News

Sapere project comes to a successful end

Over the past three years the School has been involved in the Sapere project, funded by the European Commission. Sapere has been looking at new ways to build large-scale pervasive systems, moving away from traditional client/server approaches to explore biochemically-inspired system models in which services and users can “bond” spontaneously as they encounter each other in the real world. Sapere was co-ordinated by the University of Modena Reggio Emilia and — as well as St Andrews — involved the University of Bologna, University of Geneva, and Johannes Kepler University of Linz. Sapere had its final review this week and was ranked as “excellent … the project has even exceeded expectations”.

The project achieved considerable visibility by being deployed at the Vienna City Marathon to provide services including runner tracking and guiding spectators to possible viewing opportunities. The deployment had several thousands users downloading and using a smartphone app throughout the event, as well as several large attention-sensing public displays that responded directly to people stopping to look at them.

The scientific highlights of Sapere include developing a formal model of spontaneous interactions; building a middleware platform based on these ideas; developing a catalogue of useful patterns that describe co-ordinated interactions at a high level; and creating several exciting new algorithms for context awareness and situation recognition. This last activity was led from St Andrews by Simon Dobson, Juan Ye, and Graeme Stevenson, and allowed us to recognise activities going on in “busy” spaces where multiple things are happening simultaneously — a problem that has been extremely resistant to solution until now.

Sapere shows that pervasive systems are now “ready for prime time,” and that even research that seems highly speculative and challenging can lead to results that affect people’s lives directly. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with our collaborators, and we’ll certainly be looking to take these ideas forward in new projects and directions.

Here’s a non-technical overview video introducing Sapere:

 

Success in J.P.Morgan Code for Good Competition 2013

A team of Computer Science students from the University of St Andrews came first in the J.P.Morgan Code for Good Competition 2013

The Coding Challenge was open to all students enrolled fulltime at a university located in the United Kingdom, who are under-graduates or post-graduates and are 18 years of age or over.  Teams of 4-6 students competed against each other on behalf of a charity assigned to them in order to provide a technological solution to a problem that the charity faces.

The winning team  (four from St Andrews, one from Southampton and one from Warwick) created a solution for Eneza Education, whose mission is to make 50 million kids across rural Africa smarter. In Kiswahili, “eneza” means “to reach” or “to spread,” and the group distributes education through SMS and text based quizzes, tutorials and questions. The team created an Android-based application for teachers and parents, which, when implemented, can quadruple the educational impact for students.   The St Andrews team members comprised the following

  • Alexander Wallar
  • Chi-Jui Wu
  • Ilia Shumailov
  • Valentin Tunev

Tales from the Real World

School President James Anderson and Careers Adviser Ben Carter invited recent graduates Matt Hailey, Ali Scott, Craig Garrigan and Steve Lowson back to the School yesterday to share their experience of working in the real world since graduating, with our final year students.

They have been successful in securing positions at highly regarded companies including Sky Scanner, PlanForCloud, NCR and NCC Group. Talks described career paths, roles and responsibilities, professional development and current employment opportunities.

Find out more about using your Computer Science degree and read student case studies on the careers website. Thanks to all for a great afternoon. Yes, cakes were consumed.

CollageImage

Clockwise from top left:
Steve, Ali and Craig prepare to give their talk.
Matt and Ali reminisce in the coffee area.
James, Craig, Stephen, Ben, Ali and Matt joined our final year students for cake and questions.

Industrial Action Today

Dear Students,
As you probably know, all three main University trades unions have called for a withdrawal of labour on 31 October. In the School of Computer Science, we expect that most teaching scheduled that day will take place, and would advise all students to turn up for their lectures as normal, or even better, to turn up a little early just in case.

In particular, we can confirm that the Jack Cole and John Honey buildings will be open. Adequate safety cover, including first aiders and fire marshals will be in place.

Once we know what lectures, if any, have not been delivered, and whether the lecturers intend to cover the missed material themselves, we will make arrangements to fill any gaps. All lecture material should be placed on student resources as normal no later than the following day 1 Nov.

Steve Linton, Head of School

ITS & UIST 2013: “Influential and Ground Breaking”

These are words used by the Co-Chair of UIST 2013, Dr Shahram Izadi of Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK), to describe one of the prestigious conferences taking place in St Andrews this week.

“UIST is the leading conference on new user interface trends and technologies. Some of the most influential and ground breaking work on graphical user interfaces, multi-touch, augmented reality, 3D user interaction and sensing was published at this conference.

It is now in its 26th year, and the first time it has been hosted in the UK. We are very excited to be hosting a packed program at the University of St Andrews. The program includes great papers, demos, posters, a wet and wonderful student innovation competition, and a great keynote on flying robots.”

Ivan Poupyrev, principal research scientist at Disney Research in Pittsburgh, described hosting UIST in St Andrews as “an acknowledgment of some great research in human-computer interaction that is carried out by research groups in Scotland, including the University of St Andrews.”

Two major events taking place this week are the 8th ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS), and the 26th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), hosted by the Human Computer Interaction Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.

Read more about the events in the University News and local media.

Big Data Research Featured in MIT Technology Review

A survey article written by Jonathan Ward and Adam Barker has been featured in the MIT Technology Review.

Undefined By Data: A Survey of Big Data Definitions surveys the various definitions of big data offered by the world’s biggest and most influential high-tech organisations. The article then attempts to distill from all this noise a definition that everyone can agree on. The article was picked up by the MIT Technology Review and has fostered a lively discussion around a coherent definition; according to Topsy (social media analysis) the article has been retweeted over 400 times.

Creating High Value Cloud Services at ScotSoft Forum

On August 29th Gordon Baxter, Derek Wang and Ian Sommerville (St Andrews), along with Ian Allison (RGU) manned the stand for the SFC funded project “Creating High Value Cloud Services” at Scotland IS’s annual ScotSoft Forum. There were over 500 people at the event which was held in Edinburgh’s Sheraton Grand Hotel. The programme of talks that took place throughout the afternoon included presentations by Larry Cable (Salesforce) and a keynote by Vint Cerf (Google).

Find out more about the project on Services to the Cloud and The Cloudscape blog