Research

PGR Seminar with Mustafa Abdelwahed and Maria Andrei

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 6th December at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below is a title and Abstract for Mustafa and Maria’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Mustafa Abdelwahed:

Title: Behaviour Planning: A toolbox for diverse planning

Abstract:

Diverse planning approaches are utilised in real-world applications like risk management, automated streamed data analysis, and malware detection. These approaches aim to create diverse plans through a two-phase process. The first phase generates plans, while the second selects a subset of plans based on a diversity model. A diversity model is a function that quantifies the diversity of a given set of plans based on a provided distance function.

Unfortunately, existing diverse planning approaches do not account for those models when generating plans and struggle to explain why any two plans are different.

Existing diverse planning approaches do not account for those models when generating plans, hence struggle to explain why any two plans are different, and are limited to classical planning.

To address such limitations, we introduce Behaviour Planning, a novel toolbox that creates diverse plans based on customisable diversity models and can explain why two plans are different concerning such models.

Maria Andrei: 

Title: Leveraging Immersive Technology to Enhance Climate Communication, Education & Action

Abstract: Climate change represents one of the most pressing challenges of our time, not only in its environmental impacts, but also as a pivotal science communication problem. Despite widespread scientific consensus on the causes and mitigation strategies for climate change, public understanding remains deeply fragmented and polarized. This disconnect hinders the collective action required from individuals, organizations, and policymakers to combat global warming effectively. My research explores the potential of immersive technologies to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and public understanding by leveraging experiential learning experiences to inspire the attitudinal and behavioural shifts necessary to address climate change.

PGR Seminar with Carla Davesa Sureda

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 22nd November at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below is a Title and Abstract for Carla’s talk – Please do come along if you are able.

Title:

Towards High-Level Modelling in Automated Planning

Abstract:

Planning is a fundamental activity, arising frequently in many contexts, from daily tasks to industrial processes. The planning task consists of selecting a sequence of actions to achieve a specified goal from specified initial conditions. The Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) is the leading language used in the field of automated planning to model planning problems. Previous work has highlighted the limitations of PDDL, particularly in terms of its expressivity. Our interest lies in facilitating the handling of complex problems and enhancing the overall capability of automated planning systems. Unified-Planning is a Python library offering high-level API to specify planning problems and to invoke automated planners. In this paper, we present an extension of the UP library aimed at enhancing its expressivity for high-level problem modelling. In particular, we have added an array type, an expression to count booleans, and the allowance for integer parameters in actions. We show how these facilities enable natural high-level models of three classical planning problems.

Doughnuts will be available! 🍩

Fully funded PhD scholarship in Algorithms for Data Science

Lead supervisor: Dr Peter Macgregor

Application deadline: 1 March 2025

Project description:

Modern data science and machine learning applications involve datasets with millions of data points and hundreds of dimensions. For example, deep learning pipelines produce massive vector datasets representing text, image, audio and other data types. The analysis of such datasets with classical algorithms often requires significant time and/or computational resources which may not be available in many applications.

This motivates the development of a new generation of fast algorithms for data analysis, running in linear or sub-linear time and often producing an approximate result rather than an exact one. Moreover, the dataset may change over time, requiring dynamic algorithms which handle updates efficiently.

This project will tackle aspects of the design, analysis, and implementation of algorithms for processing large dynamic datasets, with the aim to develop new algorithms with state-of-the-art practical performance and/or theoretical guarantees. This could involve performing new analysis of existing algorithms, designing new algorithms with provable guarantees, or implementing heuristic algorithms with state-of-the-art empirical performance.

Possible Directions

Potential areas of research, depending on the interests of the candidate include:

  • Developing improved nearest-neighbour search algorithms (e.g., based on kd-trees, HNSW, locality-sensitive hashing).
  • Exploring any connection between hierarchical clustering algorithms and nearest-neighbour search algorithms.
  • Creating new dynamic or hierarchical clustering algorithms (e.g. based on spectral clustering or DBSCAN).
  • Creating dynamic algorithms for numerical linear algebra. For example, maintaining the PCA of a dynamically changing dataset.
  • Any other project in the area of algorithmic data science and machine learning.

Applicants should have a strong interest in the mathematical analysis of algorithms, knowledge of topics in discrete mathematics and linear algebra, and some familiarity with existing algorithms for data analysis and machine learning. Strong programming skills would also be desirable.

The scholarship:

We have one fully-funded scholarship available, starting in September 2025. The scholarship covers all tuition fees irrespective of country of origin and includes a stipend valued at £19,705 per annum. More details of the scholarship can be found here: https://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/csblog/2024/10/24/phd-studentships-available-for-2025-entry/, but please note the different application deadline.

Eligibility criteria:

We are looking for highly motivated research students keen to be part of a diverse and supportive research community. Applicants must hold a good Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a related area appropriate for the topic of this PhD.

International applications are welcome. We especially encourage female applicants and underrepresented minorities to apply. The School of Computer Science was awarded the Athena SWAN Silver award for its sustained progression in advancing equality and representation, and we welcome applications from those suitably qualified from all genders, all races, ethnicities and nationalities, LGBT+, all or no religion, all social class backgrounds, and all family structures to apply for our postgraduate research programmes.

To apply:

Interested applicants can contact Peter Macgregor with an outline proposal.

Full instructions for the formal application process

The deadline for applications is 1 March 2025.

