Congratulations to Gonzalo Mendez, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured with supervisor Dr Miguel Nacenta, Internal examiner, Dr Tristan Henderson and external examiner Associate Professor Samuel Huron, from Télécom ParisTech.
Image courtesy of Annemarie Paton.
Alex Voss from the School of Computer Science and Anna Clements and Eva Borger from the University Library have been awarded funding by OCLC for a 1-year project titled “Characterizing the adoption of ORCID ID in academic communities”.
ORCID iDs are persistent digital identifiers that distinguish researchers and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, support automated linkages between individuals and their professional activities ensuring that their work is recognized and attributed.
The funded project, which began in March, expands on a pilot study carried out in 2017 by Eva as part of her MSc dissertation project, which investigated the adoption and use of ORCID iDs among researchers at the University of St Andrews and identified key use cases and new avenues for advocacy.
The team now aim to carry out similar surveys at other institutions that integrate ORCID iDs and build a bigger picture of how advocacy, institutional processes and mandates relate to the adoption of ORCID iDs in academic communities. Based on these findings, they plan to formulate recommendations on how advocacy and policies regarding ORCID iDs can be employed to maximise their value in the research process.
Alex Voss has a related MSc dissertation, Consolidating Output and Citations Data, for students interested in this particular project or research area.
If you would like to find out more about ORCID iDs at the University of St Andrews, visit their ORCID pages. For more information about the project, please contact Alex Voss at alex.voss@st-andrews.ac.uk or visit the ORCID study blog for ongoing updates.
Applying to study at university includes many financial considerations. Scholarships and bursaries can help reward academic achievement and provide financial awards enabling students to undertake or further their education. Students in Computer Science have secured a variety of bursaries to help fund their passion for the subject. Successful undergraduate and postgraduate student perspectives are highlighted below.
Sherlock Cruz , the first recipient of The London Scholarship reflected on his time at St Andrews and how scholarships can transform lives. The scholarship encourages young students from the Greater London area to study at St Andrews by equipping them with accommodation and living costs.
The School is fortunate in receiving on-going support from Adobe for undergraduate students studying Computer Science by way of Adobe Prize Bursaries. Successful applicants receive an award each year for the duration of their degree.
Henry Hargreaves was the successful recipient of a Royal Television Society Technology Bursary. The bursary encourages the most talented Engineering and Computer Sciences undergraduates to consider a career in television.
Alice Herbison secured a Carnegie-Cameron Bursary to support postgraduate study enabling her to undertake our MSc in Human Computer Interaction.
Arkwright Awards for budding young engineers nurtures high-potential A-level and Scottish Advanced Higher students who have a desire to be future leaders in engineering disciplines, including computing, software, communications and product design. More information on Arkwright engineering awards and who can apply can be located on their website.
The scholarships and funding catalogue has up-to-date information on eligibility for undergraduate and postgraduate applicants.
Congratulations to Matus Tejiscak, who successfully defended his thesis yesterday. He is pictured with supervisor Dr Edwin Brady, Internal examiner Dr Chris Jefferson and external examiner Dr Andreas Abel, from the University of Gothenburg.
Abstract:
“Why is my kid getting HD on their phone, while I’m stuck with SD on my 50″ TV?” This type of complaint is among the most common directed to streaming services such as Netflix and BBC. Recent studies observe that adaptive video streams, when competing behind a bottleneck link, generate flows that lead to instability, under-utilization, and unfairness. Additional measurements suggest there may also be a negative impact on users’ perceived quality of experience as a consequence. The intuitive response may be, and has been, that application-generated issues should be resolved by the application. In this presentation I shall demonstrate that fairness, by any definition, can only be solved in the network. Moreover, that in an increasingly HTTP-S world, some form of client interaction is required. In support, a new network-layer ‘QoE-fairness’ metric will be be introduced that reflects user experience. Experiments using our open-source implementation in the home environment reinforce the network-layer as the right place to attack the general problem.
Refs-
[1] http://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/networking/networking2015/1570066341.pdf
[2] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2940144
Speaker Bio:
Marwan Fayed joined the University of St Andrews in 2018. He received his MA from Boston University and his PhD from the University of Ottawa, in 2003 and 2009 respectively, and in between worked at Microsoft as a member of the Core Reliability Group. In 2009 he joined the University of Stirling, UK as Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) Lecturer, alongside an appointment to ‘Theme Leader’ for networking research in Scotland, 2014-2016. His current research interests lie in wireless algorithms, as well as general network, transport, and measurement in next generation edge networks. He is a co-founder of HUBS C.i.C., an ISP focussed on rural communities, recipient of an IEEE best paper award, and a Senior Member of both the IEEE and ACM.
Title and Abstract TBD
“The Human Personal Assistant you summon by text”
Computer Science student Nnamdi Ekwe-Ekwe launches a UK-wide app today, that frees up your time to do what you want to do rather than what you have to do. Shrowze is an app that provides everyone with their own human personal assistant to help them with whatever they need to do. It is the Human Personal Assistant you summon by text.
Nnamdi a PhD student in the School, built Shrowze in response to how long he saw it took people (himself included) to complete tasks that should be simple and straightforward (such as finding accommodation, booking a flight, organising and booking a meal, getting a plumber, etc.)
Nnamdi notes,
“As a full-time student I’ve always wanted to have more time for myself and concentrate on the truly important things, while not neglecting the numerous commitments I have every day – a problem shared by millions the world over. I just remember spending lots of time on routine everyday things that needed doing, when instead I could have been spending my time more usefully.”
With Shrowze, whatever it is you need doing, whatever it is you need getting, from wherever in the world, their team of human personal assistants can help – all you have to do is send a text. Shrowze has been trialed over the past 6 months with the general public and with students, receiving great feedback.
“Hi, I’m looking for accommodation for next year. This is my budget, and it’s going to be 4 of us sharing. Can you give us some potential places and book us viewings?”
“Hi, can you find me cheap flights to Barcelona for next week? And accommodation, and also give me a list of things to do there?”
“Hi, can you book me the best but cheapest taxi to the station? Three of us are going, we have two pieces of luggage!”
Shrowze is now live for all users across the country. For the next two weeks, anybody who signs up with Shrowze, will get 1 hour free time to have access to their own human personal assistant. Additionally, all students get a special 50% discount for as long as they are a student to use Shrowze.
Website – https://www.shrowze.co.uk/
Nnamdi Ekwe-Ekwe completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Leicester before studying for his Masters in Advanced Computer Science at the University of St Andrews and is currently a PhD student with a focus on Cloud Computing.
Text and images courtesy of Darcy Roberts, Communications Team, Shrowze and Nnamdi.
Biography: Dr. Anil Madhavapeddy is a University Lecturer at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and a Fellow of Pembroke College where he is Director of Studies for Computer Science. He has worked in industry (NetApp, Citrix, Intel), academia (Cambridge, Imperial, UCLA) and startups (XenSource, Unikernel Systems, Docker) over the past two decades. At Cambridge, he directs the OCaml Labs research group which delves into the intersection of functional programming and systems, and is a maintainer on many open source projects such as OpenBSD, OCaml, Xen and Docker.
Timetable
9:30: Introduction by Professor Saleem Bhatti
9:35: Lecture 1
10:35: Break with tea and coffee
11:15: Lecture 2
12:15: Lunch (not provided)
14:00: Lecture 3
15:00: Close by Professor Simon Dobson
Lecture 1: Rebuilding Operating Systems with Functional Principles
The software stacks that we deploy across computing devices in the world are based on shaky foundations. Millions of lines of C code crammed into monolithic operating system kernels, mixed with layers of scheduling logic, wrapped in a hypervisor, and served with a dose of nominal security checking on the side. In this talk, I will describe an alternative approach to constructing reliable, specialised systems with a familiar developer experience. We will use modular functional programming to build several services such as a secure web server that have no reliance on conventional operating systems, and explain how to express their logic in a high level, functional fashion. By the end of it, everyone in the audience should be able to build their own so-called unikernels!
Lecture 2: The First Billion Real Deployments of Unikernels
Unikernels offer a path to a more sane basis for driving applications on hardware, but will they ever be adopted for real? For the past fifteen years, an intrepid group of adventurers have been developing the MirageOS application stack in the OCaml programming language. Along the way, it has been deployed in many unusual industrial situations that I will describe in this talk, starting with the Docker container stack, then moving onto the Xen hypervisor that drives billions of servers worldwide. I will explain the challenges of using functional programming in industry, but also the rewards of seeing successful deployments quietly working in mission-critical areas of systems software.
Lecture 3: Programming the Next Trillion Embedded Devices
The unikernel approach of compiling highly specialised applications from high-level source code is perfectly suited to programming the trillions of embedded devices that are making their way around the world. However, this raises new challenges from a programming language perspective: how can we run on a spectrum of devices from the very tiny (with just kilobytes of RAM) to specialised hardware? I will describe the new frontier of functional metaprogramming (programs which generate more programs) that we are using to compile a single application to many heterogenous devices, and a Git-like model to coordinate across thousands of nodes. I will conclude with by motivating the need for a next-generation operating system to power new exciting applications such as augmented and virtual reality in our situated environments, and remove the need for constant centralised coordination via the Internet.
Congratulations to Alexander Murashko, who successfully defended his thesis last week. Alexander is pictured with External Examiner, Professor Paul McKevitt from Ulster University, Internal Examiner Dr Kasim Terzic, Convener Professor Alan Dearle and Supervisor Dr John Thomson.
Image courtesy of Annemarie Paton.
Abstract:
Matthew Rice, Scotland Director for the Open Rights Group, the digital rights campaigning organisation, will lead a seminar discussing the role of civil society organisations in the discourse of technology, rights, regulation, and norms. Computer Scientists sit at an important point in this debate, as individuals affected by changes in norms, but more importantly as builders of the applications and the infrastructure that reflect these norms.
The seminar will discuss the impact civil society has on changing norms and laws around the world, and why these actors matter in the space between governments, companies, and wider society. It will introduce students to the Open Rights Group, the UK’s only technology and human rights grassroots campaigning organisation on t, and its current work in the area of technology and human rights.
Digital technology has transformed the way we live and opened up limitless new ways to communicate, connect, share and learn across the world. But for all the benefits, technological developments have created new threats to our human rights. The Open Rights Group raise awareness of these threats and challenge them through public campaigns, legal actions, policy interventions and tech projects.
