School of Computer Science

Becky Plummer (Bloomberg): Engineering Software to Last (School Seminar)

Abstract:

The goals of building software in a professional environment are vastly different from those of a course assignment. In this talk, we’ll cover the differences between the environments, best practices during development and tips from years of experience with troubleshooting production issues.

Speaker Bio:

Becky Plummer is the software engineering team leader responsible for content collaboration applications for the Bloomberg Terminal and the Global Head of the Engineering Champions Program. Becky made a name for herself as a software engineer by creating the trade confirmation alerting system that was fully crash recoverable for the Bloomberg Fixed Income Electronic Trading platform. She created the Engineering Champions program in 2011 to empower developers to influence change and collaborate on improving the development environment tools. Finally, she has run both small scale implementation projects as well as cross engineering projects including hundreds of developers. She is a graduate of University of Maine and Columbia University with a Master’s degree in Computer Science. Joined Bloomberg LP in New York in 2006 and moved to London in 2014 to gain a global perspective.

More information at this link.

Event details

  • When: 9th October 2018 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Purdie Theatre B
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Michael O’Boyle (Edinburgh): Heteregeneous Thinking (School Seminar)

Abstract:

Moore’s Law has been the main driver behind the extraordinary success
of computer systems. However, with the technology roadmap showing a
decline in transistor scaling and hence the demise of Moore’s law,
computer systems will be increasingly specialised and diverse. The
consistent ISA contract is beginning to break down. As it stands,
software will simply not fit. Current compiler technology, whose role
is to map software to the underlying hardware is incapable of doing
this. This looming crisis requires a fundamental rethink of how we
design, program and use heterogeneous systems. This talk proposes a
new way of tackling heterogeneity so that, rather than deny and fear
the end of Moore’s law, we embrace and exploit it.

Speaker Bio:

Michael O’Boyle is a Professor of computer science at the University
of Edinburgh. He is best known for his work in incorporating machine
learning into compilation and parallelization, automating the design
and construction of optimizing technology. He has published over 100
papers and received three best paper awards. He was presented with
the ACM CGO Test of Time award in 2017. He is a founding member of
HiPEAC, the Director of the ARM Research Centre of Excellence at
Edinburgh and Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in
Pervasive Parallelism. He is a senior EPSRC Research Fellow and a
Fellow of the BCS.

Event details

  • When: 2nd October 2018 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Nathan Carter (Bentley University): Lurch: software for immediate feedback for students in a first proof course (School Seminar)

Abstract:

Lurch is an open-source word processor that can check the steps in students’ mathematical proofs. Users write in a natural language, but mark portions of a document as meaningful, so the software can distinguish content for human readers from content it should analyze.

This talk begins with an overview of the most recent release of the system, the ways in which it impacts students’ learning of mathematical proofs, and how it needs to be improved in the future. I will then cover how we are making those improvements in the next version, which will lead naturally to an introduction of the Lurch Web Platform, a foundational set of tools that we will use to bring the project to the web.

That platform is available on GitHub for other mathematical software developers to use in their own projects. It includes a web editor with mathematical typesetting, an interface for marking up documents with mathematical (or other structured) meaning, OpenMath support, meaning visualization tools, and document dependence and sharing features, among others.

Speaker Bio:

Nathan Carter uses computer science to advance mathematics. He writes open source mathematics software for university mathematics education, in areas including mathematical logic and abstract algebra visualization. He is a past winner of the Mathematical Association of America’s Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Beginning College or University Mathematics Faculty Member and his first book, Visual Group Theory, won the 2012 Beckenbach Book Prize from that same society. His second book, Introduction to the Mathematics of Computer Graphics, was published in 2016. His current book project will be an edited volume entitled Data Science for Mathematicians, intended to help mathematics faculty make the transition into teaching and doing research in the fast-growing field of data science.

Event details

  • When: 25th September 2018 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Science and Innovation mission to Japan

Sue Kinoshita, Minister Counsellor economic affairs and Professor Quigley

This week Professor Quigley joined a mission to Japan with other academics from the University of Oxford, Edinburgh, UCL and Manchester. The week long event was organised by the UK’s Science and Innovation team in Japan, part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Over five days the delegation visited and presented at seven companies along with three seminars and workshops. Across nine presentations Professor Quigley presented to hundreds of people and introduced some of the Human Computer Interaction research in SACHI, along with research from the AI research group. This mission has the goal to strengthen research collaboration and innovation partnership between the UK and Japan.

During his talks, Aaron provided examples from our engineering doctorate program, our MSc program, work on research interns, PhD students and academics from across Computer Science.

 

Sethu Vijayakumar, Edinburgh University, Sue Kinoshita, Minister Counsellor economic affairs, Professor Aaron Quigley, Seiichi Asano, Senior science Officer and Joesph Robertson, Science & Innovation Officer.

Griff Jones, First Secretary, science innovation & global challenges, Sethu Vijayakumar, Edinburgh University, Sue Kinoshita, Minister Counsellor economic affairs, Professor Aaron Quigley, Seiichi Asano, Senior science Officer and Joesph Robertson, Science & Innovation Officer.

Global Human Computer Interaction at World Usability Day Estonia

Professor Quigley will be a distinguished speaker at the World Usability Day in Tallinn, Estonia this November as part of the ACM DSP. Aaron was appointed to the Distinguished Speaker Program (DSP) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) earlier this year. The DSP brings together international thought leaders from academia, industry, and government.

