School of Computer Science

December Graduation 2018

Congratulations to the Masters Class of 2018, and PhD students Dr Daniel Rough and Dr Adeola Fabola who graduated last week. The School also celebrated the Installation of Professor Adam Barker. Students and guests were invited to a reception in Computer Science after the ceremony to celebrate their achievement and reflect on their time in the School.

Our graduates move on to a wide variety of interesting and challenging employment and further study opportunities, and we wish them all well with their future careers.

PhD viva success: Shyam Reyal

Congratulations to Shyam Reyal, who successfully defended his thesis yesterday. He is pictured with Internal examiner Dr Tom Kelsey and external examiner Dr Mark Dunlop , from the University of Strathclyde. Shyam’s research was supervised by Dr Per Ola Kristensson and Dr Mark-Jan Nederhof.

Image courtesy of Annemarie Paton

PhD viva success: Julian Petford

Congratulations to Julian Petford, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured with internal examiner Professor Aaron Quigley and external examiner Dr Jason Alexander, from Lancaster University. Julian’s PhD research in Full Coverage Displays for Non-Immersive Applications was supervised by Dr Miguel Nacenta.

Image courtesy of Wendy Boyter

Dr Roy Dyckhoff: A Eulogy

A Service of Thanksgiving was held at St Salvator’s Chapel on Saturday in memory of Roy Dyckhoff who died in hospital in September. The service included a eulogy composed and delivered by Head of School Professor Simon Dobson.

Since his death I’ve been fascinated to hear how others saw Roy — and how their views differed noticeably from what I saw in him. My perception was of a mathematician who’d made his home in computer science, at the computational end of our shared disciplines: someone fascinated by notions of proof as applied to computation, with a far broader and deeper mathematical knowledge than most of his colleagues and an ability to point out links between the practical and the theoretical. But in recent months I’ve learned of many different Roys: the one who moved from topology to category theory in his PhD; the one who worked on proof theory; the one who was a mainstay of computational logic in the UK; the one who rang bells here in our beautiful chapel; who climbed mountains; who studied languages — and probably many others that I’ll learn more of over the course of today.

Roy started at programming early: a one-year job with punched cards before going up to Cambridge as a maths undergraduate. And while doing his degree he spent his second year — when for some reason he had no maths exams — attending all the lectures, tutorials, and seminars for a degree in Persian. (As one does.) Perhaps this should have been a hint there that maths was only ever going to be a part of his intellectual career; or perhaps it was an early signature of an individual with exceptionally wide-ranging interests, who would constantly return to pure maths from lengthy diversions into other subjects. One look at the bookshelves of his house in St Andrews tells you this — volumes on renaissance art, arts and crafts, world history, and early music sitting alongside the algebra and number theory. It’s interesting also to look at theses of his nine PhD students, interesting how many of them sit at interfaces: between proof theory and category theory, between logic and search, between logic programming, functional programming, and type theory.

But such a broad base of interests sat on a bedrock of fascination for precision — indeed, a demand for precision, and an irritation that other people and organisations seemed so unreasonably comfortable with anything less than precise approaches to subjects. We saw this clearly in Roy’s (repeated) attempts to translate some or other aspect of the university’s regulations into first-order logic — an activity with which he persisted in the face of almost complete bafflement on the part of those to whom he addressed his memoranda. “Let S be the set of all students, and consider a set M of modules operated on by a collection of groups G-sub-i such that…” and so on. I’ve sometimes wondered how those on the receiving end felt about this mathematician’s take on their job — or indeed whether Roy himself imagined the university’s administration to be populated entirely by frustrated logicians, trapped in an imprecise world of programme requirements and module anti-requisites, and as anxious as him to re-write the rules with precision.

Given all this, I think it’s hard to assess what Roy’s influence has been, since it’s been spread over so many disparate areas — and that’s probably a good thing. “Activity is the enemy of thought,” as Christopher Strachey once observed, and the attempt to measure and quantify thought isn’t far behind. It’s not bad in itself, but we now know it breeds a narrow specialisation that over-values increasingly deep looks at increasingly tiny areas of knowledge, and systematically under-values those who want, and feel able, to contribute more widely — as Roy did. If there’s anything to take away from his career, I think it would be this, an example of scholarship that is at once broad, deep, intellectually honest, and constantly curious.

For those who’d like to mark his passing in some way, the family have suggested giving blood as a suitable marker. Alternatively, they are collecting for the Scottish Mountain Bothies Association, which was a charity he supported for many years. https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/roydyckhoff

Graduation Reception: December 2018

The School will celebrate more student successes and accomplishments next month, when our MSc and PhD students graduate. We look forward to toasting their success at our graduation reception in the School of Computer Science, on Thursday 6th December, between 1.30 and 3.30. Over the years graduation has involved cakes, fizz, laughter, changeable weather and lots of reminiscing as pictured below. For family and friends who can’t make it to the graduation, the University broadcasts each graduation ceremony live.

Summer and Winter Graduations 2010 – 2014

Celebrations, Kilts and Graduation 2010- 2014

St Andrews Research Open-day in Computer Science

Register for St Andrews ROCS HERE for free.

