School of Computer Science

MSc Poster Demo Session 2017

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

The eventful poster demonstration session provides a great opportunity for students to meet with second markers, reflect upon their MSc experience and appreciate the diverse projects completed by their peers. This year, students organised a School sponsored CS Ball, to celebrate their achievement.

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

Images courtesy of Saleem Bhatti and Xu Zhu.

Postgraduate Dinner at Fairmont Hotel

Postgraduate student, Paul Dobra organised an end of semester celebratory dinner at the Fairmont Hotel in April. The social event marked the end of teaching and provided a chance to relax before the commencement of dissertation. Paul supplied comments and shared some photos from the occasion.

“There are rather few occasions not to be happy when you are surrounded by friends and family. Even better so when your friends are like your family, and in true computer science spirit the end of the second semester finished in a grand style: enjoying the scenic view of the North Sea from the balcony of the Fairmont Hotel and Restaurant, approximately 60 postgraduates celebrated their friendship and the successful completion of deadlines. Consisting of a lavish three-course meal and blessed with amazing weather, the event was a reminder of the true, everlasting bonds that can be forged outside university.”

Images and text courtesy of Paul Dobra

Monads and Lenses – Dr James Cheney

Talk Title:  Monads and Lenses

Abstract:

Monads are an abstraction that can be used to mathematically model computational effects (among other things).  Lenses are an abstraction for bidirectional computation, a generalization of the view-update problem.  In this talk I will discuss ways to combine them and why it might be interesting to do so.

 

This talk is on joint work with Faris Abou-Saleh, Jeremy Gibbons, James McKinna and Perdita Stevens conducted as part of the recently-concluded project “A theory of least change for bidirectional transformations”.

Event details

  • When: 17th July 2017 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Colloquium, Seminar

First ever Computer Science Ball

We would like to cordially invite all staff, students, and alumni to this historic CS event in the making. As you know, other schools in St Andrews have their own annual ball e.g. chem-ball, physics-ball, bull-and-bear (economics) ball etc. For a while, we have wanted our own CS ball – and thanks to a team of keen MSc students and sponsorship from the School of Computer Science – the ball is finally happening!

The tickets available from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/first-ever-cs-ball-smurfalicious-blue-ball-tickets-35035549271 are priced at £39.95, which includes:

  • Full 3 course dinner (starter, main, dessert) with 4 options each to choose from – including vegan/vegetarian/pescaterian options and adjustments for Halal etc.
  • A glass of champagne or a non-alcoholic mocktail
  • A Ceilidh till midnight
  • Return transport by coach from St Andrews to The Old Manor Hotel

The ball will strengthen our sense of fellowship, between all staff and students, and not least as a school. But as you all know very well, we are not just a school, we are a family – the St Andrews #csfamily. Hope to see many of you there!

FAQ:

https://www.smurf.com/

Info and files provided by Shyam Reyal

Computer Science: June Graduation 2017

Congratulations to our Senior Honours Class of 2017, MSci Honours students and our PhD students Dr Anne-Marie Mann, Dr Ildiko Pete, Dr Yuchen Zhao and Dr Michael Mauderer, who graduated on Wednesday. Students were invited to a reception in the School prior to the ceremony, to celebrate their achievement with staff, friends and family. We echo the sentiments expressed by our Head of School, Professor Steve Linton, during his Graduation address.

“For what you have achieved here, we are so proud of you. For what you will achieve, we wait eagerly and will always be proud. And wherever you are, we hope you will always regard St Andrews as a place you can call home.”

Our graduates will indeed 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.


Images courtesy of Annemarie Paton and Ryo Yanagida.

DHSI Seminar Series (Digital Health Science Initiative)

“Addiction”

Seminar Room 1 School of Medicine

12:00: Alex Baldacchino- Introduction

12:15: Ognjen Arandjelović & Aniqa Aslam- Understanding Fatal and Non-Fatal Drug Overdose Risk Factors in Fife: Overdose Risk (OdRi) tool

12:45: Damien Williams & Fergus Neville- Transdermal alcohol monitoring

13:15: David Harris-Birtill & David Morrison- Narco Cat – waste water analysis in substance misuse – a novel epidemiological tool

13:15 – 14.00: All Questions & Opportunities

Event details

  • When: 14th June 2017 12:00 - 14:00
  • Where: N Haugh, St Andrews
  • Format: Seminar

Dr. Ornela Dardha’ talk: Session Types Revisited

Event Location: School of Medicine, Seminar room 1

Abstract:
Session types are a formalism to model structured communication-based programming. A session type describes communication by specifying the type and direction of data exchanged between two parties. We show that session types are encodable in more primitive and foundational pi-calculus types. Besides providing an expressivity result, the encoding: (i) removes redundancies in the syntax of session types, and (ii) yields standard properties of session types as straightforward corollaries, exploiting the corresponding properties of standard typed pi-calculus. The robustness of the encoding is tested on a few extensions of session types, including subtyping, polymorphism, and higher-order communications. In this talk we present the encoding, some of its applications and recent developments.

 

Event details

  • When: 4th July 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: N Haugh, St Andrews
  • Format: Seminar

Simon Fowler Seminar: First-Class Distributed Session Types

Session types codify communication patterns, giving developers guarantees that applications satisfy predefined protocols. Session types have come a long way from their theoretical roots: recent work has seen the implementation of static analysis tools; embeddings into a multitude of programming languages; and the integration of session types into languages as a first-class language construct.

Work at Edinburgh has concentrated on the latter. Lindley and Morris have extended the experimental functional programmming language Links with session-typed hannels in a multithreaded setting.

Distribution, however, brings challenges such as failure and the need for distributed channel delegation algorithms. In this talk, I will demonstrate and discuss the design and implementation of session types in Links. I will describe my recent work on adding support for distribution to Links, allowing the creation of session-typed, multi-user web applications.

Finally, I will describe recent, in-progress, work on a static type system and semantics allowing the controlled relaxation of the requirement of *linearity* (that
every endpoint must be used exactly once) to that of affinity (that every endpoint must be used at most once) in order to account for the question of users leaving a session midway through, and describe how the system still retains core metatheoretic pro

Event details

  • When: 5th June 2017 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar