Research

Distinguished Lecture: ‘Scalability and Fault-tolerance, are they the same?’ by Joe Armstrong

The first of this academic year’s distinguished lectures will be given by Professor Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, on Monday 16th November 2015 at The Byre Theatre.Joe Armstrong

Abstract:

To build a scalable system the important thing is to make small isolated independent units. To scale up we just add more units. To build a fault-tolerant system the important thing to do is make small isolated independent units…. Does that sound familiar? Haven’t I seen that somewhere before? Oh yes, in the first paragraph! So maybe scalability and fault tolerance are really different names for the same thing.

This property of systems, namely that fault-tolerant systems were also scalable, was noticed years ago, notably in the design of the Tandem computer system. The Tandem was design for fault tolerance but rapidly became a leading supplier of scalable computer platforms. Thus it was with Erlang.

Erlang followed  a lot of the Tandem design, it was built for fault-tolerance but some of the most successful applications  (such as WhatsApp) use it for its scalability.

In this lecture I’ll talk about the intimate relationship between scalability and fault-tolerance and why they are architecturally the same thing.

I’ll talk about the design of Erlang and why scalable systems have to be built on non-shared memory abstractions.

Bio:

Joe Armstrong has been programming since 1967. He invented the programming language Erlang. He has worked as a programmer, founded a few successful companies and written a few books. He has a PHD in Computer Science from KTH. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Event details

  • When: 16th November 2015 09:15 - 15:30
  • Where: Byre Theatre
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Distinguished lecture

PhD Viva Success: C. J. Davies

Congratulations to CJ Davies, who successfully defended his thesis today. CJ is pictured below with supervisor Dr Alan Miller and Dr Luke Hutton. Dr Ishbel Duncan acted as internal examiner and external examiner was Prof. Vic Callaghan from the University of Essex.

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Professor Ian Miguel’s Inaugural Lecture

Staff and students from the School of Computer Science attended Prof. Ian Miguel’s Inaugural Lecture in St Salvator’s Quadrangle yesterday evening. The well-received and highly accessible lecture titled “Constraint Satisfaction and the Crystal Maze”, was accompanied by a reception in Lower College Hall. Many will remember celebrating Ian’s installation as a new Professor at December graduation last year. Inaugural lectures provide newly appointed professors the opportunity to inform colleagues, the student community and the general public of their research interests and future plans.

Professor Ian Miguel's Inaugural Lecture

Professor Ian Miguel’s Inaugural Lecture

Lockheed Martin Award

Congratulations to our recent graduate Sam Elliott, who has won the Lockheed Martin Award SIS-0518for  Best Engineered Project at the Young Software Engineer awards.

The Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards are given for the best undergraduate software projects drawn from across all students studying computer science and software engineering in Scotland.

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Sam’s project, “A Concurrency System for Idris and Erlang”, takes an important step towards addressing the problem of writing large scale software, coordinated across several concurrently running machines, possibly distributed throughout the world. Writing such software is notoriously difficult because not only  do programmers need to think about the progress of a an individual task, they also need to think about how data is communicated between each task.

 

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The project combines Idris, a new programming language developed at the University of St Andrews, with Erlang, a programming language specifically designed for building robust distributed systems, and contributes a new system for running concurrent programs, with guaranteed behaviour, in a robust, industrial strength concurrent environment.

 

Seminar: ‘Disrupting trillion dollar industries using low power wireless sensor networks’ by Raphael Scheps and Gideon Farrell

Abstract:
Some of the world’s most important industries are intrinsically grounded in the physical world, yet their interaction with it is still almost completely manual. Converge is a young startup, forged in the fires of Entrepreneurs First, that is building wireless, distributed sensor networks to revolutionise how these industries operate. We (Raph and Gideon, founders) will talk about our tech (and what makes it a fun challenge to build), the difficulties of working in enormous and complex industries and our first 10 months as a company.

Bio:
Gideon and Raphael co-founded Converge to deal with the huge amounts of data that will be produced by connected devices. Two Physicists from Cambridge, they are obsessed with instrumenting the world with connected sensors to drive a smarter physical environment. Gideon read Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, and obtained his M.Sci with a thesis on Solar Jets. He has been writing software for over 10 years, working for companies such as Primary Energy Research and Softeam Cadextan. He worked on the first generation of IoT connected sensors at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (The WISP project) in 2009. Raphael read Theoretical Physics, obtaining an M.Math with a thesis on String Theory and Quantum Gravity. He has worked on high speed interconnect within the hardware engineering team at Mellanox as well as the experimental astrophysics team at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He was Vice President at Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, the oldest student entrepreneurship society in Europe. They both met at Cambridge five years ago and started Converge in 2014.

This seminar is part of our ongoing school series. To see all our upcoming seminar follow this link: here.

