PGR Seminar – Erdem Kus & Junyu Zhang

You are warmly invited to the next PGR Seminar.

Date & Time: Monday 20/10/2025 14:00-15:00

Location: JC 1.33A

  1. Speaker: Erdem Kus

Title: Frugal Algorithm Selection for Combinatorial Search

Abstract: Solvers for combinatorial search and optimisation problems often exhibit highly complementary performance: instances that are hard for one solver may be easy for another. The Algorithm Selection Problem (ASP) addresses this by predicting, for each problem instance, which solver will perform best. Machine learning models trained for this purpose, however, are typically expensive to construct, as they require exhaustive solver runs on all training instances to obtain ground-truth performance data.

In this work, we propose a frugal alternative that formulates algorithm selection as an active learning problem. Instead of uniformly evaluating all solver–instance pairs, our method intelligently selects the most informative ones, thereby drastically reducing the cost of data collection. We show that standard active learning techniques are inadequate for this setting, as they overlook the structure and cost characteristics unique to algorithm selection. To address this, we introduce novel, cost-aware active learning strategies that leverage auxiliary models to balance informativeness and evaluation cost.

Bio: Erdem is a PhD candidate whose research focuses on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Constraint Programming (CP).

  1. Speaker: Junyu Zhang

Title: Remaking Characters in Heritage Contexts to Support Inclusive Learning

Abstract: Characters in immersive environments have the potential to enrich user experience, improving engagement with heritage and in so doing benefiting heritage organisations and their communities. Creating authentic digital scenes based upon survey, archaeological and historical data, co-creative design and community engagement enables communities and their visitors to understand the past better. The understanding of authenticity stimulates the potential of enriching cultural heritage with the details of lives past and also discusses how this research benefits the Sustainable Development Goals.

Bio: Minty is a PhD candidate exploring the authenticity of characters to support inclusive learning in heritage contexts. She is interested in how digital technologies can be used in the intersection of different disciplines to achieve SDGs in the field of cultural heritage, so as to enhance the promotion, representation, and well-being in digital humanities education and also affect resonated dialogue and thinking among diverse people and communities in facing the current challenges.

We hope you can join us!

PGR Seminar – Qurat ul ain Shaheen

You are warmly invited to the next PRG Seminar.

Date & Time: Monday 13/10/2025 14:00-14:40

Location: JC 1.33A

Speaker: Qurat ul ain Shaheen

Title: A Framework for Uncertainty Sampling in Active Learning

Abstract: Uncertainty sampling is an active learning paradigm where data instances representing maximum uncertainty for a machine learning model are selected for training. This talk will explore existing uncertainty modelling approaches for binary classification of categorical data.  It will introduce a conceptual framework to improve uncertainty modelling and present some preliminary results.

Bio: Qurat ul ain Shaheen is a final year PhD researcher. Her research focuses on modelling uncertainty in active learning.

We hope you can join us!

Young Software Engineer of the Year 2025 Awards

Huge congratulations to Verity Powel, a winner at last night’s Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards (https://www.scotlandis.com/blog/rugby-video-tech-scores-top-award-for-st-andrews-student/). Her final year project “Video Analytics For Rugby Skills Training” was nominated by the school (https://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/csblog/2025/07/28/nomination-to-young-software-engineering-of-the-year-awards-2025/) in June. The awards were announced at the ScotSoft 2025 (https://www.scotlandis.com/scotsoft-2025/), Scotland’s leading tech conference at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

The Young Software Engineer of the Year accolades are awarded to the best undergraduate software projects from students studying computer science and software engineering in Scotland. Over the years, St Andrews has many finalists and prize winners.

PGR Seminar – David Morrison

You are warmly invited to the next PRG Seminar.

Date & Time: Monday 06/10/2025 14:00-14:40

Location: JC 1.33A

Speaker: David Morrison

Title: Synthetic Whole Slide Image Patch Embeddings for Multiple Instance Learning

Abstract: Obtaining high-quality data is a persistent challenge for the training of computational pathology models. As medical data, Whole-slide images (WSIs) are often held under restrictive terms by medical institutions and, as a result, are hard to access by researchers. Where data is available, the number of whole slide images can be limited and skewed towards common pathology types. In addition, there can be issues with labelling: slide-level labels may lack information about specific pathologies, for example, they may be limited to binary labels of normal or malignant, while annotations at the level of patches are rarely available.

Synthetic data generation is a possible solution to these problems by allowing researchers to produce data on demand that can be used in an unrestricted manner with high-quality labels. I have previously presented on the generation of synthetic patch data. In this talk, I will discuss an extension to this work in which this approach is combined with models trained to characterise the slide as a whole in order to provide a synthesis process for data for use with multiple instance learning techniques, commonly used in whole slide image classification.

We hope you can join us!

 

PGR Seminar – Sharon Pisani & Mirza Hossain

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 3rd October 11:00-12:00 in JC 1.33A.

