Research

Wrist Worn Haptic Feedback Device

One of our PhD students Esma Mansouri Benssassi and her supervisor Dr Erica Ye defined a requirement for a wrist worn device to group a number of Haptic feedback elements for an experiment they wished to carry out. The on-board Haptic elements are two eccentric rotating mass micro motors and an linear resonant actuator. Initial circuit schematics and printed circuit board designs were created in an Open Source Electronics Design Automation Suite KiCAD EDA. The resulting printed circuit board (PCB) design was made on the CS CNC Router , this produces the PCB by engraving the copper clad fibreglass-epoxy board with a Vee cutter.

PCBBare Circular Engraved PCB

The case for the PCB was created in Autodesk Inventor and was 3D printed using the CS Makerbot 2X 3D printer.

Blank PCB and 3D Printed Case

Haptic Wristband and Haptic Transducers

The wrist worn Haptic feedback device will be connected via an umbilical cable to the main control Feather M0 embedded ARM and Haptic Driver breadboard. This is an ARM microcontroller and wifi module which can be programmed using the Arduino IDE. Code for the ARM processor will enable stored and custom waveforms to be played on the haptic devices on the wrist.

Haptic Feedback Breadboard Assembly

Research on containers for HPC environments featured in CACM and HPC Wire

Rethinking High performance computing Platforms: Challenges, Opportunities and Recommendations, co-authored by Adam Barker and a team (Ole Weidner, Malcolm Atkinson, Rosa Filgueira Vicente) in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh was recently featured in the Communications of the ACM and HPC Wire.

The paper focuses on container technology and argues that a number of “second generation” high-performance computing applications with heterogeneous, dynamic and data-intensive properties have an extended set of requirements, which are not met by the current production HPC platform models and policies. These applications (and users) require a new approach to supporting infrastructure, which draws on container-like technology and services. The paper then goes on to describe cHPC: an early prototype of an implementation based on Linux Containers (LXC).

Ali Khajeh-Hosseini, Co-founder of AbarCloud and former co-founder of ShopForCloud (acquired by RightScale as PlanForCloud) said of this research, “Containers have helped speed-up the development and deployment of applications in heterogeneous environments found in larger enterprises. It’s interesting to investigate their applications in similar types of environments in newer HPC applications.“

Data and the User Experience in Retail

The Hut Group develop and manage a proprietary eCommerce platform that handled over half a billion pounds of revenue last year. UX within the company is responsible for optimising user flows through the website, and working with Design departments to deliver user delight. With over 30 distinct site brands internally, and several external clients, the team attempt to strike a balance between optimising sites for revenue and user delight. This talk is about the challenges of UX within a wider business organisation, and the role that Computer Science graduates can play in a multidisciplinary UX team.

Bio:
Elliott joined The Hut Group in June, starting in the Research and Development department. He worked on developing a dashboard for use inside the business, and developed a series of prototypes to show users Social Media content on-site. He now heads the User Experience (UX) department. Prior to joining THG, Elliott worked at Skyscanner as a front-end developer whilst graduating from St Andrews in Computer Science with several modules in HCI.

Event details

  • When: 6th March 2017 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Honey 110 - John Honey Teaching Lab
  • Format: Seminar

School of Computer Science – PhD Scholarships

The School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews offers funding for up to six students to undertake PhD research starting in the Fall of 2017 in any of the areas of research carried out by its academic faculty (which includes, but is not limited to, Artificial Intelligence and Symbolic Computation, Computer Systems Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, and Programming Languages).

We are looking for highly motivated research students willing to be part of a diverse and supportive research community.

Applicants must hold a BSc or MSc in an area appropriate for their proposed topic of study (usually Computer Science, but not restricted to it). The Scholarship covers PhD fees and provides a tax-free maintenance stipend of £14,296 per year for 3.5 years. Exceptional students can apply for an additional £2,000 per year. International applications are welcome.

We especially encourage female applicants and underrepresented minorities to apply. Admission is competitive but candidate selection takes into account the motivation, skills and previous experience of the candidates. If you are interested, please get in contact with us by e-mail even if you are not sure of your eligibility or strength as a candidate (write an e-mail to pg-admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk Subject: Informal PhD Inquiry). We will facilitate contact with a member of research staff in your area of interest (for a list of existing faculty and areas of research see http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/prospective-pg/postgraduate-supervisors).

