Research Groups

PhD viva success: Evan Brown

Congratulations to Evan Brown, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured with Internal examiner Dr Tristan Henderson and external examiner Professor Chris Marsden, Professor of Internet Law at the University of Sussex.

Evan’s PhD research on using corpus linguistics to build collaborative legal research tools was supervised by Professor Aaron Quigley.

Distinguished Speaker: Australia, Columbia and Thailand

This Saturday Professor Aaron Quigley will deliver a keynote talk on Global Human Computer Interaction at the Thai SIGCHI Symposium in Bangkok. This is the first symposium of the Bangkok ACM SIGCHI Chapter which aims to connect the Thai UX and HCI communities together with those beyond their borders. This talk is part of the Distinguished Speaker Program (DSP) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

In May, Professor Quigley will travel to Melbourne and Sydney Australia as part of the ACM DSP program. First, he will deliver a talk on the Future of Interaction at the Melbourne Knowledge Week followed by a “fireside chat” and panel in the University of Melbourne and finally a seminar in the University of Sydney. His talks will cover a number of areas of research he explores with his colleagues and students in SACHI, the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group.

In August, Aaron has been invited to deliver a keynote at the 5th Workshop on ICTs for improving Patients Rehabilitation Research Techniques in Popayán, Colombia. This talk will focus on some of Aaron’s more recent, and unpublished research, in augmenting interactions in AR and his older work on technology for rehabilitation and older people.

Professor Quigley is currently on sabbatical in the National University of Singapore but he will attend the CHI 2019 conference in Glasgow this May with SACHI colleagues and graduate students presenting their latest research.

Tom Kelsey appointed Associate Editor of Human Reproduction Update

Arne Sunde, the incoming Editor-in-Chief, has appointed Tom Kelsey as Associate Editor of Human Reproduction Update.

Human Reproduction Update is the leading journal in Reproductive Medicine, with an Impact Factor of 11.852. The journal publishes comprehensive and systematic review articles in human reproductive physiology and medicine, and is published on behalf of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE). The Associate Editor system at Human Reproduction Update has been in place since the beginning of 2001 and it has a significant positive effect on the quality and dynamism of the journal.

In the ISI JCR Global Ranking for 2017, Human Reproduction Update is ranked first of 29 journals in Reproductive Biology, and first of 82 journals in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Tom Kelsey has published extensively in Human Reproduction Update and its sister journals Human Reproduction (impact factor 4.949) and Molecular Human Reproduction (impact factor 3.449). He is also Associate Editor for the Open Access journals Frontiers in Endocrinology and Frontiers in Physiology. He is a regular reviewer for these journals and also the British Medical Journal, BMJ Open, Health Education Journal, Nature Scientific Reports, PLOS One, Mathematical Medicine and Biology, Systems Biology in Reproductive Medicine, and the European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology.

Professors Quigley and Kitamura to co-chair ACM CHI 2021 in Asia

Professors Quigley and Kitamura

Professor Aaron Quigley and Professor Yoshifumi Kitamura (Tohoku University, Japan) have been appointed the general co-chairs for the ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Asia in 2021.  CHI is hosted by the ACM SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference for the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This flagship conference is generally considered the most prestigious in the field of HCI and attracts thousands of international attendees annually.

 

CHI provides a place where researchers and practitioners can gather from across the world to discuss the latest HCI topics. It has been held since 1982 and this is only the second time CHI will be held in Asia.  CHI 2020 will be held in Hawaii while CHI 2019 will be held in Glasgow next May. The location for CHI 2021 will be announced to the global research community during CHI 2019.

This week Professor Quigley was invited to present at the Third ACM SIGCHI Asian Symposium hosted in the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Tohoku University, Sendai. The ACM SIGCHI Asian Development committee organised this event to bring together early career researchers, students and more from multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific region to discuss ideas that can lead to innovations and to inspire us all. The event served to  develop connections and regional/local societies through promoting collaboration among Asian-Pacific HCI researchers and practitioners. Professor Quigley will be spending his upcoming sabbatical in Asia.  

