Director of Research Juliana Bowles hosted a “Coming-back-to-school-for-research day” on 13 June, providing an opportunity for research staff and students to talk about current projects and future collaborations.
Research Groups
Seminar Talk from a SICSA visitor (Daniel Garijo) Friday 10 June, 11.00am
Accelerating Research Software Understandability Through Knowledge Capture
Summary: Research Software is key to understand, reproduce and reuse existing work in many disciplines, ranging from Geosciences to Astronomy or Artificial Intelligence. However, research software is usually difficult to find, reuse, compare and understand due to its disconnected documentation (dispersed in manuals, readme files, web sites, and code comments) and a lack of structured metadata to describe it. These problems affect not only researchers, but also students who aim to compare published findings and policy makers seeking clarity on a scientific result. In this talk I will present the main research challenges and our recent efforts towards facilitating software understanding by automatically capturing Knowledge Graphs from software documentation and code.
Short bio: Dr. Daniel Garijo Verdejo is a Distinguished Researcher at the Ontology Engineering Group of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). Previously, he held a Research Computer Scientist position at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. Daniel’s research activities focus on e-Science and Knowledge Capture, specifically on how to increase the understandability of research software and scientific workflows by creating Knowledge Graph from their documentation and provenance (i.e., steps, outputs, inputs, intermediate results).
For this talk we will use a hybrid approach: In person (Jack Cole, 1.33) and online, via Teams.
If you wish to attend it would be helpful if you could register on eventbrite to let us know if you intend to attend in person or online
All Welcome!
REF Results
We’re delighted that the world-leading quality of our research has been recognised in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework.
Congratulations to all members of our School!
More Information on CS Ref results can be found on our Research page
Systems Research Group seminars
The Systems Research Group is re-starting their seminars series from 6th May 2022. Seminars will take place every two weeks at 1pm, on Fridays. From May to July the seminars will be online (SRG Teams), while from September onward we aim to move them to a hybrid format. More information on the schedule can be found on the seminars page of the Systems Research Group site.
Learning to Describe: A New Approach to Computer Vision Based Ancient Coin Analysis
The work on deep learning based understanding of ancient coins by Jessica Cooper, who is a Research Assistant and a part-time PhD student supervised by Oggie Arandjelovic and David Harrison has been chosen as a featured, “title story” article by the Journal Sci where it was published in a Special Issue Machine Learning and Vision for Cultural Heritage.
Open source contributors sought for an interview
MANAGING OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS ON GITHUB — SUCCESS FACTORS AND PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
As a part of my, Julia Seeger’s, MSc Dissertation in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews I am looking for volunteers for an interview. This interview is a part of a research project focussed on success factors and performance indicators of managing open source projects hosted on GitHub.
I am looking for core contributors to open source projects hosted on GitHub. Ideally, the project should have configured and make use of Travis CI, and should have a history of pull requests before and after the configuration of Travis CI.
I would firstly be interested in your opinion about success factors and performance indicators that I have identified by analysing the public GitHub repository of your project with the help of the GitHub API. I will ask if, as a core contributor of the project, you would agree or disagree with my findings. Secondly, I am interested in your personal experience in managing a repository of an open source project on GitHub, and the factors and managing techniques you identified to be important for a successful project.
The interview will take place in a form of a video or an audio call via Skype for Business or Microsoft Teams. The interview will take place during July 2020, consists of 6 questions and will last around 25 minutes. If you agree to participate, questions will be given to you at least three days in advance.
If you are willing to participate, please get in touch using the contact details below. You will then be given a Participant Information Sheet that further details my research, and will have the opportunity to ask questions, before being asked whether you consent to participate.
Contact Details
Researcher: Julia Seeger
js433@st-andrews.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr. Olexandr Konovalov
obk1@st-andrews.ac.uk
Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for Nguyen Dang
Congratulations to Dr Nguyen Dang, who has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. The 3 year Fellowships are intended to assist those at an early stage of their academic careers to undertake a significant piece of publishable work. Nguyen will be researching Constraint-based automated generation of synthetic benchmark instances.
Abstract summary: “Combinatorial problems such as routing or timetabling are ubiquitous in society, industry, and academia. In the quest to develop algorithms to solve these problems effectively, we need benchmark instances. An instance is an example of the problems at hand for testing how well an algorithm performs. Having rich benchmarks of instances is essential for algorithm developers to gain understanding about the strengths and weaknesses of their approaches, and ensure successful applications in practice. This fellowship will provide a fully automated system for generating valid and useful synthetic benchmark instances based on a constraint modelling pipeline that supports several algorithmic techniques.”
Winnability of Klondike Solitaire research features in Major Nelson’s video podcast
Research carried out by Charlie Blake and Ian Gent to compute the approximate odds of winning any version of solitaire features in Major Nelson’s Video Podcast [Interview with Ian and Charlie starts 23:56] for XBox news today.
Today is National Solitaire Day and the 30th anniversary of the game. The celebrations include an invitation to participate in a record breaking attempt at the most games of Microsoft Solitaire completed in one day. You can download the collection free or play it through your browser.
The Klondike Solitaire research also featured in the New Scientist last year.
Link to the full paper on arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.12314
Online article published in Technology Nov 17th 2019: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2223643-we-finally-know-the-odds-of-winning-a-game-of-solitaire/
The Serums Project Consortium meeting
This Week Dr Juliana Bowles brought together nine leading academic and industry partners for the 4th Consortium meeting for the Serums project.
The project aims to produce tools and technologies to support future-generation healthcare systems that will integrate home-based healthcare into a holistic treatment plan, reducing cost and travel-associated risks and increasing quality of healthcare provision.
For further information on the project visit the Serums website
Image and text provided by Annemarie Paton
Modern practices of sharing computational research
As a part of the Love Data Week, Olexandr Konovalov will give a talk on Tuesday 11 February, 3pm, Physics Lecture Theatre C.
Abstract: Have you been frustrated by trying to use someone else’s code which is non-trivial to install? Have you tried to make supplementary code for your paper to be easily accessible for the reader? If so, you certainly know that this may require non-trivial efforts. I will demonstrate some tools that may help to create reproducible computational experiments, and will explain which skills will be needed to use these tools. The talk will demonstrate examples in Python and R runnable in Jupyter notebooks. You are welcome to bring your laptop to try these examples online. No prior knowledge of programming is required.
Links:
- Templates for reproducible experiments in GAP, Python and R
- Code4REF guidance on recording research software in Pure
References:
- The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) demos
- Ten simple rules for writing and sharing computational analyses in Jupyter Notebooks PLOS Computational Biology paper by Adam Rule, Amanda Birmingham, Cristal Zuniga, Ilkay Altintas, Shih-Cheng Huang, Rob Knight, Niema Moshiri, Mai H. Nguyen, Sara Brin Rosenthal, Fernando Pérez and Peter W. Rose
- Hidden REF announcement
Event details
- When: 11th February 2020 15:00 - 16:00
- Where: Phys Theatre C
- Format: Talk