Research

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

Job Vacancy: Research Fellow in Computer Science

A Research Associate position in analysis and verification of novel cache algorithms is available at the School of Computer Science within the University of St Andrews. The position is a fixed-term position for 18 months, starting January 2017 or as soon as possible thereafter. The project involves understanding and developing the theoretical basis for such algorithms, formalising them using formal techniques of theorem proving and/or model checking, and developing formal analysis and correctness proofs for such algorithms.

This is part of the EPSRC-funded “C3:Scalable & Verified Shared Memory via Consistency-Directed Cache Coherence” (EP/M027317/1) project, a collaborative project with architecture researchers at the University of Edinburgh and at Intel Corporation Ltd, investigating high-performance cache coherence protocols. Our goal is to propose and verify a family of protocols that are aware of high-level programming models, including in particular those with so-called relaxed memory consistency models.

The particular direction at St Andrews under the direction of Dr Sarkar is to develop verification methods that will scale to the research cache coherence protocols being co-developed within the project. This is a new application area for formal methods, with performance and correctness both equally important. Thus, a background in one or more of Formal Methods, Compilers and Static Analysis, and Verification Tools is expected. Software development and/or formal proof development experience is invaluable.

For an informal discussion about the post you are welcome to contact Dr Susmit Sarkar.

Applications are particularly welcomed from women and other groups that are under-represented in Research posts at the University.

Full posting

RadarCat presented at UIST2016

SACHI research project RadarCat (Radar Categorization for Input & Interaction), highlighted earlier this year in the University news, the Courier and Gizmodo and in a Google I/O ATAP 2016 session, will be presented at UIST2016 this week.

RadarCat is a small, versatile radar-based system for material and object classification which enables new forms of everyday proximate interaction with digital devices. SACHI’s contribution to Project Soli featured in a previous blog post SACHI contribute to Google’s Project Soli, in May. Read more about RadarCat for object recognition on the SACHI blog.

Google's Project Soli workshop in March 2016

Google’s Project Soli workshop in March 2016

Acacia – The Smart Image Compressor

Today we are releasing Acacia – a machine learning enabled image compressor developed here in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. Acacia is the work of Oleksandr Murashko and Dr. John Thomson.

screenshot

Acacia (Advanced Content-Adaptive Compressor of ImAges) is an image compression tool targeting at those who want the best compression under constrained energy or processing time scenarios – for instance a mobile device or a cloud image server. It allows users to target specific image quality or file size metrics when compressing an image with JPEG or WebP, with only minimal additional compression time. It does this by using machine learning to predict how an individual image will be compressed, and adjusts the aggressiveness of compression accordingly.

Acacia allows users to target compression to their file size or quality needs, significantly increasing the effectiveness of compression by adjusting to each individual image. It is available with a graphical interface, and with a CLI for batch processing.

Acacia is free and open source, runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS, and is available on Github as source, or as a Windows binary.

This software accompanies our paper, Predicting and Optimizing Image Compression, published in ACM Multimedia this week. The paper is available for free from John Thomson’s web site.

Visit by the new Principal and Vice-Chancellor ‌Professor Sally Mapstone

On Tuesday the 5th of October we were pleased to host our new Principal and Vice-Chancellor ‌Professor Sally Mapstone to visit the School of Computer Science. During this visit she was able to meet with staff and students, visit our teaching spaces and visit some of our research labs. We discussed our new Engineering Doctorate (EngD) in Computer Science, our PhD programme, our new and existing MSc programmes, our growth in undergraduate single, joint and MSci degree programmes along with changes to our teaching and research space over the past few years.

From left to right, Simon Dobson, Ruth Letham, Steve Linton, Sally Mapstone, Aaron Quigley, Robin Nabel and Dharini Balasubramaniam

From left to right, Simon Dobson, Ruth Letham, Steve Linton, Sally Mapstone, Aaron Quigley, Robin Nabel and Dharini Balasubramaniam

We were also able to showcase some of our ongoing research which included a short talk from Adam Barker, on Distributed Systems and his recent time with Google, and demonstrations from Chris Jefferson, on visualisation of constraints, Vinodh Rajan Sampath, on Scribal Behaviour and Digital Palaeography, Gonzalo Mendez, on iVolver, Gergely Flamich and Patrick Schrempf, on RadarCat,  Hui-Shyong Yeo on WatchMi and David Morrison, on Beyond Medics.

We thank all the staff and students who made our new Principal feel welcome here in Computer Science.

 

 

Aaron Quigley appointed as ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Conferences

Congratulations to Professor Aaron Quigley who has been appointed to the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee, to serve as the Vice President for Conferences. The ACM Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI) is the premier international society for professionals, academics and students who are interested in human-technology & human-computer interaction. SIGCHI sponsors or co-sponsors 24 conferences in addition to providing in-cooperation support for over 40 other conferences. This family of HCI conferences are held across the year and around the world.

As Vice-President for conferences, Aaron will be responsible for strategic planning for SIGCHI-sponsored conferences, overseeing all aspects of SIGCHI-sponsored conferences, chairing various boards and committees and working with other SIGCHI vice-presidents and the SIGCHI executive committee on policies affecting SIGCHI sponsored, co-sponsored, and in-cooperation conferences.

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