St Andrews ROCS is an event for those of you who engage (or are planning to engage) with research in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.

The main audiences are prospective postgraduate students, prospective or current industrial collaborators, and colleagues from other disciplines or Schools in Scotland and beyond.

The event will take place Friday October 26th 2018, between 10:00 AM and 4 PM.

There will be talks from all research groups, posters, demonstrations, guided tours, and much more.

You can learn about how to become a St Andrews PhD student or an active industrial collaborator.

The event will take place in the JACK COLE BUILDING, NORTH HAUGH, UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS, ST ANDREWS, KY16 9SX, SCOTLAND.

You can download the programme of activities.

If you have any questions, e-mail dopgr-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Register for St Andrews ROCS HERE for free.

Event details

  • When: 26th October 2018 10:00 - 16:00
  • Where: School of Computer Science
  • Format: Conference, Symposium, Visiting Day

DLS: Scalable Intelligent Systems by 2025 (Carl Hewitt)

Venue: The Old Course Hotel (Hall of Champions)

Timetable:

9:30 Lecture 1
10:30 Break with Coffee
11:15 Lecture 2
12:15 Break for Lunch (not provided)
14:15 Lecture 3
15:15 Discussion

Lecture 1: Introduction to Scalable Intelligent Systems

Lecture 2: Foundations for Scalable Intelligent Systems

Lecture 3: Implications of Scalable Intelligent Systems

Speaker Bio:

Professor Carl Hewitt is the creator (together with his students and other colleagues) of the Actor Model of computation, which influenced the development of the Scheme programming language and the π calculus, and inspired several other systems and programming languages. The Actor Model is in widespread industrial use including eBay, Microsoft, and Twitter. For his doctoral thesis, he designed Planner, the first programming language based on pattern-invoked procedural plans.

Professor Hewitt’s recent research centers on the area of Inconsistency Robustness, i.e., system performance in the face of continual, pervasive inconsistencies (a shift from the previously dominant paradigms of inconsistency denial and inconsistency elimination, i.e., to sweep inconsistencies under the rug). ActorScript and the Actor Model on which it is based can play an important role in the implementation of more inconsistency-robust information systems. Hewitt is an advocate in the emerging campaign against mandatory installation of backdoors in the Internet of Things.

Hewitt is Board Chair of iRobust™, an international scientific society for the promotion of the field of Inconsistency Robustness. He is also Board Chair of Standard IoT™, an international standards organization for the Internet of Things, which is using the Actor Model to unify and generalize emerging standards for IoT. He has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford University and Keio University and is Emeritus in the EECS department at MIT.

Abstract:

A project to build the technology stack outlined in these lectures can bring Scalable Intelligent Systems to fruition by 2025. Scalable Intelligent Systems have the following characteristics:

  • Interactively acquire information from video, Web pages, hologlasses, online data bases, sensors, articles, human speech and gestures, etc.
  • Real-time integration of massive pervasively inconsistent information
  • Scalability in all important dimensions meaning that there are no hard barriers to continual improvement in the above areas
  • Close human collaboration with hologlasses for secure mobile interaction. Computers alone cannot implement the above capabilities
  • No closed-form algorithmic solution is possible to implement the above capabilities

Technology stack for Scalable Intelligent Systems is outlined below:

  • Experiences Hologlasses: Collaboration, Gestures, Animations, Video
  • Matrix Discourse, Rhetoric, and Narration
  • Citadels No single point of failure
  • Massive Inconsistency Robust Ontology Propositions, Goals, Plans, Descriptions, Statistics, Narratives
  • Actor Services Hardware and Software
  • Actor Many Cores Non-sequential, Every-word-tagged, Faraday cage Crypto, Stacked Carbon Nanotube

For example, pain management could greatly benefit from Scalable Intelligent Systems. Complexities of dealing with pain have led to the current opioid crisis. According to Eric Rodgers, PhD., director of the VA’s Office of Evidence Based Practice:

“The use of opioids has changed tremendously since the 1990s, when we first started formulating a plan for guidelines. The concept then was that opioid therapy was an underused strategy for helping our patients and we were trying to get our providers to use this type of therapy more. But as time went on, we became more aware of the harms of opioid therapy and the development of pill mills. The problems got worse.

It’s now become routine for providers to check the state databases to see if there’s multi-sourcing — getting prescriptions from other providers. Providers are also now supposed to use urine drug screenings and, if there are unusual results, to do a confirmation. [For every death from an opioid overdose] there are 10 people who have a problem with opioid use disorder or addiction. And for every addicted person, we have another 10 who are misusing their medication.”

Pain management requires much more than just prescribing opioids, which are often critical for short-term and less often longer-term use. [Coker 2015; Friedberg 2012; Holt 2017; Marchant 2017; McKinney 2015; Spiegel 2018; Tedesco, et. al. 2017; White 2017] Organizational aspects play an important role in pain management. [Fagerhaugh and Strauss 1977]

Event details

  • When: 13th November 2018 09:30 - 15:30
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Distinguished lecture