News

Retirement of Professor Alan Dearle

Colleagues gathered recently to wish a happy retirement to Professor Al Dearle at the end of August.

Having received both a BSc and a PhD from St Andrews, Al has spent most of his career here, interrupted by sojourns in Adelaide and Stirling. His research has cut across several themes, beginning with persistent programming (still arguably a better approach to data management than what we use currently), moving onto middleware and languages for ubiquitous computing and sensors, and most recently focused on algorithms for similarity search.

He was our third Head of School, following on from Ron Morrison.

He’s always been relentlessly focused on both student experience and staff excellence, and oversaw the expansion of the School away from our traditional core in back-end systems and programming languages into the front-end of sensor networks and HCI. As part of this he emailed one potential new hire, “We have a professorship on offer: if you can’t find the advert on the web yourself, you’re probably not the calibre of person we’re looking for”.

He then moved to College Gate as Dean of Science, during which time he introduced the GAP policy (codifying what we already did) and pushing the institution to adopt more digital teaching (which we definitely didn’t already do) by buying Teams and Panopto. It’d be easy to hold this against him, but it almost certainly saved us later when the pandemic struck and we had all the digital infrastructure we needed already in place and understood. And then he successfully returned to the School and to his research, which is a transition that very few people manage successfully.

We’re not expecting to see much less of Al now he’s retired: he’ll still be around to assess and criticise us. That’s something the School management would not have any other way. He has been (and will continue to be) central to shaping the School into what it is, with the most collegial atmosphere and the best balance of teaching and research of anywhere you could choose to work.

Happy retirement Al!

Research Activities by Open Virtual Worlds Research Group

Throughout July, the research group Open Virtual Worlds from the School of Computer Science was involved in digitalising the archaeological artefacts, historical sites, and natural landscapes in collaboration with their important partner, Timespan Museum in Helmsdale, Highlands.

Two PhD students, Junyu Zhang and Sharon Pisani, who are researching digital heritage and sustainability, were using 360 photogrammetry to document the local area, which included the Helmsdale Harbour, the former fish curing yards, the Jurassic Coast, the Flow Country UNESCO World Heritage Site, and other natural reserves.

The efforts and work from the Open Virtual Worlds will contribute to the HERITALISE project, which includes seventeen partners from seven different European countries – the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Scotland, Malta, and Cyprus, forming an interdisciplinary group to bring about intelligence, methodology and expertise towards the preservation and promotion of cultural heritage.

old and new harbours in Helmsdale

old and new harbours in Helmsdale

old and new harbours in Helmsdale

old and new harbours in Helmsdale

outdoor fieldwork at natural reserve sites, historical landscapes and heritage ruins

outdoor fieldwork at natural reserve sites, historical landscapes and heritage ruins

members from Open Virtual World and Timespan Museum

members from Open Virtual World and Timespan Museum

members from Open Virtual World and Timespan Museum

Interviews with descendants of historical heritage site

3D scanning of archaeological artefacts

3D scanning of archaeological artefacts

Helmsdale

🎉Award Congratulations to Dr Di Wu – IEEE IoT PhD Thesis Competition 🎉

Congratulations to Dr Di Wu for an outstanding achievement of third place in the inaugural IEEE  IoT PhD thesis competition. Di’s thesis, “Distributed Machine Learning on Edge Computing Systems” truly stood out among the impressive nominations. The judging panel, comprising leading experts in the field, meticulously evaluated each submission based on the following criteria: Problem Definition, Design Methodology, Achievement and Significance, Originality and Innovation, Impact, and Quality of Presentation. Di’s work exemplified excellence across these critical areas.

Congratulations once again to Di on this well-deserved recognition for advancing the field of IoT! 🎉

Talk from St Andrews Entrepreneurship – Innovation Insights

Timer clock 11.30am – 12.00pm followed by “Ask Me Anything” in Jack Cole Coffee Area 12.00pm-1.00pm

Tear off calendar 3rd September 2025

Pin JC 1.33A/B

Join us for Innovation Insights, an interactive session designed to showcase how the University of St Andrews Entrepreneurship Centre supports staff and students to turn ideas into real-world innovation and impact.

