over (a) the value and (b) the dependence of a function, respectively. We represent both physical concepts and the repair plans using higher-order logic. This is because many physical concepts are most naturally represented as higher-order functions and because polymorphic higher-order functions are required to enable the repair plans to be applied to diverse situations.

14.00 3. Title: Reformation: A Domain-Independent Algorithm for Theory Repair

Abstract: We describe and invite discussion on work in progress on reformation, a new algorithm for the automated repair of faulty logical theories. A fault is revealed by a reasoning failure: either the proof of a false theorem or the failure to prove a true conjecture. Repair suggestions are systematically extracted via analysis of the attempted unification of two formulae. These suggestions will either block an unwanted but successful unification or unblock a wanted but failed unification attempt. In contrast to traditional belief revision and abduction mechanisms, the repairs are to the language of the theory as well as to the deletion or addition of axioms.

Professor Alan Bundy

Professor Alan Bundy is Professor of Automated Reasoning in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Bundy is a world-leader in the area of artificial intelligence called Mathematical Reasoning and has held more than 50 research grants in this area since the 1970s , has published more than 200 research papers and has been awarded the 2007 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence and Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automated Deduction. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineers and, in 2012, was awarded a CBE for services to computing science. As well as his research work, Professor Bundy has played an active role in the British Computer Society and has been instrumental in supporting changes to the computer science curriculum in schools.

Slides:

Event details

  • When: 27th November 2013 10:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Lower College Hall
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series

Some Limits of Language: A Perspective from Formal Grammars and Languages by Prof Arvind Joshi, School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Limits of language can be studied from various perspectives such as morphology, syntax, and semantics, among others. At the syntactic level, one direction that has been pursued very actively is via the theory of formal languages, beginning with the so-called Chomsky hierarchy. In this hierarchy, the finite state languages (regular languages) and the context free languages (CFL) have been studied very extensively, leading to many important results relevant to syntax as well as parsing. At the same time, inadequacy of these two classes of grammars (languages) for capturing natural languages has been well documented by now.
A careful look at the pumping lemma for context free languages led to the discovery of the so-called tree adjoining grammars (TAG) and to the notion of mildly context sensitive languages (MCSL), which has served as a framework for showing equivalences among other systems (such as Combinatory Categorial Grammars, CCG and Head Grammars (HG), for example). This has led to a deeper understanding of the limits of language, more specifically, by trying to provide an answer to the question: how far do we need to be beyond CFL to achieve syntactic adequacy.
I will try to describe some of this recent work by a number of researchers in the past few years.

Aravind Joshi did his undergraduate work in India and his graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania in Electrical Engineering, while simultaneously attending some courses in Linguistics at the same University. Since 1961 he has been a faculty member in the Department of Computer and Information Science and the Department of Linguistics. At present, he is a Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science and a Member of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science.
Besides working on some problems in the mathematics of language, at present, he is involved in a project on discourse annotation, jointly with Bonnie Webber (Edinburgh U.) and Rashmi Prasad (U. Wisconsin), for creating the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB).

Event details

  • When: 15th October 2013 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Purdie Theatre C
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

St Andrews Students – Experience with Industrial Internships

Internships are fantastic opportunities to gain some practical experience as well as find out what is happening the real world of computer science! Come and hear some our UG students share their experiences of their 2013 summer internships.
Melissa Mozifian: Adobe
Waqas Arshad: AIG
Mariya Hristova: Google STEP
Sam Koch: Facebook

Event details

  • When: 1st October 2013 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Purdie Theatre C
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Scaling Skyscanner’s Flight Search & Making Mobile Applications at Skyscanner

Welcome to the first presentation in the School of Computer Science’s Seminar Series.

Please join us on for a seminar on Skyscanner’s technology this Tuesday (September 24) at 14:00 in Purdie Lecture Theatre C.

