Research

SACHI Seminar – Prof Sampsa Hyysalo: Design Participation | Fri 23 May, 15:00–16:00, JCB 1.33A

We are excited to invite you to a special SACHI seminar this week with Prof Sampsa Hyysalo, who will be visiting us from Aalto University in Finland. This is a great opportunity to hear from one of the leading voices in participatory design and user innovation.

📅 Friday 23rd May | 🕛 15:00 – 16:00 PM | 📍 JCB, Room 1.33A

Title:

Design Participation: Changing Roles of Users in Innovation and Research

Abstract:

In this talk, Sampsa will introduce ideas from his forthcoming book Design Participation (September 2025, cover attached), which presents doable and demonstrated ways by which design can become a major contributor to social and environmental change. This entails a shift from seeking to define solutions to opening spaces in which others—activists, entrepreneurs, civil servants, neighbourhood communities, politicians (and so on) —can effectively elaborate on and find (re)solutions to the matters they are facing. He will reflect on over two decades of research, offering insights into how participatory methods can help tackle complex social and environmental challenges. The talk will draw from work in health tech, energy transition, and civic design.

This session should be particularly relevant to colleagues working in Human-Computer Interaction, Science and Technology Studies, systems design, and research that intersects with communities, policy, and practice.

Bio:

Sampsa Hyysalo is a Professor of Co-Design at the Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, Finland. His research focuses on designer-user relations in sociotechnical change. This includes engagement in participatory design, co-design, open and user innovation, open design, peer knowledge creation, user communities, citizen science and user knowledge in organizations, design ethnography, longitudinal ethnography, social shaping of technology, process studies of innovation, practice theory, and sustainability transitions.

More about Sampsa: https://www.aalto.fi/en/collaborative-and-industrial-design/sampsa-hyysalo

He is the author of several books, including:

PGR Seminar with Tilcia Woodville-price + Thu Nguyen

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 16th May at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Tilcia and Thu’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Tilcia Woodville-price

Title: Definitely, Maybe? Communicating Uncertainty In Medicine

Abstract: An inherent aspect of healthcare and data science alike, uncertainty is present at every step of data utilisation, including its collection, analysis and dissemination. Accounting for and disclosing uncertainty is an ongoing challenge faced by many disciplines. In medicine, effective communication of uncertainty is essential for shared decision-making, with important considerations surrounding the user (patients, clinicians, policymakers), the underlying information, and the means of communicating it (data visualisation). Current medical research has focused on risk communication, often failing to evaluate more complex aspects of uncertainty. In contrast, the information visualisation community has more widely researched uncertainty visualisation in other domains, but insights remain limited regarding best practice. This interdisciplinary research aims to empirically assess different forms of visualising uncertainty in medicine, evaluate how user characteristics influence comprehension, and explore new forms of communicating it through data-driven storytelling.

Thu Nguyen

Title: Multimorbidity Dynamics in Scotland: Health inequality and Trajectories in chronic disease accrual and mortality across the lifespan

Abstract: Multimorbidity – the co-occurrence of two or more chronic diseases – is a growing global concern, and is associated with higher risk of mortality, worse quality of life and substantial financial burden. About one third of the world’s population has multimorbidity. Care for multimorbid patients in the UK accounts for more than 55% of NHS costs and 75% of primary care prescription costs. The focus of multimorbidity epidemiology so far has largely been on the static clustering of diseases through cross-sectional analyses, with less emphasis on the trajectories of disease onset and the sequence in which conditions develop. Understanding the order in which diseases occur and its impact on patient outcomes can help identify high-risk trajectories and aid healthcare resource planning by identifying target populations for preventive interventions, ultimately leading to earlier diagnosis and management. Using linked electronic health records (EHRs) on 858789 individuals (2005-2021), this study aims to employ multistate modelling to explore the dynamics of multimorbidity trajectories, measure chronic disease accrual, incorporating social factors to unveil the health inequality in Scotland.

Research Software Group Lunchtime Seminar – Friday 23rd May

There will be a Research Software Group Lunchtime Seminar on Friday May 23rd at 1pm, in room 1.33B.

Talk Title: “People First: Sustaining Research Software by Sustaining the People Who Build It”

Speakers are Software Sustainability Institute Fellows: Deborah Udoh (OLS) and Olexandr Konovalov (St Andrews)

– https://www.software.ac.uk/fellowship-programme/deborah-udoh

– https://www.software.ac.uk/fellowship-programme/olexandr-konovalov

Abstract

What does it mean to build sustainable research software—and sustainable research software communities?

