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ACM SIGCHI: Communication Ambassador & Turing Award Celebration News

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

Hot off the press: Type-Driven Development with Idris

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 runs London Marathon 2017 for Guide Dogs

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.

Distinguished Lecture Series 2017: Dr David Manlove

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.

Team NOMAD win IDEA Explosion 2017

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.


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Research on containers for HPC environments featured in CACM and HPC Wire

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.“

Success in the Laidlaw Undergraduate Internship Programme in Research and Leadership

Congratulations to Patrick Schrempf and Billy Brown who have been successful in their applications for a Laidlaw Undergraduate Internship in Research and Leadership for 2017. You can read further details about Billy and Patrick below.

Billy Brown:

I’m a fourth year Computer Science student from Belgium with too much interest for the subject. I play and referee korfball for the university, and I am fascinated by Old English and Norse history and mythology. I plan on using the Laidlaw Internship programme to get into the field of Computer Science research.

Project summary:

The Essence Domain Inference project aims to improve automated decision making by optimising the understanding of the statements used to define a problem specification. As part of the compilation of the high level Essence specification language, this project would tighten the domains to which a specified problem applies, with a domain inference algorithm.

The work is very much in the context of the recently-announced EPSRC grant working on automated constraint modelling in an attempt to advance the state of the art in solving complex combinatorial search problems. The modelling pipeline is akin to a compiler in that we refine a specification in the Essence language Billy mentions down to a number of powerful solving formalisms. The work Billy plan is to improve the refinement process and therefore the performance of the solvers, leading to higher quality solutions more quickly.

Patrick Schrempf:
I am currently a third year Computer Science student from Vienna. After enjoying doing research with the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction (SACHI) group last year, I am looking forward to the Laidlaw Internship Programme. Apart from research and studying, I enjoy training and competing with the Triathlon Club and the Pool Society.
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Chris Norval wins best paper at Mining Online Health Reports workshop

St Andrews researchers Chris Norval and Tristan Henderson won the Best Paper award at the Mining Online Health Reports workshop, part of the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2017). The workshop brought together experts from academia, industry and the health sector to discuss techniques and future priorities for analysing online data for health research.

Norval and Henderson’s paper argued that the successful exploitation of people’s social data requires new and usable methods of obtaining consent, and proposed the use of machine learning algorithms to predict when someone is likely to give consent for their data to be used. This work forms part of a Wellcome Trust funded project on understanding consent for sharing health data over online social networks.