We’re thrilled to share some fantastic news and congratulate Saleem on being selected as one of the recipients of the ICANN Grant Program for his project: “Deployability of ILNP at Global Scale.”
The announcement was officially made by ICANN on May 29, 2025, as part of their first-ever cohort of grant recipients. You can read the full announcement here.
This is a major achievement and a testament to Saleem’s dedication. Once again, congratulations, Saleem!
The school hosted a highly successful Doors Open event yesterday, welcoming many visitors including industry professionals, university colleagues from other schools (e.g. Psychology & Neuroscience, Biology and Chemistry) and prospective students. Attendees had the opportunity to explore cutting-edge projects in Artificial Intelligence, Human-computer Interaction, Software Engineering and engage with interactive technology demonstrations.
Highlights of the event included the popular “Hot Tattie” sessions in Artificial Intelligence, Programming Languages and Human Computer Interaction. The enthusiastic participation and positive feedback from visitors highlighted the school’s commitment to outreach, education, and fostering a strong connection between academia and the broader community.
Special thanks to Ruth Hoffmann and Kirsty Ross who organised this event. We would like to thank all who attended Doors Open and made it a success. We look forward to seeing you next year!
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!
On 11th April, the School of Computer Science at St Andrews will host our Doors Open event. We will be thrilled to welcome any and all visitors from outwith the School, whether you are locally based, from elsewhere in the UK, or from overseas.
As a rapidly growing school, we are looking to build relationships with new partners and are keen to find out how we can help you, your companies, and/or organisations to solve problems and improve processes.
Our Doors Open Day will have over 60 individual exhibits and activities. Our presenters will be our staff and students, with representation from 1st year undergrad through to PhD students, academic and technical members of staff.
Please register here if you would like to attend to enable us to order sufficient food!
The School of Computer Science received the wonderful news today that the School has been successful in its application for an Athena SWAN Silver award!
This is great news for the School and reflects an enormous amount of hard work.
#AthenaSwan and #GenderEquality
We had a wonderful time yesterday at the Doors Open day. We welcomed more than 200 visitors who were interested in learning more about our programs, facilities, and research.
We showcased some of our cutting-edge projects in artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and software engineering. Our visitors had the chance to interact with virtual reality systems, and smart devices. They also learned about the ethical and social implications of these technologies.
Special Thanks to Ruth Hoffmann, Ken Boyd and Kirsty Ross who organised the event. We would also like to thank everyone who attended the doors open day and made it a success. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to contact us at collaborate-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk.
We look forward to seeing you again soon!
The Schools of Computer Science and Mathematics & Statistics are now an Institutional Member of the European Women in Mathematics (EWM). The EWM is an association dedicated to encouraging women to study mathematics and related sciences (such as computer science), supporting them in their careers and promoting scientific communication.
Being an Institutional Member supports the EWM in their mission and promotes the role of women in mathematics and related fields while strengthening connections across the European community of mathematicians (which is the primary goal of the EWM). “With the help of our institutional members we are able to empower more female mathematicians by offering travel grants, organize panel discussions and providing a platform to communicate.”
If you would like to find out more about the EWM or how the Schools support Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity, please get in touch with the ED&I officers or Ruth Hoffmann who is a EWM country coordinator for the UK.
Dr Alan Miller and Catherine Anne Cassidy of the Open Virtual Worlds research group have been successful in funding from the Impact Innovation Fund for their project “Evidencing and Amplifying Impact of Immersive Exhibits in Highlands and Islands Museums”. The project will evaluate the value of digital heritage engagement with virtual reality exhibitions and further develop opportunities to preserve and promote cultural heritage in the highlands and islands of Scotland. Collaborative activities and approaches trialled are intended to discover ways to maximise positive impact. Exhibits are part of the Northern Heritage Network, which provides an infrastructure for transnational collaboration of heritage organisations to preserve and promote heritage within and beyond the North Sea region. The geographical focus of the network is: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Scotland, Island of Ireland, Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and the Baltic countries.
Lockdown and COVID-19 meant that the focus of the heritage sector was how to connect with audiences remotely. Whether this be through live online events, social media, virtual tours or other means. In the coming year there is much emphasis on sustainability and on the return of visitors to museums.
Evidence prior to COVID-19 shows that such exhibits have a positive impact in: communicating heritage, improving the sustainability of museums, improving visitor numbers and contributing to the wider Scottish economy. This is recognised by museums who are setting aside valuable space, and time to host immersive exhibits in the coming year. Through developing, deploying and using immersive exhibits we will enhance the “within walls” museum experience with the following impacts:
Design of a Heritage Impact Toolkit for digital heritage engagement evaluation will facilitate relevant data collection for West Highland Museum, Timespan Museum, Tomintoul & Glenlivet Discovery Centre, North Isles Landscape Partnership Scheme, Finlaggan Trust, Museum of Islay Life, and Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist a Tuath.
Through surveys, interviews and observation we will collect evidence of impact. Identified profiles for evidence collection include end users (visitors), stakeholders (community), museum and visitor centres (heritage practitioners), and third party organisations (e.g., Creative Scotland, European Commission, ICOM), This will be combined with statistics including visitor numbers and feedback from visitors. Inquiry will cover:
We had our first School seminar of the semester today. The speaker was André G. Pereira visiting Scotland on a SICSA DVF Fellowship. André is working on AI Planning problems, an area that is closely related to the work of our own Constraint Programming research group.
Title: Understanding Neuro-Symbolic Planning
Abstract: In this seminar, we present the area of neuro-symbolic planning, introducing fundamental concepts and applications. We focus on presenting recent research on the problem of learning heuristic functions with machine learning techniques. We discuss the distinctions and particularities between the “model-based” and “model-free” approaches, and the different methods to address the problem. Then, we focus on explaining the behavior of “model-free” approaches. We discuss the generation of the training set, and present sampling algorithms and techniques to improve the quality of the training set. We also discuss how the distribution of samples over the state space of a task, together with the quality of its estimators, are directly related to the quality of the learned heuristic function. Finally, we empirically detail which factors have the greatest impact on the quality of the learned heuristic function.
Biography: Dr. André G. Pereira is a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. His research aims to develop and explain the behavior of intelligent systems for sequential decision-making problems. Dr. Pereira has authored several papers on top-tier venues such as IJCAI, AAAI, and ICAPS. These papers contribute towards explaining the behavior of heuristic search algorithms, how to use combinatorial optimization-based reasoning to solve planning tasks, and how to use machine learning techniques to produce heuristic functions. Dr. Pereira is a program committee member of IJCAI and AAAI. His doctoral dissertation was awarded second place in the national Doctoral Dissertation Contest on Computer Science (2017), and first place in the national Doctoral Dissertation Contest on Artificial Intelligence (2018). Dr. Pereira advised three awarded students on national events, including first place and finalist in the Scientific Initiation Work Contest (2018, 2022), and finalist in the Master Dissertation Contest on Artificial Intelligence (2020).
Alan Miller and The Virtual Open Worlds team appeared in The Herald earlier this month promoting their digital reconstruction of Fort William for the West Highland Museum
Using VR headsets, the team created a fully immersive virtual reality model of the old fort in Fort William in the days leading up to the Battle of Culloden on April 16, 1746.
