School of Computer Science

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

SICSA Workshop on Learning Analytics in Education

The Higher Education Research Group is happy to announce the SICSA-sponsored workshop on learning analytics on Aug 6th 2018.

Goals

The purpose of this SICSA-sponsored workshop is to encourage an evidence-based approach to teaching by leveraging quantitative and qualitative data available to CS schools. Most importantly, we plan to organise a multi-institution study on using machine learning and AI-based techniques on existing data to improve learning outcomes across multiple universities. The workshop will serve to formulate the goals of such a study and forge the necessary collaborations to make this happen.

Format

We are very happy to announce that the chief regulatory adviser at Jisc Technologies Andrew Cormack will give an invited talk about the legal and ethical framework for learning analytics. In addition to the invited talk, the workshop will consist of a set of breakout sessions and a final discussion dedicated to preparing a follow-up study. The breakout sessions will involve discussions about existing quantitative and qualitative data available to educators, how these data influence teaching, what (statistical and other) data procesisng is useful for driving decisions, and which algorithmic approaches could be applied across institutions.

Background

Evidence-based teaching is of particular importance in fast-moving fields like Computer Science, and is therefore of interest to many higher education institutions. We have more data on students and courses than ever before including grades, entry requirements, qualitative and quantitative feedback, and career paths after leaving the university, and as computer scientists we are well equipped to process such data. It is important to measure the positive and negative impact of changes to the delivery (e.g. lecture capture, different lecturers) and content (slides, supporting material, organisation) in order to maintain and hopefully improve learning outcomes over time.

However, measuring how teaching approaches affect learning outcomes can be challenging because of issues such as data protection, small numbers of students, changes in the curriculum, or changes in admission procedures. Measuring differences between institutions is even harder because of differences in course structure, class sizes and marking scales. We believe that computer science techniques such as data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence will become increasingly important in this field, and would like to set up an ambitious study across several universities based on the findings of this workshop. Such a study is only possible if coordinated well across institutions and this workshop aims to provide the basis for such collaboration.

Target Audience

The workshop will involve 24 academics, mainly from SICSA-affiliated institutions, aiming to foster an exchange of ideas and best practice. While the central topic is CS education, we hope to also appeal to CS academics engaged in data ethics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (e.g. for processing data in natural text form) because the topic provides an important application of CS, and has great potential for impact.

To register, contact Kasim at kt54@st-andrews.ac.uk, or go to the Eventbrite page:

http://learning-analytics-workshop.eventbrite.com/

Event details

  • When: 6th August 2018 09:30 - 15:30
  • Where: Gateway Bldg
  • Format: Workshop

Graduation Reception June 2018

Congratulations to our Senior Honours Class of 2018, MSci Honours students and our PhD students Dr Adam Barwell, Dr Martin McCaffery, Dr Gonzalo Mendez and Dr Long Thai, who graduated last month. Students were invited to a reception in the School prior to the ceremony, to celebrate their achievement with staff, friends and family.

Our graduates will 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.

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