Event details

  • When: 22nd September 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: ‘Measuring Personalization of Online Services’ by Alan Mislove

The School of Computer Science is delighted to welcome Alan Mislove from Northeastern University Boston to give his talk on ‘Measuring Personalization of Online Services

Abstract: Today, many web services personalize their content, including Netflix (movie recommendations), Amazon (product suggestions), and Yelp (business reviews). In many cases, personalization provides advantages for users: for example, when a user searches for an ambiguous query such as “router,” Amazon may be able to suggest the woodworking tool instead of the networking device. However, personalization is rarely transparent (or even labeled), and has the potential be used to the user’s disadvantage. For example, on e-commerce sites, personalization could be used to manipulate the set of products shown (price steering) or by customizing the prices of products (price discrimination). Unfortunately, today, we lack the tools and techniques necessary to be able to detect when personalization is occurring, as well as what inputs are used to perform personalization.

In this talk, I discuss my group’s recent work that aims to address this problem. First, we develop a methodology for accurately measuring when web services are personalizing their content. While conceptually simple, there are numerous details that our methodology must handle in order to accurately attribute differences in results to personalization (as opposed to other sources of noise). Second, we apply this methodology to two domains: Web search services (e.g., Google, Bing) and e-commerce sites (e.g., BestBuy.com, Expedia). We find evidence of personalization for real users on both Google search and nine of the popular e-commerce sites. Third, using fake accounts, we investigate the effect of user attributes and behaviors on personalization; we find that the choice of browser, logging in, and a user’s previously content can significantly affect the results presented.

Bio: Alan Mislove is an Associate Professor at the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. He received his Ph.D. from Rice University in 2009. Prof. Mislove’s research concerns distributed systems and networks, with a focus on using social networks to enhance the security, privacy, and efficiency of newly emerging systems. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award (2011), and his work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the CBS Evening News.

This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

Event details

  • When: 13th October 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: ‘Designing trusted and engaging forms of peer to peer healthcare’ by Pam Briggs

The School of Computer Science are delighted to welcome Pam Briggs from Northumbria University, Newcastle who will deliver her talk on Trust and Engagement.

Abstract: Patients now generate a significant amount of online material about health.  This raises questions about how we should design websites featuring patient knowledge and experience in order to ensure those sites provide a good match to patient needs.  In this presentation I describe a structured participatory methodology for the development and evaluation of a set of patient experience websites that took place over three phases, consistent with experience based co-design:

(1) a capture phase in which we wBriggs_Pamorked with patients to understand their reactions to existing websites; (2) an understand phase in which we translated this information into a patient-engagement framework and accompanying set of design guidelines and (3) an improve phase, where we used these guidelines to create three new health websites that were then assessed as patient experience interventions in a range of empirical studies.

Bio: Pam holds a Chair in Applied Psychology, delivering innovative research and consultancy around issues of identity, trust and security in new social media. Her research seeks answers to three main questions: Why and when do we feel secure in disclosing sensitive identity information about ourselves? What makes us trust an electronic message? How and when do we seek to protect our privacy?

In the last five years, Pam has published over forty articles on human perceptions of trust, privacy and security in computer-mediated communication and has recently developed, with colleagues, an innovative model of health advice-seeking online (ESRC funded). She has given a number of invited addresses on online trust and e-health, including an invited address on e-health to the World Health Summit 2009, the opening address at the Second International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (Canada) and the keynote to the 2010 IFIP Trust Management conference in Morioka, Japan. She has been a member of ESRC’s fellowship and CASE studentship committees and has recently made a contribution to the Govt. Office for Science’s Technology Foresight programme on the Future of Identity. She is currently a member of EPSRC’s new Identity Futures Network and also EPSRC’s Cybersecurity Network. She is one of the founder members of the UK’s new ‘Science of Cybersecurity’ Institute, funded by GCHQ in association with RCUK’s Global Uncertainty Programme.

This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

Event details

  • When: 29th September 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Adam Barker – Google Visiting Faculty

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Congratulations to Adam Barker who has been awarded a prestigious Visiting Researcher position at Google through the Google Visiting Faculty Program.

“The Google Visiting Faculty program aims to identify and support world-class, full-time faculty pursuing research in areas of mutual interest. Each year, through the Google Visiting Faculty Program, over 25 academics visit Google from universities all over the world. They work closely with our research and engineering teams, and have the opportunity to explore projects at industrial scale, work with state-of-the-art technology, and experience Google culture up close.”

Adam will be leaving for Google’s global headquarters in Mountain View and will be working with Dr John Wilkes and Dr Walfredo Cirne on Service Level Objectives (SLOs), with the aim of contributing towards Google’s internal cluster management systems.

Commenting on Adam’s award Professor Ian Sommerville said “Adam has done a great job in building links with industry and in linking his research to practical research challenges in cloud computing. His research work with Google will deepen his understanding of the problems of scale, reveal new research challenges and will inspire his teaching.”

On a related note, Adam currently has two open positions for a Research Assistant and a PhD scholarship (including International fees) in Data Science. Please get in touch directly with Adam if you are interested.

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.