The two talks combined will take about 50 minutes with time for questions, and combine two topics presented by Skyscanner experts:

Grzegorz Janas- Project Manager Mobile Applications
Simon Thorogood- Senior Architect Development Engineering
Scott Krueger- Technical Manager Databases
Skyscanner: http://www.skyscanner.net/

Abstract:
Come and hear from Skyscanner Engineers on the Challenges behind engineering the world’s fastest growing Metasearch product and our journey towards being the “most trusted online travel company in the world” Skyscanner has 24 million unique monthly visitors and 25 million installed apps generating one-third of its traffic through mobile.

Everybody welcome.

Event details

  • When: 24th September 2013 14:00 - 15:30
  • Where: Purdie Theatre C
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

On Normalising Disjunctive Intermediate Logics

Speaker:
Prof. Jonathan Seldin, University of Lethbridge, Canada

Abstract:
In this talk it is shown that every intermediate logic obtained from intuitionistic logic by adding a disjunction can be normalized. However, the normalisation procedure is not as complete as that for intuitionistic and minimal logic because some results which usually follow from normalisation fail, including the separation property and the subformula property.

Biography:
Jonathan P. Seldin, now Professor Emeritus, is a well-established senior scientist at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, with an Amsterdam PhD in combinatory logic supervised by Haskell Curry. This logic, together with lambda-calculus (to which it is equivalent) is a prototype for functional languages, such as Haskell, and typed lambda-calculus is a prototype for the typing discipline in programming languages. His work on lambda-calculus, both pure and typed, has applications in formal verification, the use of formal logics to prove properties of programs (e.g., that they satisfy their specifications). He has co-authored works with Curry and Hindley on combinatory logic and lambda calculus. He is also interested in the history and philosophy of mathematics and in proof normalisation and cut-elimination for various systems of formal logic. His visit to Scotland is as a SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow, to work with Prof. Kamareddine at Heriot-Watt University and with Dr Dyckhoff at St Andrews. For details and publications see http://directory.uleth.ca/users/jonathan.seldin

Event details

  • When: 3rd September 2013 11:30 - 12:30
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

SACHI Seminar: Team-buddy: investigating a long-lived robot companion

SACHI seminar

Title: Team-buddy: investigating a long-lived robot companion

Speaker: Ruth Aylett, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh

Abstract:
In the EU-funded LIREC project, finishing last year, Heriot-Watt University investigated how a long-lived multi-embodied (robot, graphical) companion might be incorporated into a work-environment as a team buddy, running a final continuous three-week study. This talk gives an overview of the technology issues and some of the surprises from various user-studies.

Bio:
Ruth Aylett is Professor of Computer Sciences in the School of Mathematical and Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University. She researches intelligent graphical characters, affective agent models, human-robot interaction, and interactive narrative. She was a founder of the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents and was a partner in the large HRI project LIREC – see lirec.eu. She has more than 200 publications – book chapters, journals, and refereed conferences and coordinates the Autonomous affective Agents group at Heriot-Watt University- see here

Event details

  • When: 10th September 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Jacob Eisenstein: Interactive Topic Visualization for Exploratory Text Analysis

Abstract:
Large text document collections are increasingly important in a variety of domains; examples of such collections include news articles, streaming social media, scientific research papers, and digitized literary documents. Existing methods for searching and exploring these collections focus on surface-level matches to user queries, ignoring higher-level thematic structure. Probabilistic topic models are a machine learning technique for finding themes that recur across a corpus, but there has been little work on how they can support end users in exploratory analysis. In this talk I will survey the topic modeling literature and describe our ongoing work on using topic models to support digital humanities research. In the second half of the talk, I will describe TopicViz, an interactive environment that combines traditional search and citation-graph exploration with a dust-and-magnet layout that links documents to the latent themes discovered by the topic model.
This work is in collaboration with:
Polo Chau, Jaegul Choo, Niki Kittur, Chang-Hyun Lee, Lauren Klein, Jarek Rossignac, Haesun Park, Eric P. Xing, and Tina Zhou

Bio:
Jacob Eisenstein is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He works on statistical natural language processing, focusing on social media analysis, discourse, and latent variable models. Jacob was a Postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2008, winning the George M. Sprowls dissertation award.

Event details

  • When: 23rd July 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Format: Seminar