In Estonia, Aaron will present a talk on Global Human Computer Interaction. This is the study of HCI when considering global challenges, languages, concerns, cultures and different economic drivers. This talk explores new technologies and the next generation of interfaces beyond the desktop, in a global context. The World Usability Day was founded by the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) and the theme for 2018 is “Design for Good or Evil”. It brings together UX professionals and the topics range from usability to user experience, and innovative technologies to studies in human computer interaction.

The next big thing or the next big gimmick?

Dr Tom Kelsey will be holding a panel discussion at Computing’s first ever Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Live conference on Monday 19th November in London. Through a variety of expert key-notes, end-user case studies, and panel discussions the conference will highlight key developments within AI.

Tom’s panel discussion: The next big thing or the next big gimmick?

Read more about the conference and programme of events at http://events.computing.co.uk/computingai/programme

MSc Poster Demo Session 2018

After a year of hard work, and an intensive summer project, our MSc students submitted their final dissertation and presented their project posters and artefacts.

Last month’s busy poster demonstration session pictured below, provided a great opportunity for students to meet with second markers, reflect upon their MSc experience and appreciate the diverse projects completed by their peers.


We wish them all, every success with future plans, and look forward to seeing them again at December Graduation.

Images courtesy of Lisa Dow and Xu Zhu

Alumni visit School of Computer Science

A group of alumni who studied in the school over 20 years ago (graduating classes of 1994, 1995 and 1996) organised an informal reunion last month. During their stay in town they organised a visit to the school, where they sampled the school coffee, acquired a coveted CS mug and reminisced around the photo boards. The group were given an overview of the present day Computer Science at St Andrews and proceeded on a tour of the department with current Head of School, Simon Dobson, Professor Emeritus, Ron Morrison and Dave Munro.

Dr Roy Dyckhoff

Our friend and colleague Roy Dyckhoff died in hospital last month. He had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, which was being managed through blood transfusions. His death was however sudden and unexpected.

Roy was educated at Winchester College, before studying at King’s College, Cambridge. He undertook postgraduate study at New College, Oxford. He was appointed as a Lecturer in the Department of Pure Mathematics in St Andrews in 1975, moving to Computer Science in 1981.

Roy worked in logic and proof theory, having begun his career as a topologist and category theorist (for which one of his thesis advisors was Dana Scott). Much of his work concerned various aspects of intuitionistic logic, but he also contributed to work in programming languages, type theory, natural language processing, and model checking. He was also instrumental in changing the peal of the bells in St Salvator’s chapel, the college church of the University, which he frequently rang at graduations and other events, including the celebration of the 550th anniversary of the consecration of the chapel.

He had retired from St Andrews but retained an honorary position with us, and was a frequent visitor and seminar-goer until very recently. We’ll remember him as someone who was always ready to dive into deep mathematical or philosophical discussions, as well as being someone who could explain the essence of advanced mathematical concepts even to those with a lot less mathematical sophistication than he himself possessed. His engagement with the School and the wider academic community in Scotland and worldwide should have gone on for much longer than it did, and we’ll miss the conversations and interactions that we’ll no longer have with him.

Roy’s funeral will be held on Thursday 6 September at Kirkcaldy Crematorium at 11.45am, and plans are being developed for a Service of Thanksgiving at St Salvator’s Chapel later this year. There’s a card in the front office ready for his funeral later this week.

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

Workshop on Using Video in CS Education

The Higher Education Research Group is happy to announce the workshop on using video on Computer Science education on Aug 7th 2018.

Goals

Participants of this full-day workshop will look at the role of video in education in general, and specifically:

* Discussing opportunities and challenges that are specific for use of video in teaching and learning

* Connecting practitioners to share contextual experiences in using video in education

* Discussing curriculum design implications to include the use of technology

* Generating a collection of good practice “tips” and lessons learned for the benefit of those willing to start using video in learning, assessment and feedback, and seek to disseminate them afterwards in a practitioners’ focused publication, e.g. http://collections.plos.org/ten-simple-rules

* Reconciling practice-based with theoretical approaches to construct a vision of the current state-of-the-art learning technologies to then identifying future challenges.

Format

We are very happy to announce that the Director of Computational Foundry at Swansea University, Alan Dix, will give the keynote. He has worked in human–computer interaction research since the mid 1980s, is the author of one of the major international textbooks on Human-Computer Interaction and author of approximately 500 research publications covering topics from formal methods to creativity. In 2013 he produced an HCI MOOC that is now hosted at InteractionDesign.org and the materials reused for flip class teaching. In the same year he walked 1000 miles round the coast of Wales; the outcomes of which have included a case study of the educational use of the data gathered during the walk in the Open Knowledge Foundation book on “Open Data as Open Educational Resources”. The talk will include the use of fine-grained learning analytics of video and related educational resources.

In addition to the invited talk, the workshop will consist of a set of presentations followed by a world-café activity, producing practical tips in using video in education with a focus on assessment and feedback.

Background

Although video has historically played an important part on teaching and learning, only recently video-making and editing technologies have become accessible in an unprecedented way, allowing students to become proficient video “prosumers” (producers and consumers). Further, there are numerous educational gains to be had through these technologies. This interactive workshop explores how can video be used in practice to leverage skills and foster creativity whilst facilitating knowledge acquisition.

Target Audience

The workshop will involve 24 participants, who have experience or an interest in using video in education. While the central topic is video for assessment, we hope to also appeal to practitioners using video in a wider sense (e.g. in lecture capture, MOOCs, video feedback).

In order to register, contact Adriana at agw5@st-andrews.ac.uk, or visit the Eventbrite page:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/workshop-on-using-video-in-computer-science-education-tickets-48131928895

Event details

  • When: 7th August 2018 10:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Gateway Bldg
  • Format: Workshop