Too often, sustainability is framed in terms of clean code, reproducibility, funding and long-term maintenance. But sustainability is also about people: who gets to stay, who gets to lead, and who burns out or leaves before their potential is fully realised.

This talk invites us to look beyond technical best practices and consider the human infrastructure that truly sustains research software: the developers, contributors, maintainers, and collaborators who often work in the margins of recognition. We’ll explore how issues like burnout, impostor syndrome, and lack of psychological safety threaten not just individual wellbeing, but the continuity and health of the software ecosystems we care about.

Using real-world examples from both academic and open-source contexts, we’ll share practices and small culture shifts that have helped sustain people in research software roles.

This session will include a short, interactive exercise where participants will reflect on their own sustainability needs, and collectively brainstorm people-first practices for healthier RSE communities.

PGR Seminar with Duong Phuc Tai Nguyen + Thomas Metcalfe

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 9th May at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Duong and Tom’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Duong Phuc Tai Nguyen

Title: Enhancing Dynamic Algorithm Configuration via Theory-guided Benchmarks.

Abstract: Algorithms play a vital role in numerous domains, ranging from machine learning to optimization and simulation. Developing an algorithm typically requires making multiple design choices and fine-tuning parameters, a process that can be both labor-intensive and complex. This project seeks to automate this process by employing machine learning techniques, particularly deep reinforcement learning (deep-RL). By leveraging theoretical insights from evolutionary computation, we establish new benchmarks to assess RL methods for dynamic algorithm configuration and propose enhancement techniques to increase their effectiveness

Thomas Metcalfe

Title: Listening to Rhythms: Exploring Human-Phenology Attunement through Research Products and Decentralised Computing

Abstract: Humanity and the planet are in an epoch of ecological breakdown. Modern technological cultures have severed human awareness from the living rhythms of more-than-human worlds. This research explores how decentralised, situated technologies might foster embodied attunement between humans and the phenological rhythms of place.

This seminar is a work-in-progress. 7 months into his PhD, Tom will present his journey and current thinking on the foundations and potential direction of his project. You can expect to hear how he’s trying to shift research paradigms; the profound change in the project’s onto-epistemological perspectives; and how he hopes to make a contribution to the design and HCI communities.

PGR Seminar with Gen Li + Jess McGowan

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 2nd May at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Gen and Jess’ talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Gen Li

Title: Visualization of clinical pathways based on sepsis comorbidities

Abstract: Sepsis is a severe infectious syndrome that can lead to critical illness and death. At present, most retrospective studies on sepsis focus on diagnosis and mortality risk prediction, with relatively limited attention to patients’ medical backgrounds. Comorbidities, as an important factor affecting the severity of the disease and treatment outcomes, present complex and variable characteristics in the treatment process. However, current research in this field generally lacks in-depth analysis of clinical pathways such as patient transfers and treatment interventions during hospitalization, which limits the development of personalized treatment strategies. Based on this, our research plans to use machine learning methods to extract similar comorbidity sub-groups of sepsis patients from electronic health records (EHRs), and further combine them with advanced visualization technology to explore the clinical pathways of these sub-groups. The research aims to help clinicians gain insights into the potential relationship between sepsis and related comorbidities, improve the interpretability of patients’ clinical records, and thus develop more effective treatment and management strategies for patients.

Jess McGowan

Title: Roll For Initiative: From Play to Personas

Abstract: In user centred design, designing for a wide target audience can lead to systems attempting to please everyone and thus pleasing no-one. Using a persona, i.e. a single member of that target audience, and designing a system dedicated to their needs results in a more focused design, which leads to improved usability. However, the design of personas is largely unstructured, with no clearly agreed methodology behind their creation. The solution to this could be found in Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPGs), which tend to feature clearly structured character creation instructions. This project aims to investigate to what extent can TTRPG character creation instructions aid the design of personas.

PGR Seminar with Dhananjay Saikumar

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 25th April at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Title and Abstract for Dhananjay’s talk – Please do come along if you are able.