Job vacancies: Interdisciplinary Data Scientists

The Schools of Medicine and Computer Science are seeking to appoint three highly motivated data scientists with a passion for computer vision and deep learning, and specifically their application to medical imaging. The data scientists will be based in the Schools of Computer Science and Medicine at the University of St Andrews and will work on a national Innovate UK funded initiative to create a pan Scotland Industrial Centre for AI Research in Digital Diagnostics (iCAIRD).

The successful candidates will have the opportunity to work alongside and learn from clinicians, industrial experts from Philips Healthcare and academics to help develop artificial intelligence solutions for the automatic reporting of cancer diagnoses in endometrial and cervical cancer. The main duties of the role will involve being an active member of an interdisciplinary team of scientists to help develop deep learning algorithms, within industry standard guidelines, to analyse patient samples in a manner that allows rapid clinical transfer. This work will therefore have the opportunity to impact both patient welfare and relieve pathologist work burden.

Applicants should have experience in machine learning, demonstrable experience in computer programming languages and an interest in the medical applications of computer science. The candidates would benefit from a track record in scientific writing and working in interdisciplinary teams as well as experience in computer vision.

The posts are full time and over a period of 36 months.
Closing Date: 18 January 2019

Find out more about the vacancies further particulars on the recruitment website.

PhD viva success: Julian Petford

Congratulations to Julian Petford, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured with internal examiner Professor Aaron Quigley and external examiner Dr Jason Alexander, from Lancaster University. Julian’s PhD research in Full Coverage Displays for Non-Immersive Applications was supervised by Dr Miguel Nacenta.

Image courtesy of Wendy Boyter

SRG Seminar: “Large-Scale Hierarchical k-means for Heterogeneous Many-Core Supercomputers” by Teng Yu

We present a novel design and implementation of k-means clustering algorithm targeting supercomputers with heterogeneous many-core processors. This work introduces a multi-level parallel partition approach that not only partitions by dataflow and centroid, but also by dimension. Our multi-level ($nkd$) approach unlocks the potential of the hierarchical parallelism in the SW26010 heterogeneous many-core processor and the system architecture of the supercomputer.
Our design is able to process large-scale clustering problems with up to 196,608 dimensions and over 160,000 targeting centroids, while maintaining high performance and high scalability, significantly improving the capability of k-means over previous approaches. The evaluation shows our implementation achieves performance of less than 18 seconds per iteration for a large-scale clustering case with 196,608 data dimensions and 2,000 centroids by applying 4,096 nodes (1,064,496 cores) in parallel, making k-means a more feasible solution for complex scenarios.
This work is to be presented in the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC18).

Event details

  • When: 1st November 2018 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

SRG Seminar: “Using Metric Space Indexing for Complete and Efficient Record Linkage” by Özgür Akgün

Record linkage is the process of identifying records that refer to the same real-world entities, in situations where entity identifiers are unavailable. Records are linked on the basis of similarity between common attributes, with every pair being classified as a link or non-link depending on their degree of similarity. Record linkage is usually performed in a three-step process: first groups of similar candidate records are identified using indexing, pairs within the same group are then compared in more detail, and finally classified. Even state-of-the-art indexing techniques, such as Locality Sensitive Hashing, have potential drawbacks. They may fail to group together some true matching records with high similarity. Conversely, they may group records with low similarity, leading to high computational overhead. We propose using metric space indexing to perform complete record linkage, which results in a parameter-free record linkage process combining indexing, comparison and classification into a single step delivering complete and efficient record linkage. Our experimental evaluation on real-world datasets from several domains shows that linkage using metric space indexing can yield better quality than current indexing techniques, with similar execution cost, without the need for domain knowledge or trial and error to configure the process.

Event details

  • When: 18th October 2018 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar