News

Lao Characters for Pali added to Unicode 12

Congratulations to Vinodh Rajan, Ben Mitchell, Martin Jansche and Sascha Brawer on their successful proposal for additions to the repertoire of ISO/IEC 10646, which will see Pali letters added to Lao in Unicode 12. As a result, it is now possible to write both Pali/Sanskrit in Lao and represent the entire Tripitaka in the Lao script. The proposal (https://bit.ly/2TE2XKJ) submitted in 2017 was finally added to the Unicode standard this year.

Vinodh explained that the proposal allows four things. Firstly, one can now transcribe liturgical Pali (the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism) texts and by extension the whole Pali Tripitaka (the Theravada Buddhist canon) in the Lao script without any distortion, providing lay people accurate access to these liturgical texts. Previously, the texts had to go through some sort of distortion due to the lack of appropriate characters, which means they had to be approximated. Secondly, it allows people who would want to use etymological orthography for Lao (it currently uses a phonemic orthography) access to the necessary additional characters. Thirdly, there are several books printed (mostly in the 1930’s) using the expanded alphabet that need to be eventually digitized. This will enable their proper digitization by allow plain-text representation of all the Lao characters. Lastly, it will improve the transliteration accuracy between Lao and neighboring scripts like Thai and Khmer.

The expanded Lao alphabet can be found here:
http://aksharamukha.appspot.com/#/describe/LaoPali

Vinodh, a St Andrews Computer Science alumnus completed his PhD in 2016. His thesis, Quantifying scribal behavior : a novel approach to digital paleography was supervised by Dr Mark-Jan Nederhof.

Back to normal

The School will be fully open as normal from around 0800 tomorrow, Thursday 14 February.  We’re running on generator power as a result of the weekend’s fire in Chemistry, but this will be sufficient to run all our lights, alarms, systems, and other equipment. There may need to be some restrictions in 24-hour lab access, but we’re hopeful that this won’t be necessary.

Thank you everyone for your patience and understanding, as well as to all the staff in the School and the wider University who’ve both minimised the disruption and got us back into operation so quickly.

 

Prof Simon Dobson
Head of School for Computer Science

Reduced service because of fire

As you may be aware, there was a fire over the weekend in the School of Chemistry. While this has not led to any physical damage in Computer Science, it has meant we’ve lost all power and access to our main Jack Cole building.

The School is still open and functioning as normally as possible. Classes are being relocated to other rooms in the University whenever possible. However, staff have no access to their offices (or phones), and we will be cancelling all non-essential meetings or events.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience. We expect to be back running again as normal by the end of the week. I’m happy to (try to) answer any questions you may have.

 

Prof Simon Dobson
Head of School for Computer Science

 

Dr Juan Ye: Lifelong Learning in Human Activity Recognition

Dr Juan Ye will be running an online event for IEEE SMC (Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society) on Lifelong Learning. The technical seminar, designed to focus on future research trends in human activity recognition, will take place on Friday 1st February from 2.00pm – 3.00pm.


Seminar Details: Human activity recognition systems will be increasingly deployed in real-world environments and for longer periods of time. This significantly challenges current approaches to human activity recognition, which have to account for changes in activity routines, evolution of situations, and of sensing technologies. Driven by these challenges, this webinar will argue the need to move beyond learning to lifelong machine learning – with the ability to incrementally and continuously adapt to changes in the environment being learned. We will introduce a conceptual framework for lifelong machine learning to structure various relevant proposals in the area, and identify some key research challenges that remain.

Read more about the event and joining instructions through IEEE online.

Tom Kelsey appointed Associate Editor of Human Reproduction Update

Arne Sunde, the incoming Editor-in-Chief, has appointed Tom Kelsey as Associate Editor of Human Reproduction Update.

Human Reproduction Update is the leading journal in Reproductive Medicine, with an Impact Factor of 11.852. The journal publishes comprehensive and systematic review articles in human reproductive physiology and medicine, and is published on behalf of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE). The Associate Editor system at Human Reproduction Update has been in place since the beginning of 2001 and it has a significant positive effect on the quality and dynamism of the journal.