The session will introduce the full range of entrepreneurship services available — from startup skills training and mentorship to funding opportunities and community-building initiatives. There will be real examples of how entrepreneurial activity at St Andrews has created impact locally, nationally, and globally, highlighting success stories that demonstrate what’s possible.

For staff and professional services, the session will also explore how you can better support students in developing entrepreneurial mindsets and applying innovation within their own disciplines. By the end, you’ll have a clear view of the resources available and how to connect with our growing ecosystem.

For PGRs, the session can help you discover pathways to commercialise research and bring innovations to market, as well as learn about lifelong learning and professional development resources available to support your journey.

Following the session, join us at ‘Ask Me Anything’ in which the Entrepreneurship Centre team will be available in the Jack Cole coffee area from 12pm – 1pm in which you can ask any questions and discuss your ideas.

Innovation Insights is your chance to see how entrepreneurship is flourishing across the University and how our school and students can be part of it.

PhD Student Tai Nguyen Wins Best Paper Award at GECCO 2025

Tai Nguyen, supervised by Dr. Nguyen Dang (University of St Andrews) and Dr. Carola Doerr (CNRS Researcher, Sorbonne Université, France), has been awarded the prestigious Best Paper Award at GECCO 2025, held in Málaga, Spain, from July 14–18, 2025. GECCO (Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference) is the leading international conference in its field, known for its highly competitive acceptance rate (36% in 2025).
The award-winning paper is titled: “On the Importance of Reward Design in Reinforcement Learning-based Dynamic Algorithm Configuration: A Case Study on OneMax with (1+(λ,λ))-GA.” link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3712256.3726395

To help a general audience understand the significance of this work, here is a brief and simplified summary:

This research tackles a central challenge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and optimization. Imagine trying to complete a complex task by finding the best possible strategy, which often involves tuning many parameters—a process known as “algorithm configuration.” Now, imagine an intelligent AI assistant that not only helps determine the best settings for the task at hand but also adapts those settings as the task evolves. This is known as “Dynamic Algorithm Configuration” (DAC). Tai’s work applies Reinforcement Learning (RL), a powerful AI technique in which computers learn to make decisions by receiving “rewards” or “penalties” based on their actions. The paper’s key insight is that the design of the reward system plays a crucial role in enabling the AI assistant to learn effectively, particularly in dynamic or complex environments. If rewards are not carefully crafted, the AI may struggle to identify effective strategies, especially as problem sizes increase. To address this, the team developed methods for designing reward functions, which significantly improved the AI’s learning speed and performance. In essence, their approach allows the AI to find optimal solutions much more efficiently than existing techniques.

Congratulations to Tai Nguyen, Dr. Nguyen Dang, Dr. Phong Le (University of St Andrews), Dr. André Biedenkapp (University of Freiburg, Germany), and Dr. Carola Doerr (Sorbonne Université, France) on this outstanding achievement! Party popper

Nomination to Young Software Engineering of the Year Awards 2025

Congratulations to our Senior Honours student, Verity Powell, who is nominated for the Young Software Engineering of the Year Awards 2025. She is invited to attend the awards dinner, taking place at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre on Thursday 25th September.

Verity is a Computer Science graduate, and played for the University’s Women’s 1XV Rugby team. Motivated by her experiences of underfunding in women’s sport, Verity’s Senior Honours project combined her passions for technology and athletics to develop accessible resources for community rugby players. The project uses computer vision techniques to automatically analyse conversion kicking attempts and give feedback based on biomechanics and coaching research.

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.

Graduation Reception – Thursday 3rd July 2025 🎓

 

On behalf of the School of Computer Science, we would like to congratulate all of this year’s graduating students.

The school welcomed graduates, their families and friends and academic staff to reflect on and celebrate their student journey at St Andrews. Drinks and cakes were enjoyed. 🍰🥂

The school wishes all our graduates the best of luck in their future endeavours. ✨