Congratulations to School Manager Alex Bain, who completed the London Marathon again this year, raising funds for Guide Dogs. Alex, runner no 40807 is pictured below with his finisher’s medal. Donations to recognise his achievement and the training involved, can be made via his Justgiving page. Read more about his fundraising on KingdomFM.
Congratulations to Yunjia Wang, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured with Internal examiner Dr Alice Toniolo and Supervisor Dr Ishbel Duncan.
Earlier today our Junior Honours students presented their Team Projects. The projects involve substantial team based software engineering and rely heavily on collaborative development. There are many aspects of software and professional development along with considerable inter-team and intra-team collaborations. This year the students were asked to develop a version of the Settlers of Catan with AI players. They were further asked to make their games interoperate so one teams AI or human player might play on another teams game and board.
The teams demonstrated lots of creativity with the use of software tools, approaches to AI, use of domain specific languages, remote services, games environments, graphics development, collaborative frameworks and many tools for software engineering project development. Thanks to all the students, supervisors and coordinators for their hard work this year.
We wish all our junior honours students success with their forthcoming exams and we look forward to seeing them again for their senior honours year in September.
Images and text courtesy of Professor Aaron Quigley
Our talented hard working SH students from CS4099: Major Software Project and CS4098: Minor Software Project presented their posters and final year software artifact to staff and students earlier this week.
As Illustrated in the above collage, the busy poster session is the perfect opportunity to discuss output from their year long project with markers, and provides time to share research ideas and reflect on the experience with their peer group. We wish them success with forthcoming exams and look forward to seeing them during June graduation celebrations.
Congratulations to Hui-Shyong Yeo, who has been selected as both an ACM SIGCHI communication ambassador and to represent SIGCHI at the ACM 50 Years of the A.M. Turing Award Celebration.
Yeo is a 2nd year PhD student and is particularly interested in exploring and developing novel interaction techniques. Since joining us in SACHI, he has had work accepted at ACM CHI 2016 and CHI 2017, ACM MobileHCI 2016 and 2017 and ACM UIST 2016. His work has featured at Google I/O 2016, locally on STV news and he gave a talk at Google UK in 2016 about his research. His work has also featured in the media including in Gizmodo, TheVerge, Engadget and TechCrunch., see his personal website for more details. Continue reading
A new book, Type-Driven Development with Idris has just been published by Manning Publications. Written by Dr Edwin Brady, the creator of Idris, Type-Driven Development with Idris teaches you how to improve the performance and accuracy of your programs by taking advantage of a state-of-the-art type system.
Type-driven development is an approach to programming that embraces types as the foundation of your code. It is based on the concept of “dependent types”, which allow you to express relationships and other assumptions directly in your code, and have these assumptions checked by the compiler. With this approach, you can define specifications early in development and write code that’s easy to maintain, test, and extend.
Dr Brady said:
“Idris arose as a result of my own research into program verification and language design with advanced type systems. After spending several years immersed in the concept of programming with dependent types, I felt there was a need for a language designed for developers and practitioners as well as researchers. By teaching the concept of type-driven development using Idris, the book aims to make state-of-the-art verification techniques accessible to software practitioners.”
The book is currently available via MANNING publications: https://www.manning.com/books/type-driven-development-with-idris. ePub and Kindle versions available from April 10th. The source code, chapter 1 and chapter 13 are available as free downloads.
Alex Bain will be running the London Marathon again this year, raising funds for Guide Dogs. He is holding a fundraising bake sale in the department today. There are still plenty delicious cakes and home baking on offer. Support all his effort and training by buying a cake or two.
You can also donate through his justgiving page.
*Update: Total so far £320. Cakes and other sweet treats remain.
On March 31st, Dr David Manlove from the University of Glasgow, delivered the semester two distinguished lectures in Lower and Upper College Hall. The overall title was algorithms for healthcare-related matching problems.
David started with an overview of complexity theory and solving hard problems. He gave examples of this in practice, for example how researchers constructed a best-possible tour around the best 20,000 pubs in the UK. The second lecture focussed on how to assign junior doctors to hospitals in the best way, a very practical problem but with interesting complexity issues. The final lecture focussed on the life-changing topic of how to set up exchanges of kidneys between healthy donors and patients needing transplants. David talked about how his expertise in algorithms has been translated into regularly finding the best possible matches which then result in real transplants taking place.
David is pictured above at various stages of the distinguished lecture series and outside College Hall with Head of School, Prof Steve Linton, Prof Ian Gent and Dr Ishbel Duncan,
Videos from the DLS can be accessed on Vimeo –
Lecture 1: https://vimeo.com/211633740
Lecture 2: https://vimeo.com/211634119
Lecture 3: https://vimeo.com/211634923
Images courtesy of Ryo Yanagida.
Congratulations to PhD students Shyam Reyal and Simone Conte , from Computer Science and Senior Scientific Officer Tomas Lebl, from Chemistry who presented NOMAD (NMR Online Management and Datastore) at IDEA Explosion 2017 and emerged victorious. Shyam delivered a five-minute elevator pitch, whilst Simone and Tomas responded to questions. Judges acknowledged that NOMAD has huge potential with researchers, and were impressed that it has been used in St Andrews for the past 5 years, with other universities now lined-up to make use of its services, fully supporting the use of the prize money to set-up a company.
Rethinking High performance computing Platforms: Challenges, Opportunities and Recommendations, co-authored by Adam Barker and a team (Ole Weidner, Malcolm Atkinson, Rosa Filgueira Vicente) in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh was recently featured in the Communications of the ACM and HPC Wire.
The paper focuses on container technology and argues that a number of “second generation” high-performance computing applications with heterogeneous, dynamic and data-intensive properties have an extended set of requirements, which are not met by the current production HPC platform models and policies. These applications (and users) require a new approach to supporting infrastructure, which draws on container-like technology and services. The paper then goes on to describe cHPC: an early prototype of an implementation based on Linux Containers (LXC).
Ali Khajeh-Hosseini, Co-founder of AbarCloud and former co-founder of ShopForCloud (acquired by RightScale as PlanForCloud) said of this research, “Containers have helped speed-up the development and deployment of applications in heterogeneous environments found in larger enterprises. It’s interesting to investigate their applications in similar types of environments in newer HPC applications.“
