News

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. ✨

 

CS Graduation Reception

On behalf of the school, we would like to invite our Graduating Students and your guests to our upcoming graduation reception.

Please join us in celebrating your achievements and marking this significant milestone in your academic journey with a glass of bubbly and some cakes from Fisher and Donaldsons

    • Date: Thursday, 3rd July
    • Time: 10:30am – 12:30pm
    • Location: Jack Cole Coffee area

We look forward to seeing you there.

Best Wishes,

The Admin Team

Enhancing Privacy for Internet Communication Protocols: SICSA 2025 Best PhD Dissertation Award

On June 25th, recent PhD graduate, Dr. Gregor Haywood, took to the stage to receive the 2025 “Best PhD Dissertation” award from the Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance (SICSA).

Gregor (Lecturer in the Department of Cybersecurity and Computing at Abertay University, and PhD Award Recipient) is standing next to Debbie Meharg, Head of Applied Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University, Director of Education for SICSA, and the Awards Chair for the SICSA PhD Conference 2025

Gregor (Lecturer in the Department of Cybersecurity and Computing at Abertay University, and PhD Award Recipient) standing next to Debbie Meharg, Head of Applied Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University, Director of Education for SICSA, and the Awards Chair for the SICSA PhD Conference 2025

Haywood’s thesis on “Enhancing Privacy for Secure Internet Communications Using ILNP” focuses on how underlying communication protocols for the Internet could avoid privacy leaks, while continuing to utilise existing and unmodified hardware, infrastructure, and Internet services. His study was driven by his academic interest in the unintended design consequences within large interconnected systems:

I was captivated by working on a project that was socially relevant, deeply technical, and – ultimately – solvable. During my undergraduate degree, I started looking at private communication mechanisms as a side project which turned into my fourth year dissertation, and continued onwards within my PhD. I like finding these unanticipated problems, such as privacy leaks, security vulnerabilities, and environmental impacts, then designing new solutions that fix the problems without disrupting the operation of the larger systems at play.

(Dr Gregor Haywood)

Professor Saleem Bhatti (School of Computer Science, Thesis Supervisor) adds how Haywood’s work demonstrates what he believes to be ‘the first deployable mechanisms for perturbing traffic flow correlation attacks at the network level, as well as perturbing privacy attacks by traffic analysis as might be performed by a machine-learning system.’ For this reason, he was enthusiastic to nominate Haywood’s thesis for SICSA stating it is ‘an excellent balance between science and engineering’ that explores ‘a radical new architecture in addressing using the Identifier Locator Network Protocol (ILNP) to provide new privacy features, and an open-source implementation in FreeBSD that is usable across the existing Internet.’

The SICSA PhD Conference is a flagship event that brings together various participants from fourteen Scottish Universities to network, seek graduate researcher training, and share current interdisciplinary projects.  Dr. Tristan Henderson (Senior Lecturer and Computer Science Director of Postgraduate Research) comments that submitting to awards like SICSA encompasses the primary aim of a PhD which is ‘learning how to become a researcher.’  For this reason, SICSA is a valuable opportunity that allows for ‘visibility’ and ‘recognition’ of one’s work both nationally and internationally adds Professor Bhatti.

In recalling his own researcher journey, Dr. Haywood expresses that whether it is learning a ‘can-do attitude’ from his supervisor or picking up fun new quirks such as ‘hoarding hand-me-down computer hardware,’ the School of Computer Science and his PhD research have given him the space to thrive for who he is:

I suspect I will always have a compulsive need to understand things deeply – but now I have the tools to harness that into computer systems research, and whether it is celebrating the wins at conference dinners with my peers, or consoling each other at the pub when it falls apart, it is hard to put words to the joy I have found in being part of a community that can match my passion, debate my technical points, and jump on board with my research tangent conversation starters.

 It’s also very exciting to celebrate a success in privacy research. Many headlines are about data breaches and privacy failures, and so much research is about finding new privacy vulnerabilities. Being able to say “we made things better” is a great opportunity to inject some hope into the research community.                                            

(Dr Gregor Haywood)

This elation also extends to the pride that both Dr. Henderson and Professor Bhatti feel towards having an alumnus from the School of Computer Science win this award. ‘It is a great honour’ they both expressed, and a fantastic example of the impact of research outside of the university. Dr. Henderson adds that within Computer Science, there are a number of dissertation awards, including SICSA and the BCS in the UK, as well as the ACM internationally. He encourages students to indulge in these opportunities, with Dr. Haywood noting that ‘participating in this and other inter-institutional networking events was a valuable way for me to broaden my research mindset throughout the PhD’ and if you are considering applying yourself or nominating a student for it, ‘do it! You have nothing to lose and plenty to gain. Remember it is the reviewers’ job to judge your work, not yours – you just need to judge whether you have time to submit.’

Dr. Haywood is now a Lecturer in the Department of Cybersecurity and Computing at Abertay University with key aspects of his work being available to read online until his thesis is published in June 2026.

ILNP web page: https://ilnp.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk

Blog written by Nina Globerson