Title: Signal Collapse in One-Shot Pruning: When Sparse Models Fail to Distinguish Neural Representations

Abstract: The deep learning breakthrough in 2012, marked by AlexNet’s success on the ImageNet challenge, ushered in an era of increasingly large neural networks. Modern models now hold tens of millions to billions of parameters, enabling remarkable capabilities but creating serious challenges for deployment in real-world, resource-constrained environments. This has led to growing interest in model compression, with network pruning emerging as a widely adopted method to reduce computational and memory demands. Iterative pruning—based on repeated prune-retrain cycles—can retain accuracy but becomes infeasible at scale due to high computational cost. One-shot pruning, which removes parameters in a single step without retraining, offers a more scalable alternative but often results in severe accuracy degradation. For instance, pruning 80% of the parameters from RegNetX-32GF (a 100M+ parameter model) drops ImageNet accuracy from 80% to 1%, rendering the model unusable. This talk uncovers a new and fundamental bottleneck behind such failures: signal collapse, a previously overlooked phenomenon that disrupts the network’s ability to distinguish between inputs. To address this, a simple and efficient method called REFLOW is introduced, enabling sparse networks to recover strong performance without retraining or gradient computation. On RegNetX-32GF, REFLOW lifts accuracy from 1% to 73% at 80% sparsity—in under 15 seconds. These findings reframe the challenges of one-shot pruning and open new opportunities for practical and efficient deployment of deep learning models.

SACHI Seminar, Stavroula Pipyrou – Radical Imagination: Knowledge Through Generations

We are pleased to share our upcoming SACHI seminar this week by Dr Stavroula Pipyrou, a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and Founding Director of the Centre for Minorities Research.

📅 Wednesday 2nd April  | 🕛 13:00 – 14:00 PM | 📍 JCB, Room 1.33A

Title:

Radical Imagination: Knowledge Through Generations

Abstract:

“Today we will engage with insights from a young Greek interlocutor who did not live the Cold War period firsthand. She relates to the legacies of the Cold War through radical imagination, projecting that it is only logical that the affects of the era have left irreversible psychological marks on the people who experienced it. The talk proposes a theory of psychic time and generational battles for belonging. There is a critique of history as taught in school textbooks when compared to the lived experiences of history in the present.”

Bio:

Stavroula is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, Founding Director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Minorities Research and editor of the interdisciplinary book series Routledge Advances in Minority Studies. She works on minority politics, displacement, governance, and the Cold War. She is the author of “The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Minority Politics” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and “Lurking Cold War: Life Through Historical Communion” (Berghahn 2025). Lurking Cold War explores the entangled registers of the Cold War that continue to stalk the social landscape in Italy and Greece. Critiquing the connections between global categories and individual experiences, Lurking foregrounds Cold War resonances through materiality, imagination, speculation and affect, in literature, bureaucracy and in the family. A theory of methexi illustrates how people and history are brought into communion, blurring the boundaries between known and unknown, reality and imagination, and form and interpretation. The result is an articulation of history that matters in a way that matters.

SACHI Seminar, Mark Zarb – Bridging Minds and Machines: Redefining Computing Education

We are pleased to share our upcoming SACHI seminar by Dr Mark Zarb, an Associate Professor based within the School of Computing, Engineering and Technology at RGU:

📅 26th March | 🕛 13:00 – 14:00 PM | 📍 JCB, Room 1.33A

Title:

Bridging Minds and Machines: Redefining Computing Education

Abstract:

Since 2009, Dr Zarb has been exploring the evolving landscape of pedagogical research, collecting ideas from across disciplines and trends. In this acronym-filled talk, he offers a guided tour through some of the latest research at RGU — from grappling with the ethical dilemmas posed by conversational AI in education, to exploring “shadow podcasts” as informal learning tools. We will look at practical challenges, unexpected questions and at how rapidly shifting technology continues to shape how (and why) we teach and learn.

Bio

Dr Mark Zarb is an Associate Professor based within the School of Computing, Engineering and Technology at RGU

His main research focus is within computing education, having led international working groups on transitions into higher education in 2018 and post-pandemic educational landscapes in 2021 and 2022.

He received his PhD (2014, University of Dundee) for work exploring the role of verbal communication styles in pair programming. His various roles and experiences allow him a wide and international perspective on computing education.

SACHI Seminar with Aluna Everitt – Democratising the Design and Development of Emerging Technologies

We are pleased to share our upcoming SACHI research seminar by Dr Aluna Everitt, a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand:

📅 Today | 🕛 12:00 – 1:00 PM | 📍 JCB, Room 1.33B

Title:

Democratising the Design and Development of Emerging Technologies

Abstract:

My research focuses on democratising the development of emerging technologies. More specifically, by establishing accessible approaches for designing and building emerging technologies such as robotics, wearables, and shape-changing interfaces. To advance the field, my research focuses not only on understanding these technologies (e.g., their design), but also how to build them (e.g., engineer them), and how to innovate with them (e.g., application). In this talk, I will go into detail about some of the projects I have worked on around this topic across the fields of HCI, Design, and Engineering.