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Sharon and Mirza’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Sharon Pisani

Title: Building Sustainable Heritage Virtual Museums for Communities using Sociodata

Abstract: Virtual museums are moving beyond simple digitisation of artefacts to become dynamic platforms for community engagement and sustainable development. This talk introduces the VERA Platform, which combines a flexible Virtual Museum Infrastructure with a new layer of sustainability-oriented contextual data called sociodata. Sociodata links heritage objects to their cultural landscapes, local communities, and relevant Sustainable Development Goals, enabling richer discovery, analysis, and reuse. In this talk, I will outline the platform’s architecture and metadata model. The talk will highlight technical challenges such as interoperability with European data spaces, and supporting interactive storytelling at scale—issues highly relevant to digital infrastructure and data-driven research in the heritage sector.

Bio: Sharon is a PhD researcher examining the role of emergent digital technologies in preserving and engaging with cultural heritage while supporting sustainable development. Her research focuses on digitising cultural landscapes—both natural and cultural heritage—to assess various impacts on heritage and community identities. She explores how digital tools, including 3D scanning, 3D modeling, and mixed reality, can aid in recreating and safeguarding heritage at risk.

Mirza Hossain

Title: Fishing for monosemantic neurons in histopathology foundation models

Abstract: This early-stage study introduces Histoscope, an interactive system for examining sparse autoencoders (SAEs) that are trained on top of the UNI pathology encoder. Vision transformers for histopathology often exhibit superposition, where single neurons respond to multiple distinct tissue patterns, making interpretation difficult. Histoscope provides quantitative metrics and visualisations to assess whether neurons are monosemantic—associated with a single concept—or polysemantic—associated with multiple concepts. The work highlights methods for analysing internal representations of histopathology foundation models and contributes to efforts toward more transparent AI in pathology.

Bio: Mirza Hossain is a second-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on multimodal AI in medical imaging with an emphasis on mechanistic interpretability of large foundation models. He is supervised by Dr. David Harris-Birtill.

 

The St Andrews Global Research Centre for Changing Climates Science, Society, Solutions

The next 600 years of St Andrews history will be set against a radically altered climate. The St Andrews Centre for Changing Climates, initiated this September, will leverage insights from climate change past and present, spanning science and society, to better understand the diverse array of challenges posed by a changing climate, and the solutions required to address them. Structured around cross cutting themes (Thresholds, Extremes, Solutions) and critical research topics (Environmental history; Climate and culture; Climate fundamentals and impacts; Adaptation and mitigation; Climate, health, and wellbeing), the Centre will pursue a distinctively diverse, cross-disciplinary agenda of research and impact, of benefit to researchers, decision makers, and the public. With a vision of interdisciplinarity possible only at an institution like St Andrews, the Centre will inspire uniquely nuanced, well-informed, and long-term perspectives on the scientific, political, ethical, and social dimensions of climate change.

The Centre’s Director, Dr James Rae, Reader in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said: “St Andrews is uniquely well positioned to pull together research on the plurality of changing climates – physical, economic, social, cultural – to better understand how we can address this critical global challenge. Dr Alan Miller from the School of Computer Science will be participating in the research center.

St Andrews Computer Science makes big splash at Digital Heritage 2025

Sharon Pisani, Maria Andrei, Junyu Zhang and Alan Miller travelled to Siene for Digital Heritage 2025. Four paper presentations, project workshops and much networking later we reflect on a successful conference.

We are proud to announce that Sharon Pisani from Open Virtual Worlds has received the Best Paper Award for her wonderful work “Introducing Sociodata in Virtual Museums: A Holistic Approach for Sustainable Development in Cultural Landscapes”, at the leading international conference of Digital Heritage Congress 2025! The conference was inspiringly hosted in the beautiful medieval city of Siena. Congratulations to Sharon on her well-deserved achievement!

The papers presented included:

Remaking Lost Communities in Virtual Cultural Landscapes
Junyu Zhang, Miriam Sturdee, Perin Westerhof Nyman, Iain Oliver, Jacquie Aitken , Alan Miller

Designing a Virtual Museum Ecosystem for the Cloud
Alan Miller , Catherine. Cassidy Sharon. Pisani , Maria. Andrei  Junyu. Zhang , Sarah. Kennedy , Iain. Oliver , Jacquie. Aitken, Raymond . Williams,, and Vanessa. Martin,

Introducing Sociodata in Virtual Museums: A Holistic Approach for Sustainable Development in Cultural Landscapes
Sharon Pisani , Alan Miller , Catherine Cassidy , Loraine Clarke , Iain Oliver , and Gonçalo Gomes

Bridging Psychological Distance from Climate Change through Experiential Learning with Heritage Organisations
Maria Andrei, Sonja Heinrich, Jason Jacques, Iain Oliver, Sharon Pisani, Alan Miller, Richard Bates

We also participated in a workshop lead by HERITALISE Horizon Europe project developing tools for the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage.

Thank you to the Timespan Museum and West Highland Museum for their support and participation as well as the Schools of Earth and Environmental Sciences, History and Biology for contributions.

Thanks also to the School of Computer Science, and  Innovate UK for funding the presentations and to the HERITALISE project https://heritalise-eccch.eu/ and the CULTURALTY project https://culturality.museum/, for supporting  work reported in two of the papers.