PhD Viva Success: Yasir Alguwaifli

Please join me in congratulating Yasir Alguwaifli, who has just passed his PhD viva subject to minor corrections.

Yasir, who is supervised by Christopher Brown, has provided his thesis abstract below.

Thanks to Özgür Akgün for serving as internal examiner and Prof Christoph Kessler from Linköping University for serving as the external examiner.

Controlling energy consumption has always been a necessity in many computing contexts as the resources that provide said energy is limited, be it a battery supplying power to an Single Board Computer (SBC)/System-on-a-Chip (SoC), an embedded system, a drone, a phone, or another low/limited energy device, or a large cluster of machines that process extensive computations requiring multiple resources, such as a Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) system. The need to accurately predict the energy consumption of such devices is crucial in many fields. Furthermore, different types of languages, e.g. Haskell and C/C++, exhibit different behavioural properties, such as strict vs. lazy evaluation, garbage collection vs. manual memory management, and different parallel runtime behaviours. In addition most software developers do not write software with energy consumption as a goal, this is mostly due to the lack of generalised tooling to help them optimise and predict energy consumption of their software. Therefore, the need to predict energy consumption in a generalised way for different types of languages that do not rely on specific program properties is needed. We construct several statistical models based on parallel benchmarks using regression modelling such as Non-negative Least Squares (NNLS), Random Forests, and Lasso and Elastic-Net Regularized Generalized Linear Models (GLMNET) from two different programming paradigms, namely Haskell and C/C++. Furthermore, the assessment of the statistical models is made over a complete set of benchmarks that behave similarly in both Haskell and C/C++. In addition to assessing the statistical models, we develop meta-heuristic algorithms to predict the energy consumed in parallel benchmarks from Haskell’s Nofib and C/C++’s Princeton Application Repository for Shared-Memory Computers (PARSEC) suites for a range of implementations in PThreads, OpenMP and Intel’s Threading Building Blocks (TBB). The results show that benchmarks with high scalability and performance in parallel execution can have their energy consumption predicted and even optimised by selecting the best configuration for the desired results. We also observe that even in degraded performance benchmarks, high core count execution can still be predicted to the nearest configuration to produce the lowest energy sample. Additionally, the meta-heuristic technique can be employed using a language- and architecture-agnostic approach to energy consumption prediction rather than requiring hand-tuned models for specific architectures and/or benchmarks. Although meta-heuristic sampling provided acceptable levels of accuracy, the combination of the statistical model with the meta-heuristic algorithms proved to be challenging to optimise. Except for low to medium accuracy levels for the Genetic algorithm, combining meta-heuristics demonstrated limited to poor accuracy.

Research participants from further education wanted

We are looking to speak to further education students of all disciplines.

Photo by David Kennedy on Unsplash

We want to understand what students want to know about personal cyber security and how they want to learn it.   To participate, you must be 16 or over and based at college, not at school, and willing to take part in an interview about this.  Sessions will last a maximum of 30-40 minutes, held on Microsoft Teams. Participants will be offered a £8 voucher for their time and contributions.

If you are interested, please get in contact using the details below. You will then be given a Participant Information Sheet with further details of our research and have the opportunity to ask questions, before being asked whether you consent to participate.

Contact Details

Amy Hunt  – student-cyber-awareness@st-andrews.ac.uk

This study is being conducted as part of a research study in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.  The researchers are Dr Jean Carletta, Kevin Doherty, Amy Hunt, and Molly Wilson.

 

Learning to Describe: A New Approach to Computer Vision Based Ancient Coin Analysis

The work on deep learning based understanding of ancient coins by Jessica Cooper, who is a Research Assistant and a part-time PhD student supervised by Oggie Arandjelovic and David Harrison has been chosen as a featured, “title story” article by the Journal Sci where it was published in a Special Issue Machine Learning and Vision for Cultural Heritage.

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for Nguyen Dang

Congratulations to Dr Nguyen Dang, who has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. The 3 year Fellowships are intended to assist those at an early stage of their academic careers to undertake a significant piece of publishable work. Nguyen will be researching Constraint-based automated generation of synthetic benchmark instances.

Abstract summary: “Combinatorial problems such as routing or timetabling are ubiquitous in society, industry, and academia. In the quest to develop algorithms to solve these problems effectively, we need benchmark instances. An instance is an example of the problems at hand for testing how well an algorithm performs. Having rich benchmarks of instances is essential for algorithm developers to gain understanding about the strengths and weaknesses of their approaches, and ensure successful applications in practice. This fellowship will provide a fully automated system for generating valid and useful synthetic benchmark instances based on a constraint modelling pipeline that supports several algorithmic techniques.”

Winnability of Klondike Solitaire research features in Major Nelson’s video podcast

Research carried out by Charlie Blake and Ian Gent to compute the approximate odds of winning any version of solitaire features in Major Nelson’s Video Podcast [Interview with Ian and Charlie starts 23:56] for XBox news today.

Today is National Solitaire Day and the 30th anniversary of the game. The celebrations include an invitation to participate in a record breaking attempt at the most games of Microsoft Solitaire completed in one day. You can download the collection free or play it through your browser.

The Klondike Solitaire research also featured in the New Scientist last year.
Link to the full paper on arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.12314

Online article published in Technology Nov 17th 2019: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2223643-we-finally-know-the-odds-of-winning-a-game-of-solitaire/

Professor Simon Dobson elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE)

Congratulations to Head of School Simon Dobson who has been elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh for his exceptional achievements in science. This prestigious award recognises expertise which supports the “advancement of learning and knowledge in Scottish public life”. The RSE established in 1783, plays a leading role in “the development of a modern enlightenment that will enable Scotland to contribute significantly to addressing the global challenges facing humanity in the 21st Century”. The RSE announced its newly-elected 2020 Fellows on Tuesday, describing Fellows as “leading thinkers and experts from Scotland and around the world whose work has a significant impact on our nation”.

Simon works on adaptive systems, especially those driven by sensors. He has concentrated recently on how to make robust decisions from sensor data as the sensor system degrades, which is a critical foundation for making best use of the torrent of data coming from the “Internet of Things”. He is also interested in complex processes such as how epidemics spread in a population and how urban transport networks function, where mathematical models need to be complemented by repeatable and validated computational experiments that pose a major software challenge.

The Serums Project Consortium meeting

This Week Dr Juliana Bowles brought together nine leading academic and industry partners for the 4th Consortium meeting for the Serums project.

The project aims to produce tools and technologies to support future-generation healthcare systems that will integrate home-based healthcare into a holistic treatment plan, reducing cost and travel-associated risks and increasing quality of healthcare provision.

For further information on the project visit the Serums website

Image and text provided by Annemarie Paton

Blindness seminar

The medical school is holding a Seminar on Wednesday 8th January @1400-1530
New tools and methods to prevent blindness.
Seminar room 1, Medical and Biological Sciences Building

  • Dr. Andrew Blaikie, St Andrews
    Arclight Project
  • Dr. Craig Robertson, CEO Epipole Ltd
    Hand held fundus cameras
  • Prof Congdon, Queen’s University Belfast
    Overview of Global Ophthalmology

Event details

  • When: 8th January 2020 14:00 - 15:30
  • Format: Seminar