Bio:

Dr. Aluna Everitt is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Prior to moving to Christchurch (NZ), she was a Research Associate in the Cyber-Physical Systems group at the University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. She was also a Senior Visiting Researcher and postdoc at the University of Bristol (BIG Lab). Dr. Everitt was awarded her PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University, specializing in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). As a multi-disciplinary researcher, her areas of interest and expertise lie across the fields of HCI, Design, and Engineering. She has a particular interest in conducting both quantitative and qualitative research which combines a mix of engineering fabrication approaches for iterative prototyping, together with collaborative design (co-design) to encourage users and experts from different domains to develop content and applications for the next generation of interactive hardware systems and interfaces (e.g., shape-changing displays, wearables, and robotics).

Fully funded PhD scholarship in Multi-agent Path Planning

Lead supervisor: Professor Ian Miguel

Application deadline: 1 March 2025

Project description:

Planning is a fundamental discipline of Artificial Intelligence, which asks us to find a sequence of actions transforming an initial state into a goal state. This project focuses on multi-agent path planning (also known as multi-agent path finding), where a set of mobile agents is navigated from starting positions to target positions. MAPP is the focus of intense research effort because it has many challenging real-world applications in robotics, navigation, the video game industry, and automatic warehousing. Automatic warehousing is one of the most challenging domains and the focus of the greatest investment. For example, Amazon have invested heavily in robot-equipped warehouses. It is performed on a huge scale (thousands of robots in warehouses containing many thousands of shelves and products) with the need to find an efficient solution quickly so that the robots are always safely moving towards their goals. The typical layout of a warehouse increases difficulty further: shelves are packed tightly into the space, reducing the capacity for movement of the robots.

MAPP is inherently very difficult — there is no known “cheap” method to produce high quality solutions quickly at the scale required. Current approaches fall into two categories, both relying on AI techniques that search through the vast space of possible solutions. Those that guarantee optimality struggle to scale, while approaches that scale do so at the cost of reduced solution quality. This proposal is to advance the state of the art in optimal MAPP significantly through a novel combination of path planning and constraint programming. Constraint programming is a powerful automated reasoning technique that allows us to model a complex decision-making problem such as MAPP by describing the set of choices that must be made (e.g. which path a robot should take) and the set of constraints that specify allowed combinations of choices (e.g. robots cannot collide). This model is presented to a constraint solver, which searches for solutions automatically, using powerful deduction mechanisms to reduce search considerably.

The project includes the following objectives:

A New Modelling Perspective: The model input to a constraint solver is crucial to the efficiency with which solutions can be found. Our proposed innovation is in how MAPP is modelled. We will exploit the many equivalencies in these problems, for example equivalent routes between locations, and equivalent resources in terms of the robots. While these remain in the model they must potentially all be explored, wasting enormous effort. Instead of modelling the warehouse layout at a fine level of detail, the current default leading to the consideration of a vast number of equivalent paths, we will abstract the fine-grained grid representation into larger regions, for example representing an entire corridor between two shelves.

Ensuring Validity: The research challenge in adopting this more abstract modelling perspective is to ensure that plans found with this reduced representation are valid in the real warehouse by, for example, constraining these regions so that their capacities are respected and the flow of traffic within them is such that collisions and deadlocks cannot occur.

Evaluation and refinement: We will evaluate our new model on benchmark problems drawn from the competitions where state of the art MAPP solvers compete. This will allow us to gauge progress and refine and improve our new approach.

The result of this research will be to improve the scalability of optimal solvers, producing better quality solutions, increasing the throughput of a warehouse, and reducing operational costs.

Eligibility Criteria

We are looking for highly motivated research students willing to be part of a diverse and supportive research community. Applicants must hold a good Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a related area appropriate for their proposed topic of study.

International applications are welcome. We especially encourage female applicants and underrepresented minorities to apply. The School of Computer Science was awarded the Athena SWAN Silver award for its sustained progression in advancing equality and representation, and we welcome applications from those suitably qualified from all genders, all races, ethnicities and nationalities, LGBT+, all or no religion, all social class backgrounds, and all family structures to apply for our postgraduate research programmes.

Value of Award
  • Tuition scholarships cover PhD fees irrespective of country of origin.
  • Stipends are valued at £19,795 per annum (or the standard UKRI stipend, if it is higher).
To apply:

Interested applicants can contact Professor Ian Miguel with an outline proposal.

Full instructions for the formal application process can be found at How to apply – School of Computer Science – University of St Andrews