For further information, including the step-by-step procedure on how to apply please check our postgraduate-research web page (http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/prospective-pg/research-degrees). The closing date for applications is March 31st 2017 and we will make decisions on studentship allocation by April 30th 2017. Before preparing a full application we recommend that you contact us by e-mail at pg-admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Announcement of the 33rd British Colloquium for Theoretical Computer Science

The 33rd BCTCS will be hosted by the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, from the 26th to the 28th of April 2017. The purpose of BCTCS is to provide a forum in which researchers in theoretical computer science can meet, present research findings, and discuss developments in the field. It also aims to provide an environment in which PhD students can gain experience in presenting their work, and benefit from contact with established researchers.

The scope of the colloquium includes all aspects of theoretical computer science, including algorithms, complexity, cryptography, formal methods, game theory, machine learning, languages, logics and quantum computation. Both computer scientists and mathematicians are welcome to attend, as are participants from outside of the UK.

This year the colloquium will feature the following invited speakers

LMS Keynote Lecture in Discrete Mathematics
Professor László Babai, University of Chicago

Confirmed Speakers
Perdita Stevens, University of Edinburgh
Conor McBride, University of Strathclyde
Felix Fischer, University of Glasgow
Edwin Brady, University of St Andrews
Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary University of London

Registration is *now open*, and you can find more information at https://bctcs2017.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/

PhD students are especially encouraged to offer a talk.

As an additional event, there will be a Scottish Combinatorics Meeting at the School of Mathematics in St Andrews on the 24th and 25th of April. If you would like to take part in the meeting, please contact the organisers directly.

The organisers hope to welcome you to St Andrews in April.

EPSRC Grant Success: A Constraint Modelling Pipeline

Congratulations to colleagues Professor Ian Miguel, Dr Chris Jefferson, Dr Tom Kelsey, Professor Ian Gent and Dr Peter Nightingale, who have secured an impressive EPSRC grant A constraint Modelling Pipeline, with NHS and SME project partners. The three and a half year grant, officially announced yesterday, aims to advance the state of the art in solving complex combinatorial search problems ubiquitous in many settings, such as planning, scheduling or design. Specifically, the aim is to produce a powerful, general automated modelling and solving system unique in targeting a range of powerful solving formalisms from a single abstract problem specification. The research will impact across the public and private sectors, and academia.
Read more about the grant application through EPSRC reference:EP/P015638/1

Seminar: Jacob Howe on Propagation and Reification

Jacob Howe, Senior Lecturer at City University London, and sabbatical visitor, will be giving a seminar to the AI Research Group at 2pm on Thursday 15th December in JC 1.33a.

The title and abstract are:

Propagation and Reification: SAT and SMT in Prolog

This talk will describe how a watched literal DPLL based Satisfiability (SAT)
solver can be succinctly coded in 20 lines of Prolog. The extension of
this solver to an Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver will be discussed with a particular focus on
the case where the theory is that of rational-tree constraints, and its
application in a reverse engineering problem.

Event details

  • When: 15th December 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: Alice Toniolo on Computational Argumentation

Alice Toniolo, a new lecturer in Computer Science at St Andrews, will be giving a seminar to the Artificial Intelligence Research Group on Thursday 1st December 2016, 2pm, in JC 1.33a. All are welcome.

Computational argumentation: an overview of current reasoning and dialogue models and their applications

Abstract: Argumentation is the process of arriving at a decision for a controversial standpoint. Computational models of argumentation aim to imitate the human decision-making process by modelling reason for or against certain decisions and extract justifiable options. This talk will draw from philosophical studies to present the core concepts of argumentation theory in AI through a range of abstract, logical and dialogical models. I will focus on the potential of argumentation-based models employed by software agents to support reasoning and dialogue in the presence of incomplete, inconsistent and uncertain information. An application of argumentation-based reasoning is presented in the context of intelligence analysis. The agent-based tool discussed, called CISpaces (Collaborative Intelligence Spaces), employs argumentation to help analysts make sense of information in collaboration and provenance to establish the credibility of hypotheses.

Event details

  • When: 1st December 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Distinguished Lecture Series 2016: Prof. Julie McCann

Earlier this month Professor Julie McCann from Imperial College London, delivered the next set of distinguished lectures for 2016, in Lower and Upper College Hall. The three topical, well attended and interesting lectures centred around Distributed Systems and Sensing and discussed how sensor networks are being used today, how other sciences will impact the research area, how such systems are programmed and finished by introducing ongoing challenges in terms of scalability, resilience and security.

Professor McCann is pictured below at various stages of the distinguished lecture series, and with Director of Research, Professor Simon Dobson and Dean of Science, Professor Alan Dearle.

dls1

dls2

Videos from the DLS can be accessed on Vimeo –
Lecture 1: https://vimeo.com/192134381
Lecture 2: https://vimeo.com/192135351
Lecture 3: https://vimeo.com/192137007

Images courtesy of Saleem Bhatti