School of Computer Science

Senior Honours: Poster Presentation and Demo Session 2017

Our talented hard working SH students from CS4099: Major Software Project and CS4098: Minor Software Project presented their posters and final year software artifact to staff and students earlier this week.

As Illustrated in the above collage, the busy poster session is the perfect opportunity to discuss output from their year long project with markers, and provides time to share research ideas and reflect on the experience with their peer group. We wish them success with forthcoming exams and look forward to seeing them during June graduation celebrations.

Hot off the press: Type-Driven Development with Idris

A new book, Type-Driven Development with Idris has just been published by Manning Publications. Written by Dr Edwin Brady, the creator of Idris, Type-Driven Development with Idris teaches you how to improve the performance and accuracy of your programs by taking advantage of a state-of-the-art type system.

Type-driven development is an approach to programming that embraces types as the foundation of your code. It is based on the concept of “dependent types”, which allow you to express relationships and other assumptions directly in your code, and have these assumptions checked by the compiler. With this approach, you can define specifications early in development and write code that’s easy to maintain, test, and extend.

Dr Brady said:

“Idris arose as a result of my own research into program verification and language design with advanced type systems. After spending several years immersed in the concept of programming with dependent types, I felt there was a need for a language designed for developers and practitioners as well as researchers. By teaching the concept of type-driven development using Idris, the book aims to make state-of-the-art verification techniques accessible to software practitioners.”

The book is currently available via MANNING publications: https://www.manning.com/books/type-driven-development-with-idris. ePub and Kindle versions available from April 10th. The source code, chapter 1 and chapter 13 are available as free downloads.

Alex runs London Marathon 2017 for Guide Dogs

Alex Bain will be running the London Marathon again this year, raising funds for Guide Dogs. He is holding a fundraising bake sale in the department today. There are still plenty delicious cakes and home baking on offer. Support all his effort and training by buying a cake or two.

You can also donate through his justgiving page.

*Update: Total so far £320. Cakes and other sweet treats remain.

Distinguished Lecture Series 2017: Dr David Manlove

On March 31st, Dr David Manlove from the University of Glasgow, delivered the semester two distinguished lectures in Lower and Upper College Hall. The overall title was algorithms for healthcare-related matching problems.

David started with an overview of complexity theory and solving hard problems. He gave examples of this in practice, for example how researchers constructed a best-possible tour around the best 20,000 pubs in the UK. The second lecture focussed on how to assign junior doctors to hospitals in the best way, a very practical problem but with interesting complexity issues. The final lecture focussed on the life-changing topic of how to set up exchanges of kidneys between healthy donors and patients needing transplants. David talked about how his expertise in algorithms has been translated into regularly finding the best possible matches which then result in real transplants taking place.

David is pictured above at various stages of the distinguished lecture series and outside College Hall with Head of School, Prof Steve Linton, Prof Ian Gent and Dr Ishbel Duncan,

Videos from the DLS can be accessed on Vimeo –
Lecture 1: https://vimeo.com/211633740
Lecture 2: https://vimeo.com/211634119
Lecture 3: https://vimeo.com/211634923

Images courtesy of Ryo Yanagida.

Team NOMAD win IDEA Explosion 2017

Congratulations to PhD students Shyam Reyal and Simone Conte , from Computer Science and Senior Scientific Officer Tomas Lebl, from Chemistry who presented NOMAD (NMR Online Management and Datastore) at IDEA Explosion 2017 and emerged victorious. Shyam delivered a five-minute elevator pitch, whilst Simone and Tomas responded to questions. Judges acknowledged that NOMAD has huge potential with researchers, and were impressed that it has been used in St Andrews for the past 5 years, with other universities now lined-up to make use of its services, fully supporting the use of the prize money to set-up a company.


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Data and the User Experience in Retail

The Hut Group develop and manage a proprietary eCommerce platform that handled over half a billion pounds of revenue last year. UX within the company is responsible for optimising user flows through the website, and working with Design departments to deliver user delight. With over 30 distinct site brands internally, and several external clients, the team attempt to strike a balance between optimising sites for revenue and user delight. This talk is about the challenges of UX within a wider business organisation, and the role that Computer Science graduates can play in a multidisciplinary UX team.

