Research

The 11th International Conference on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP 2013)

The 11th International Conference on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP 2013) was held in the Gateway in St Andrews on July 15-17,2013. Presented were 17 peer-reviewed papers on natural language processing applications, language resources, and theoretical and implementational issues with relevance to finite-state methods. In addition, there were two keynote lectures, by Alexander Clark (King’s College London) and Bill Byrne (University of Cambridge), and three tutorials, by Ruth Hoffmann (University of St Andrews), Bevan Keeley Jones (University of Edinburgh) and Kousha Etessami (University of Edinburgh).

The conference was attended by 34 researchers and students from three continents. It also hosted a business meeting of SIGFSM (ACL Special Interest Group on Finite-State Methods). The social programme included a reception on July 14th, and a guided walk, a conference dinner in Lower College Hall and a concert in St Salvator’s Chapel on July 16th.

Accommodation in Agnes Blackadder Hall was arranged for non-local delegates, and lunches were served in the Gateway. Coffee breaks could be used for informal demos in the smaller seminar rooms of the Gateway.

Sponsored student places were available thanks to support from SICSA. Further support was received from VisitScotland and the University of St Andrews.

The full programme, with links to the proceedings, can be found from the website: http://fsmnlp2013.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/

Images and text courtesy of Mark-Jan Nederhof (conference chair), Anssi Yli-Jyrä and Shyam Reyal.

Services to the Cloud

On June 27th Gordon Baxter and Derek Wang gave a presentation about their work on the SFC funded project “Creating High Value Cloud Services” at the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce’s Business Growth Club.

Gordon talked about the lessons that have been learned so far from working closely with several Scottish SMEs who are adopting the cloud. Derek then gave a short demonstration of the web-based toolkit he has developed to analyse the potential costs and revenues associated with delivering a product or service through the cloud.

Find out more about the project on Services to the Cloud and The Cloudscape blog

PhD student awarded Google Scholarship

Many congratulations to Bilal Hussain, first year PhD student working with Dr Ian Miguel. Bilal has been awarded a Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities. We thank Google for their additional support for Bilal’s study and research. The main funding for Bilal’s PhD comes from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and we of course thank them too.

Computer Science Research 2013 & Beyond

Cloud 1

Q: What do the words in the tag cloud have in common?

A: They all relate to research happening in the School of Computer Science. Some are conference contributions coming to a conference near you soon, and some will appear as forthcoming journal articles.

The University research portal features publications and awards, and can be customised to explore research happening in the School of Computer Science.

Thinking of studying in the School or contemplating collaboration with a research group? Use the words above to search and peruse the research publications for some inspiration.

Carnegie-Cameron Taught Postgraduate Bursaries 2013

Congratulations to Alice Herbison who has been selected to receive a Carnegie-Cameron Taught Postgraduate Bursary. Alice has studied a number of undergraduate modules in the school and will begin her postgraduate studies in September on our new MSc in Human Computer Interaction. We look forward to seeing her in the department again soon.

The Carnegie Trust For The Universities Of Scotland, supports the bursaries, which were established by Andrew Carnegie in 1901.

Computing Reviews’ Notable Books and Articles 2012

ACM Computing Reviews has selected a recent survey paper written by Per Ola Kristensson and colleagues as one of the Notable Computing Books and Articles of 2012.

The list consists of nominations from Computing Reviews reviewers, Computing Reviews category editors, the editors in chief of journals covered by Computing Reviews, and others in the computing community.

The selected survey paper is entitled “Foundational Issues in Touch-Surface Stroke Gesture Design — An Integrative Review” and it was published by the journal Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction in 2012.

Gesture-based Natural User Interfaces

Research into personalised gestures for user interfaces carried out by Miguel Nacenta, Per Ola Kristensson and two of our recent MSc students, Yemliha Kamber and Yizhou Qiang featured in the University News last week. You can read more about their research in the MIT Technology Review, and Fast Company’s Co.DESIGN. Their results question whether pre-programmed gestures need the personal touch to make them more effective.

System Seminar: Middleware support for wireless sensor network, by Prof. Danny Hughes, KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract:

Contemporary ICT infrastructures are trending towards a pervasive substrate of internet-connected sensors, actuators and human interfaces. Effective use of this pervasive infrastructure is key to solving 21st century challenges such as: mass transportation, energy conservation and environmental monitoring. Building effective applications that execute on this infrastructure requires advanced middleware support that respects the resource constraints of embedded devices. In this talk, I will present recent work from KU Leuven in the area of middleware support for sensing applications, with a focus on the Loosely-coupled Component Infrastructure (LooCI). I will then discuss emerging opportunities for ‘social sensing’ wherein online social networks are used to source and configure participatory sensor networks.

Bio:

Dr. Danny Hughes is an Assistant Professor with the iMinds-DistriNet group of the department of Computer Science at KU Leuven, Belgium. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University in 2007. He has since worked as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley (USA) and Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) and as a lecturer at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (China). His research interests are in distributed systems, with a focus on middleware support for dynamic systems such as wireless sensor networks, peer-to-peer networks and online social networks. You can find out more about his research at: https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/people/showMember.do?memberID=u0061846

Event details

  • When: 2nd May 2013 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

System Seminar: Unifying sensor fault detection with energy conservation, on 23 April, by Lei Fang, University of St Andrews

Abstract
Wireless sensor networks are attracting increasing interest but suffering from severe challenges such as power constraints and low data reliability. Sensors are often energy-hungry and cannot operate over a long period, and the data they collect are frequently erroneous due to complex causes. Thus a challenging research question is how to optimise energy consumptions on sensors while keeping the collected sensor data accurate. The current literature often treat these two problems separately, however, in this talk we will present an integrated self-organising solution for model-based data collection that can preserve sensors’ energy by reducing the amount of communications and as well as deal with sensor errors.

Bio

Lei Fang is a PhD student supervised by Prof. Simon Dobson and Dr Dharini Balasubramaniam. He received his first degree in Information and Computing Science from the University of Liverpool. His research interests reside in sensor data modelling, fault detection and inference.

Event details

  • When: 23rd April 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar