Data science

Are there still two cultures?

This Friday the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Young Academy of Scotland is hosting a panel discussion and debate to celebrate the 60th anniversary of one of the most influential essays of all time. CP Snow’s “The two cultures” has passed into popular culture as the idea that arts and sciences are separated by an almost unbridgeable gap in understanding. But is this still true, as science and technology become ever more entwined with our everyday lives? Can we afford to tolerate mutual incomprehension between different groups, and how might we bridge the gap?

A small panel will discuss “The two cultures” and its relevance to modern times in the Studio Theatre at the Byre from 6pm on Friday 13th May, followed by a drinks reception. The panel includes Prof SimonDobson from the School of Computer Science, who also directs the St Andrews Institute for Data-Intensive Research that aims in part to bridge the two cultures by bringing data-driven computational techniques to both arts and science projects.

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Event details

  • When: 13th May 2016 18:00
  • Where: Byre Theatre

A highly commended project

Congratulations to our recent graduate Aleksejs Sazonovs, who’s won a Highly Commended place at this year’s Undergraduate Awards.

The Undergraduate Awards are an international and cross-disciplinary prize that aims to recognise highly creative individuals at undergraduate level. Typically this is demonstrated through excellent project work, and Aleks’ project on “A metapopulation model for predicting the success of genetic control measures for malaria” was ranked in the top 10% of submissions in the computer science category.

Aleks’ project used techniques from network science to explore what happens when mosquitoes modified to be unable to carry the malaria parasite are introduced into a wild population. Experiments like these are an essential precursor to any actual field trials. Together with supervisors from the School of Computer Science (Prof Simon Dobson) and School of Biology (Prof Oscar Gaggiotti), Aleks simulated malarial outbreaks involving different mosquito populations. He used a real geography for his experiments, taking the road network of Sierra Leone from the Open Street Map project and using this to build models of human and mosquito distributions and movement. “It’s been exciting to combine real network data with large-scale simulations,” said Prof Dobson. “It also opens-up several ideas for how to make models like this easier to build and interact with, so they could be used by experimental scientists directly and not just by computer scientists.”

The commendation comes with an invitation to all the highly commended individuals to the awards dinner in Dublin later this month, where the overall winners of the different categories will be announced.

Toward Workflow Management for Experimental Science?

The School of Computer Science welcomes the opportunity to hear from Dr Babak Esfandiari from Carleton University, CBabak Esfandiarianada who will be delivering his talk on ‘Toward Workflow Management for Experimental Science?’.

Abstract: Data, code, and other digital scientific artifacts are often found (at least by this presenter) to be out-of-synch, unreliable, poorly organized and only partially available. This makes science often hard to reproduce. In this talk, I demo an online tool to manage the workflow of a scientific project, and I speculate over how or whether it can help address these issues.

Bio: Babak Esfandiari is an Associate Professor at Carleton University, a comprehensive university located in the capital of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. He obtained his PhD from Montpellier II, which specializes in Science and Technologies. His research is in agent-based systems; network computing; object-oriented design and languages.

Event details

  • When: 14th August 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar