School of Computer Science

IDIR Summer Workshop 2018

The St Andrews Institute for Data-Intensive Research (IDIR) was set up in September 2014 to provide a focus for research and teaching activities across the University driven by access to “big data”.

IDIR does not directly sponsor or manage any research of its own: rather, we help researchers to collaborate within and beyond their home Schools in areas relating to data and computationally-intensive research.

In the past we have hosted the Summer of Vs (Variety, Veracity, Velocity & Volume) and Summer of Data Workshop Series.

This year we are hosting a series of IDIR Summer Workshops tailored by the interests of the researchers in IDIR. The themes that were identified (and the dates on which each workshop is held) are

03.07.2018 Text and/or Image Processing
24.07.2018 Data (Science) Best Practices
16.08.2018 Health and Simulation Data
04.09.2018 Cloud Computing, High Performance Computing, Reproducibility

This year’s programme of events are being organised by Özgür Akgün and Ruth Hoffmann. Get in touch with them if you would like to contribute.

Graduation Reception: Wednesday 27th June 2018

The School of Computer Science, will be hosting a graduation reception on Wednesday 27th June, in the Jack Cole building, between 10.30 and 12.30. Graduating students and guests are invited to the School to celebrate with a glass of fizz. Computer Science degrees will be conferred in an afternoon ceremony in the Younger Hall. A class photo will be taken at 11am in the Jack Cole building. Family and friends who can’t make it on the day can watch a live broadcast of graduation.

Graduation receptions have been held in the school from 2010 and some class photos have been captured for posterity.

Class photo 2010

Class photo 2011

Class photo 2014

Class Photo 2015

Class photo 2016

Class photo 2017

Senior Honours Poster and Demo Sessions

Our talented Senior Honours students are pictured presenting posters and software artefacts to second markers, interested staff and students last week. The impressive range of year-long projects included, plagiarism detection tools, augmented books with AR Visualsiation, Network science in GPUs, evaluating Full coverage display, a Blockchain construction toolkit, Intrusion detection systems evaluation and many more demonstrating cutting edge research areas. The successful session was organised by Kasim Terzic, projects coordinator in the School. We wish our students well with their forthcoming exams and look forward to seeing them at June graduation.

Images courtesy of Lisa Dow and Saleem Bhatti

Junior Honours: Software Team Project 2017

Earlier today our hard working Junior Honours students presented their Team Projects. The projects involve substantial team based software engineering and rely heavily on collective development. There are many aspects of software and professional development along with considerable inter-team and intra-team collaborations. This year the students were asked to develop a software product intended for use by the School of Medicine. The teams demonstrated lots of creativity in developing back end, HCI and Machine learning aspects for their artefact. Thanks to all the students, supervisors and coordinators for their hard work this year. We wish all our junior honours students success with their forthcoming exams and we look forward to seeing them again for senior honours in September.

SACHI research group in Canada for the annual CHI conference

  

This week members of the SACHI research group are in Canada for the annual CHI conference where they are presenting 8 papers and other research work.

Their research papers have been attracting media interest this week. The Times has covered their paper on Change blindness in proximity-aware mobile interfaces quoting Professor Quigley. 

         

 

App developers urged to cure phone ‘blindness’

While the verge and Engadget has covered the best paper Project Zanzibar: A Portable and Flexible Tangible Interaction Platform.

Hui-Shyong Yeo contributed to this research while he was a research intern at Microsoft Research last summer in Cambridge.

 

The research group has put together a page which describes all the efforts at CHI 2018 here

Next year CHI 2019 will be in Scotland while CHI 2020 will be in Hawaii on its way to Asia in 2021.

Members of SACHI are already involved in the planning for 2019 as associate chairs for the program and are looking forward to CHI here in Scotland next year

SACHI at CHI 2018 in Montreal next week

 

 

 

The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) series of academic conferences is generally considered the most prestigious in the field of human-computer interaction. It is hosted by ACM SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. CHI has been held annually since 1982 and attracts thousands of international attendees. Next week members of SACHI will be at the CHI 2018 conference in Montreal where they will be presenting 6 full papers (1 best paper), 1 demonstration, 1 late-breaking work and other activities.

This work includes pointing all around you, the design of visualization tools,  physicalization, change blindness, multi-user interfaces, tangible interaction and augmented reality.

You can find the research papers, videos and more details on SACHI @ CHI2018 here.

Montreal, Canada

War Stories: Building new tech products in an uncertain world

Steven Drost (CodeBase Chief Strategy Officer) and Jamie Coleman (CodeBase CoFounder and Chair) will talk about the topics that are rarely discussed in an academic environment around startups, product management, jobs to be done and disruption. Discussing aspects of UX, HCI, AI and systems development this is the stuff that they wish every computer scientist and startup founder knew before trying to create an innovative new business.

What is CodeBase?

CodeBase is the UK’s largest startup incubator, home to around 100 technology companies in Edinburgh and Stirling. It brings together ambitious entrepreneurs, world-class technological talent and top investors, in a creative, collaborative environment designed for the new digital economy. We host a vibrant, open community of experts in a diverse range of fields, with hands-on mentorship, networking and world-class business support. http://www.thisiscodebase.com

Jamie and Steven are quite inspiring speakers and if you are looking for project partners, collaborators or just to learn how to develop your ideas commercially, this could be a good talk for you.

 

Event details

  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Old French Bible Project

A project funded by the Undergraduate Research Assistant Scheme has successfully completed the first stage of interdisciplinary work, between the Institute of Mediaeval Studies and the School of Computer Science.  The long-term aim is to digitise and analyse early French bibles.

In this pilot project, undergraduate student Gregor Haywood, under the supervision of Prof. Clive Sneddon and Dr. Mark-Jan Nederhof, explored the feasibility of large-scale OCR technology for early printed text.  Scans from a French bible from 1543 were provided by the Special Collections of the University Library.  Much of the project consisted of iterations of automatic transcription, manual correction, retraining, and evaluation of accuracy.  In addition, problems were investigated that specifically arise from taking OCR technology designed for modern printed documents and applying it on early documents. Such problems include non-standard character sets, non-standard page layout, faded or smudged ink, and torn pages.

Despite of these problems, it was demonstrated that error rates below 3% are achievable, which paves the way for a continuation of these efforts.