PGR Seminar with Daniel Wyeth and Ferdia McKeogh

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 15th November at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below is a Title and Abstract for Daniel’s and Ferdia’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Daniel:

Deep Priors: Integrating Domain Knowledge into Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks represent the state of the art for learning complex functions purely from data.  There are however problems, such as medical imaging, where data is limited, and effective training of such networks is difficult.  Moreover, this requirement for large datasets represents a deficiency compared to human learning, which is able harness prior understanding to acquire new concepts with very few examples.  My work looks at methods for integrating domain knowledge into deep neural networks to guide training so that fewer examples are required.  In particular I explore probabilistic atlases and probabilistic graphical models as representations for this prior information, architectures which enable networks to use these, and the application of these to problems in medical image understanding.

Ferdia:

“Lessons Learned From Emulating Architectures”

Automatically generating fast emulators from formal architecture specifications avoids the error-prone and time-consuming effort of manually implementing an emulator. The key challenge is achieving high performance from correctness-focused specifications; extracting relevant functional semantics and performing aggressive optimisations. In this talk I will present my work thus far, and reflect on some of the unsuccessful paths of research.

Doughnuts will be available! 🍩

Fully funded PhD scholarship in software ethics

Supporting ethical deliberation in the software lifecycle

 

Lead supervisor: Dr Dharini Balasubramaniam

Application deadline: 1 March 2025

Project description:

Software ethics covers a broad spectrum of concerns including accountability, fairness, privacy and data protection, transparency, safety, security, accessibility, digital inclusion and sustainability. Much of the current dialogue on software ethics relates to the development, deployment and use of AI-based solutions, although there are ethical concerns related to most, if not all, software application domains. The pervasive nature of software, its critical importance to the functioning of many sectors, and the opaque nature of software-supported decision making in some domains all make it vital that ethical issues are explicitly considered throughout the software lifecycle.

There is generic ethics guidance, such as the ACM / IEEE Software Engineering Code of Ethics and sets of ethical principles specifically aimed at domains such as AI, available to software engineers. Generic and specific concepts such as value-based software development and responsible AI have been proposed to encourage ethical software development. However, there is still a lack of processes, notations, tools and training available to software professionals to support systematic ethical deliberation and ethics-driven development in practice.
This project will explore and attempt to address this gap. The student will design and develop ways to explicitly capture ethical requirements, risks and mitigations as first-class concepts in software artefacts. They will implement tools that work with these specifications to analyse the compliance of software artefacts with ethical requirements, and highlight potential violations and consequences. Interviews with software professionals and service providers may be used to inform and evaluate the efficacy and viability of outcomes. Open-source projects in chosen application domains may also be used for case study-based evaluation.

Topics of interest:

Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • A framework of ethical concerns that apply to software,
  • Notations to represent ethical requirements, risks and mitigations as first-class concepts in software design and implementation,
  • Tool support for the representation and analysis of ethical concerns in software artefacts,
  • Process and tool support for considering specific aspects of software ethics, such as bias avoidance, transparency, sustainability or accessibility, and
  • Integration of ethical training and deliberation within project and product management environments.

The scholarship:

We have one fully-funded scholarship available, starting in September 2025. The scholarship covers all tuition fees irrespective of country of origin and includes a stipend valued at £19,705 per annum. More details of the scholarship can be found here: https://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/csblog/2024/10/24/phd-studentships-available-for-2025-entry/, but please note the different application deadline.

Eligibility criteria:

We are looking for highly motivated research students keen to be part of a diverse and supportive research community. Applicants must hold a good Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a related area appropriate for the topic of this PhD.

International applications are welcome. We especially encourage female applicants and underrepresented minorities to apply. The School of Computer Science was awarded the Athena SWAN Silver award for its sustained progression in advancing equality and representation, and we welcome applications from those suitably qualified from all genders, all races, ethnicities and nationalities, LGBT+, all or no religion, all social class backgrounds, and all family structures to apply for our postgraduate research programmes.

To apply:

Interested applicants can contact Dharini Balasubramaniam with an outline proposal. Full instructions for the formal application process can be found at https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/computer-science/prospective/pgr/how-to-apply/.

The deadline for applications is 1 March 2025.

GAP Days Summer 2024 @ St Andrews

The School of Computer Science hosted this years Summer GAP Days between 26th August and 30th August.

GAP Days are workshops where developers and users with programming experience are invited to influence the future development of [GAP] by initiating and contributing to discussions and coding sprints.

These GAP Days have been special as we celebrated 10 years of the [Digraphs] package as well as 10 years of [GAP Days] (to the week!).

We had a great selection of speakers and attendees from varied backgrounds, which cumulated in the release of the re-vamped GAP webpage, and over 30 new versions of packages!

SACHI Seminar: Rights-driven Development

Abstract:

Alex will discuss a critique of modern software engineering and outline how it systematically produces systems that have negative social consequences. To help counter this trend, he offers the notion of rights-driven development, which puts the concept of a right at the heart of software engineering practices. Alex’s first step to develop rights-driven practices is to introduce a language for rights in software engineering. He provides an overview of the elements such a language must contain and outlines some ideas for developing a domain-specific language that can be integrated with modern software engineering approaches. 

Bio:

Alex Voss, who’s an Honorary Lecturer here at the school and an external member of our group. Alex was also a Technology Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and an Associate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard.

Alex holds a PhD in Informatics and works at the intersection of the social sciences and computer science. His current research aims to develop new representations, practices and tools for rights-respecting software engineering. He is also working on the role that theories of causation have in making sense of complex socio-technical systems.

His research interests include: causality in computing, specifically in big data and machine learning applications; human-centric co-realization of technologies; responsible innovation; computing and society; computer-based and computer-aided research methods.

More about Alex: https://research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/en/persons/alexander-voss

Event details:

  • When: 28th February 2024 12:30 – 13:30
  • Where: Jack Cole 1.19

If you’re interested in attending any of the seminars in room 1.19, please email the SACHI seminar coordinator: aaa8@st-andrews.ac.uk so they can make appropriate arrangements for the seminar based on the number of attendees.