Bio:
Elliott joined The Hut Group in June, starting in the Research and Development department. He worked on developing a dashboard for use inside the business, and developed a series of prototypes to show users Social Media content on-site. He now heads the User Experience (UX) department. Prior to joining THG, Elliott worked at Skyscanner as a front-end developer whilst graduating from St Andrews in Computer Science with several modules in HCI.

Event details

  • When: 6th March 2017 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Honey 110 - John Honey Teaching Lab
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: The technology driving the evolution of internet advertising, targeted advertising or intrusive surveillance?

“The technology driving the evolution of internet advertising, targeted advertising or intrusive surveillance?”

 Tim Palmer, Senior Partner, Digiterre (http://www.digiterre.com)

 

Event details

  • When: 27th February 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Seminar

Announcement of the 33rd British Colloquium for Theoretical Computer Science

The 33rd BCTCS will be hosted by the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, from the 26th to the 28th of April 2017. The purpose of BCTCS is to provide a forum in which researchers in theoretical computer science can meet, present research findings, and discuss developments in the field. It also aims to provide an environment in which PhD students can gain experience in presenting their work, and benefit from contact with established researchers.

The scope of the colloquium includes all aspects of theoretical computer science, including algorithms, complexity, cryptography, formal methods, game theory, machine learning, languages, logics and quantum computation. Both computer scientists and mathematicians are welcome to attend, as are participants from outside of the UK.

This year the colloquium will feature the following invited speakers

LMS Keynote Lecture in Discrete Mathematics
Professor László Babai, University of Chicago

Confirmed Speakers
Perdita Stevens, University of Edinburgh
Conor McBride, University of Strathclyde
Felix Fischer, University of Glasgow
Edwin Brady, University of St Andrews
Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary University of London

Registration is *now open*, and you can find more information at https://bctcs2017.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/

PhD students are especially encouraged to offer a talk.

As an additional event, there will be a Scottish Combinatorics Meeting at the School of Mathematics in St Andrews on the 24th and 25th of April. If you would like to take part in the meeting, please contact the organisers directly.

The organisers hope to welcome you to St Andrews in April.

Type-Driven Development of Communicating Systems using Idris

Speaker: Jan de Muijnck-Hughes

Abstract

Communicating protocols are a cornerstone of modern system design.
However, there is a disconnect between the different tooling used to design, implement and reason about these protocols and their implementations.
Session Types are a typing discipline that help resolve this difference by allowing protocol specifications to be used during type-checking to ensure that implementations adhere to a given specification.

Idris is a general purpose programming language that supports full-dependent types, providing programmers with the ability to reason more precisely about programs.
This talk introduces =Sessions=, our implementation of Session Types in Idris, and demonstrates =Sessions= ability to design and realise several common protocols.

=Sessions= improves upon existing Session Type implementations by introducing value dependencies between messages and fine-grained channel management during protocol design and implementation.
We also use Idris’ support for EDSL construction to allow for protocols to be designed and reasoned about in the same language as their implementation.
Thereby allowing for an intrinsic bond to be introduced between a protocol’s implementation and specification, and also with its verification.

Using =Sessions=, we can reduce the existing disconnect between the tooling used for protocol design, implementation, and verification.

 

 

 

Event details

  • When: 23rd February 2017 13:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Colloquium, Seminar, Talk

EPSRC Grant Success: A Constraint Modelling Pipeline

Congratulations to colleagues Professor Ian Miguel, Dr Chris Jefferson, Dr Tom Kelsey, Professor Ian Gent and Dr Peter Nightingale, who have secured an impressive EPSRC grant A constraint Modelling Pipeline, with NHS and SME project partners. The three and a half year grant, officially announced yesterday, aims to advance the state of the art in solving complex combinatorial search problems ubiquitous in many settings, such as planning, scheduling or design. Specifically, the aim is to produce a powerful, general automated modelling and solving system unique in targeting a range of powerful solving formalisms from a single abstract problem specification. The research will impact across the public and private sectors, and academia.
Read more about the grant application through EPSRC reference:EP/P015638/1