Kamran Razavi: Bloomberg CodeCon winner

Congratulations to Kamran Razavi, one of our MSc in Dependable Software Systems (Erasmus Mundus) students, who won the recent Bloomberg CodeCon. CodeCon is a UK wide programming contest organised by Bloomberg and is hosted locally across multiple locations in the UK, one of which was located in the department of Physics at the University of St Andrews.

Kamran emerged first from 20 other contestants at the University of St Andrews and was ranked 19th among 217 other contestants UK-wide, coming from universities such as Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. He was awarded with a championship trophy, Bluetooth speakers, travel accessories and a ticket to London for the main contest, where the top three contestants from each local site will compete against each other.

The competition is highlighted through the University emails and after registering students can prepare themselves by solving previous problems.The competition itself, lasted 2 hours with 8 questions in total, which were algorithmic in nature, and required knowledge of data structures.

Kamran was able to solve 7 questions but was only able to submit 6, due to technical problems with the contest host website. The contest could have been taken in 15 programming languages including Java, C++, C, Python etc. Kamran used Java on this occasion and thanked Bloomberg, The School of Computer Science and The University for providing opportunities such as CodeCon. We wish him every success for the final contest.

Welcome to new 2016 PhD Students

The School is very happy to welcome its new group of PhD students who have started in 2016. Shown outside the Jack Cole Building on 13 October 2016 are:

(Back row, left to right) Fahrurrozi Rahman; Xue Guo; Teng Yu; Yanbei Chen; Guilherme Soares Carneiro; Yasir Alguwaifli; and Xu Zhu.

(Front row, left to right) Mun See Chang; Zahida Almuallem; Esme Benssassi; Sidi Zhan; and the Director of Postgraduate Research, Miguel Nacenta.

Absent from the photo are Dawand Sulaiman and Saad Attieh.

Google@Computer Science in St Andrews

The School hosted another successful Google event on Wednesday. Students heard first hand, from four of our talented alumni, and had an opportunity to chat with current students who have completed internships. The well-received and very well attended session also covered mock interviews and rewarded students with the customary pizza.

PhD Viva Success: Michael Mauderer

Belated congratulations to Michael Mauderer, who successfully defended his thesis earlier this month. Micheal’s thesis, augmenting visual perception with gaze-contigent displays, was supervised by Dr Miguel Nacenta. Professor Aaron Quigley acted as internal examiner and Professor Hans Gellersen, from Lancaster University acted as external examiner.

Welcome to new PhD students

We are delighted to introduce three female PhD students funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council.

Xue Guo (JC1.06)

“I am Xue Guo, a returning student from Beijing. My PhD research into Complex Networks is supervised by Prof. Simon Dobson. Last seven years, I hopped over five places: four undergraduate years in BUPT and UCSD, one master year in St Andrews, and two gap years – one in Phoenix TV as a technology journalist, and one in Skyscanner as a software engineer. A three-to-four-year research in one town seems quite a LONG journey for me, but I am sure it will NOT be a LONGLY one in this warm academic community of School of Computer Science. My current research interest is modelling real world phenomena using complex networks, esp. smart city design. Born in Beijing, a city with a population of over 20 million, I have experienced most urban problems that a metropolis can suffer from. I would like to design a research tool for the city designers to generate solutions to traffic congestion and give advice on city infrastructure distribution. I am looking forward to learning from you and exploring more applications of complex networks. In my free time, I enjoy fencing, snowboarding, calligraphy and music.”

Yanbei Chen (JC1.19)

“From 2011 to 2014, I was studying in Zhejiang University in China, with a speciality in Automation. In 2014, I started my master program in KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, with a major in System, Control and Robotics. In the summer of 2015, I enrolled in Tohoku University Engineering Summer Program in Japan. In the first half of 2016, I conducted my master thesis in the field of machine learning, deep learning and multimodal learning under the supervision of Dr. Atsuto Maki in Computer Vision and Active Perception Lab in KTH.Currently, with the scholarship from China Scholarship Council and University of St Andrews, I will start my PhD study under the supervision of Dr. Juan Ye. My research interests lie in the fields of activity recognition, machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. From now on, my research will focus on activity recognition based on sensor data from smartphone. In my leisure time, I enjoy music, travel, reading, and jogging.”

