Belated congratulations to Michael Mauderer, who successfully defended his thesis earlier this month. Micheal’s thesis, augmenting visual perception with gaze-contigent displays, was supervised by Dr Miguel Nacenta. Professor Aaron Quigley acted as internal examiner and Professor Hans Gellersen, from Lancaster University acted as external examiner.
Abstract:
GPS has enabled a number of location based services outdoors, but the problem of localisation remains open in GPS-denied environments, such as indoors and underground. In this talk, I will discuss the key challenges to accurate and robust position estimation, and will describe a variety of sensor modalities and algorithms developed at Oxford to address this problem.
The talk will cover inertial, radio-based and vision-based localisation approaches and their advantages and disadvantages in different settings.
Short Bio:
Niki Trigoni is a Professor at the Oxford University Department of Computer Science and a fellow of Kellogg College. She obtained her PhD at the University of Cambridge (2001), became a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University (2002-2004), and a Lecturer at Birkbeck College (2004-2007). Since she moved to Oxford in 2007, she established the Sensor Networks Group, and has conducted research in communication, localization and in-network processing algorithms for sensor networks. Her recent and ongoing projects span a wide variety of sensor networks applications, including indoor/underground localization, wildlife sensing, road traffic monitoring, autonomous (aerial and ground) vehicles, and sensor networks for industrial processes.
Abstract:
Quicksort is a well-known sorting algorithm used to implement sort functionality in many libraries. The presentation isn’t really about the algorithm itself but rather about how to actually create an efficient implementation of the algorithm: a text-book implementation of the algorithm actually is not that quick (even if the pivot is chosen cleverly). It takes paying some attention to detail to improve the implementation significantly. This presentation starts with a simple implementation and makes incremental improvements to eventually yield a proper generic and fast sorting function. All code will be in C++ but it should be possible to follow the majority of the reasoning with knowledge of another programming language.
Short Bio:
Dietmar Kühl is a senior software developer at Bloomberg L.P. working on the data distribution environment used both internally and by enterprise installations at clients. Before joining Bloomberg he has done mainly consulting for software projects in the finance area. He is a regular attendee of the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee, presents at conferences, and he used to be a moderator of the newsgroup comp.lang.c++.moderated. He frequently answers questions on Stackoverflow.
Abstract:
Evolutionary algorithms (EA) has developed as an academic discipline since the 1960s. The subject has spawned major subfields such as swarm intelligence and genetic programming and is applied to a wide variety of practical real world problems in science medicine and engineering. EAs are often the only practical method of solving large combinatorial optimisation problems and have achieved best-known results on a variety of benchmark problems. The global academic EA community is highly active, supporting several large international conferences and high-quality international journals. Despite this activity, sustained over decades, the community has struggled to make significant progress on developing a satisfactory theory of EAs. At the same time, substantial progress has been made on developing more sophisticated EAs that are ever more powerful but ever less amenable to theoretical study. In this talk I will outline some of the main approaches to a theory of EAs and illustrate the gap between those EAs that can be theoretically analysed by those approaches and EAs that are being used in practice. I will conclude with some interesting current developments and key open questions.
Short Bio:
John McCall is a Professor of Computing Science at Robert Gordon University. He works in the Computational Intelligence research group, which he founded in 2003. He has over twenty years research experience in naturally-inspired computing. His research focuses on the study and analysis of a range of naturally-inspired optimization algorithms (genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimisation, ant colony optimisation, estimation of distribution algorithms etc.) and their application to difficult learning and optimisation problems, particularly real-world problems arising in complex engineering and medical / biological systems. Application areas of this research include medical decision support, data modeling of drilling operations, analysis of biological sequences, staff rostering and scheduling, industrial process optimization and bio-control. He has over 90 publications in books, journals and conferences. He has successfully supervised 13 PhD students and has examined over 15 PhD theses.
Congratulations to Dr David Harris-Birtill, who was announced the winner of the Converge Challenge KickStart award at a ceremony in Edinburgh yesterday. The converge challenge competition rewards an early-stage idea or a new product. David won a cash injection prize of £3,000 to kick-start Beyond Medics – Automated Remote Pulse Oximetry, a camera based system that remotely measures patients’ vital signs.
Congratulations to Dr Miguel Nacenta and Michael Mauderer on the success of Deepview and its subsequent application Gazer, an open source tool that provides functionality for showcasing light field images using gaze-contingent focus. The software, developed by SACHI, works in conjunction with eye tracking devices to allow photographers using light field cameras to discern images by automatically concentrating on objects using just their eyes.
Results from the project have been widely disseminated in the media and featured on a BBC click episode (20.56)
For more information and downloads visit the Gazer project section or github repository.
The project was funded through the European Union’s Marie Curie Program (CIG – 303780).
The SACHI group’s contribution to Project Soli was selected and featured in the official alpha developer video released by Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP), and has subsequently been shown on stage during the Google I/O ATAP 2016 session earlier in May.
The team systematically explored the Soli and developed machine learning techniques to train and classify objects. Achieving advanced interactions in real time, at this scale with consumer ready devices is an exciting development within the project. Read more about their research and Project Soli experience in “Object recognition with the Project Soli in St Andrews”.
The team consisted of Hui-Shyong Yeo (a PhD student in SACHI), Patrick Schrempf (a 2nd year CS student), Gergely Flamich (a 2nd year CS student), Dr David Harris-Birtill (a senior research fellow in SACHI) and Professor Aaron Quigley.
Google’s Project Soli workshop: March 2016
The School of Computer Science is excited to announce Scotland’s first Engineering Doctorate (EngD) in Computer Science. The innovative research apprenticeship in partnership with The Data Lab, was launched on Monday in Edinburgh and featured in The University News earlier today.
Prospective research engineers and industry sponsors can find essential information and application forms on the EngD website. In partnership with The Data Lab, 5 prize studentships have been announced for 2016. Interested applicants with strong data-intensive and/or data-driven research are encouraged to apply (27th June deadline).
Monday’s launch in Edinburgh
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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