In the ISI JCR Global Ranking for 2017, Human Reproduction Update is ranked first of 29 journals in Reproductive Biology, and first of 82 journals in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Tom Kelsey has published extensively in Human Reproduction Update and its sister journals Human Reproduction (impact factor 4.949) and Molecular Human Reproduction (impact factor 3.449). He is also Associate Editor for the Open Access journals Frontiers in Endocrinology and Frontiers in Physiology. He is a regular reviewer for these journals and also the British Medical Journal, BMJ Open, Health Education Journal, Nature Scientific Reports, PLOS One, Mathematical Medicine and Biology, Systems Biology in Reproductive Medicine, and the European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology.

A new vision

In an unexpected addition to his skill set the School’s resident gadget expert, Marwan Fayed, has started a sideline in cleaning glasses with his new ultrasonic cleaning-thingy, as found in quality opticians everywhere.

After a successful demonstration on the Head of School’s eyewear a long queue of glasses-wearing computer scientists formed around the School’s coffee area. Who knows how much this will improve our creativity?

Job vacancies: Lecturers in Computer Science

The School of Computer Science is recruiting two new Lecturers as part of a large on-going expansion of our academic staff.

You will be a scholar with a growing international research reputation in Computer Science and a commitment to delivering high quality teaching within the broad field of Computer Science and its applications. The successful candidate will be expected to have a range of interests, to be active in research publication that strengthens or complements those in the School and to be capable of teaching the subject to undergraduate and taught postgraduate students who come to us with a wide range of backgrounds.

Candidates should hold a PhD in a cognate discipline. Excellent teaching skills and an interest in promoting knowledge exchange are essential. You should also have some familiarity with grant seeking processes in relation to research councils and other sources.

Closing date: 14th January 2019

Informal enquiries can be directed to Professor Simon Dobson (hos-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk) or Dr Dharini Balasubramaniam (dot-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk).

Find out more about the vacancies further particulars on the recruitment website.

Professors Quigley and Kitamura to co-chair ACM CHI 2021 in Asia

Professors Quigley and Kitamura

Professor Aaron Quigley and Professor Yoshifumi Kitamura (Tohoku University, Japan) have been appointed the general co-chairs for the ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Asia in 2021.  CHI is hosted by the ACM SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference for the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This flagship conference is generally considered the most prestigious in the field of HCI and attracts thousands of international attendees annually.

 

CHI provides a place where researchers and practitioners can gather from across the world to discuss the latest HCI topics. It has been held since 1982 and this is only the second time CHI will be held in Asia.  CHI 2020 will be held in Hawaii while CHI 2019 will be held in Glasgow next May. The location for CHI 2021 will be announced to the global research community during CHI 2019.

This week Professor Quigley was invited to present at the Third ACM SIGCHI Asian Symposium hosted in the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Tohoku University, Sendai. The ACM SIGCHI Asian Development committee organised this event to bring together early career researchers, students and more from multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific region to discuss ideas that can lead to innovations and to inspire us all. The event served to  develop connections and regional/local societies through promoting collaboration among Asian-Pacific HCI researchers and practitioners. Professor Quigley will be spending his upcoming sabbatical in Asia.  

Job vacancies: Interdisciplinary Data Scientists

The Schools of Medicine and Computer Science are seeking to appoint three highly motivated data scientists with a passion for computer vision and deep learning, and specifically their application to medical imaging. The data scientists will be based in the Schools of Computer Science and Medicine at the University of St Andrews and will work on a national Innovate UK funded initiative to create a pan Scotland Industrial Centre for AI Research in Digital Diagnostics (iCAIRD).

The successful candidates will have the opportunity to work alongside and learn from clinicians, industrial experts from Philips Healthcare and academics to help develop artificial intelligence solutions for the automatic reporting of cancer diagnoses in endometrial and cervical cancer. The main duties of the role will involve being an active member of an interdisciplinary team of scientists to help develop deep learning algorithms, within industry standard guidelines, to analyse patient samples in a manner that allows rapid clinical transfer. This work will therefore have the opportunity to impact both patient welfare and relieve pathologist work burden.

Applicants should have experience in machine learning, demonstrable experience in computer programming languages and an interest in the medical applications of computer science. The candidates would benefit from a track record in scientific writing and working in interdisciplinary teams as well as experience in computer vision.

The posts are full time and over a period of 36 months.
Closing Date: 18 January 2019

Find out more about the vacancies further particulars on the recruitment website.