Sidi Zhan (JC1.11)

“Hi, I am Sidi Zhan! I completed my BEng in Computer Science at Beijing Foreign Studies University, focusing on recommending doctors to patients in online healthcare QA community. I am now working as a PhD student in Computer Science under the supervision of Dr. Tristan Henderson and Dr. Juan Ye. My proposed research is to enhance peers mutual help and promote their social support in online healthcare community by using recommender to match-make the patient users. My research project will include collecting and analyzing users’ profiles and records data, so policies on user privacy protection will also be examined. I enjoy studying and living in St Andrews, the beautiful coastal city, very much. I am so willing to combine my hobbies with the life here by experiencing local culture, like jogging along the East Sands, singing in a chorus and going Ceilidh dances.”

Seminar: A Changing Landscape: Securing The Internet Of Things (IoT)

Professor Sanjay Jha, Director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Laboratory (Cyspri) at UNSW.

The first part of this talk will discuss how the community is converging towards the IoT vision having worked in wireless sensor networking and Machine-2-Machine (M2M) communication. This will follow a general discussion of security challenges in IoT.

Finally I will discuss some results from an ongoing projects on security of bodywork devices and IoT. Wireless bodyworn sensing devices are becoming popular for fitness, sports training and personalized healthcare applications. Securing the data generated by these devices is essential if they are to be integrated into the current health infrastructure and employed in medical applications. In this talk, I will discuss a mechanism to secure data provenance and location proof for these devices by exploiting symmetric spatio-temporal characteristics of the wireless link between two communicating parties. Our solution enables both parties to generate closely matching `link’ fingerprints, which uniquely associate a data session with a wireless link such that a third party, at a later date, can verify the links the data was communicated on. These fingerprints are very hard for an eavesdropper to forge, lightweight compared to traditional provenance mechanisms, and allow for interesting security properties such as accountability and non-repudiation. I will present our solution with experiments using bodyworn devices in scenarios approximating actual device deployment. I will also touch upon other research on secure reprogramming of IoT devices over wireless networks.

Event details

When: 8th September 2016 12:30 - 13:30
Where: Honey 103 - GFB
Format: Seminar

PhD Viva Success: Vinodh Rajan Sampath

Congratulations to Vinodh Rajan Sampath, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured below with supervisor Dr Mark-Jan Nederhof, research student Juan Mendoza Santana and internal examiner Dr Tom Kelsey. Dr Peter Stokes from King’s College London, acted as external examiner.

Could your car be used to spy on you?

In the not-so-distant future, cars won’t require a human driver anymore. They will drive autonomously, and you will be their passenger. However, these vehicles will also need to know your location, and, in some cases (e.g. for taxis and car rentals), your identity. Consequently, your movements might be tracked.

How do you feel about your car collecting such private data?

Tell us what you think! Please complete the online survey here.

The survey is completely anonymous. The record of your survey responses will not contain any identifying information about you, such as your name or e-mail address.

If there are any additional questions or comments, please email Tobias Meyer or Prof Saleem Bhatti.

Thank you very much for your help and support!

Computer Science: June Graduation Reception 2016

Congratulations to our Senior Honours Class of 2016, and our PhD students Dr Jan de Muijnck-Hughes, Dr Christopher Davies, Dr Jakub Dostal, Dr Marc Werfs, Dr Ditchaphong Phoomikiattisak, Dr Bruce Simpson and Dr Ward Jaradat who graduated yesterday. Students were invited to a reception in the school to celebrate their achievement with staff, friends and family.

Saad Attieh, one of our talented SH students was awarded this year’s Principal’s Medal, which recognises exceptional endeavour and achievement during a student’s time at St Andrews. Read more about the medal and his journey in the University News.

Our graduates move on to a wide variety of interesting and challenging employment and further study opportunities, and we wish them all well with their future careers.

SACHI presence at CHI 2016

The SACHI group were well represented at CHI 2016 held in San Jose, California. The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction, and an exciting venue to discover, discuss and learn about the future of how people interact with technology.

SACHI presented five full papers, one note and a workshop paper, ran a successful workshop on Proxemic Mobile Collocated Interactions and designed many of the vibrant SIGCHI banners on display throughout the conference.

Well done to all concerned. SACHI group activities, conference keynote and plenary sessions are pictured below. CHI 2017 will be held in Denver, Colorado next year with a September deadline for papers and notes.

Images courtesy of Aaron Quigley

Computer Science Blog