School of Computer Science

RadarCat presented at UIST2016

SACHI research project RadarCat (Radar Categorization for Input & Interaction), highlighted earlier this year in the University news, the Courier and Gizmodo and in a Google I/O ATAP 2016 session, will be presented at UIST2016 this week.

RadarCat is a small, versatile radar-based system for material and object classification which enables new forms of everyday proximate interaction with digital devices. SACHI’s contribution to Project Soli featured in a previous blog post SACHI contribute to Google’s Project Soli, in May. Read more about RadarCat for object recognition on the SACHI blog.

Google's Project Soli workshop in March 2016

Google’s Project Soli workshop in March 2016

Computer Science hosts Hack the Bubble

Earlier this month the School hosted hack the Bubble, a 12-hour hackathon organized by STACS, the St Andrews Computing Society and sponsored by J.P. Morgan. Hackathons are great events for teams of students to build projects from scratch and compete for awesome prizes.

The main aim of this event was to show our first and second year students what a hackathon is in a more accessible 12-hour format instead of the traditional 24 or 48 hour ones. The event was a great success with 70 students participating and 15 teams presenting their projects at the end.

This event wouldn’t have been possible without the help of the School of Computer Science for providing the venue, and sponsors J.P. Morgan for the food and prizes.

Hack the Bubble October 2016

Hack the Bubble October 2016

Images and text courtesy of STACS.

Computer Science hosts J.P. Morgan

Earlier this month, J.P. Morgan visited the School of Computer Science, to highlight tech careers, internships and other student opportunities. Staff from the company and CS students are pictured viewing project challenges and solutions through their technology showcase, discussing future career openings and enjoying pizza.

jp2

jpmorgan

Kamran Razavi: Bloomberg CodeCon winner

Congratulations to Kamran Razavi, one of our MSc in Dependable Software Systems (Erasmus Mundus) students, who won the recent Bloomberg CodeCon. CodeCon is a UK wide programming contest organised by Bloomberg and is hosted locally across multiple locations in the UK, one of which was located in the department of Physics at the University of St Andrews.

Kamran emerged first from 20 other contestants at the University of St Andrews and was ranked 19th among 217 other contestants UK-wide, coming from universities such as Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. He was awarded with a championship trophy, Bluetooth speakers, travel accessories and a ticket to London for the main contest, where the top three contestants from each local site will compete against each other.

codecon

The competition is highlighted through the University emails and after registering students can prepare themselves by solving previous problems.The competition itself, lasted 2 hours with 8 questions in total, which were algorithmic in nature, and required knowledge of data structures.

Kamran was able to solve 7 questions but was only able to submit 6, due to technical problems with the contest host website. The contest could have been taken in 15 programming languages including Java, C++, C, Python etc. Kamran used Java on this occasion and thanked Bloomberg, The School of Computer Science and The University for providing opportunities such as CodeCon. We wish him every success for the final contest.

Welcome to new 2016 PhD Students

dsc_6200

The School is very happy to welcome its new group of PhD students who have started in 2016. Shown outside the Jack Cole Building on 13 October 2016 are:

(Back row, left to right) Fahrurrozi Rahman; Xue Guo; Teng Yu; Yanbei Chen; Guilherme Soares Carneiro; Yasir Alguwaifli; and Xu Zhu.

(Front row, left to right) Mun See Chang; Zahida Almuallem; Esme Benssassi; Sidi Zhan; and the Director of Postgraduate Research, Miguel Nacenta.

Absent from the photo are Dawand Sulaiman and Saad Attieh.

Visit by the new Principal and Vice-Chancellor ‌Professor Sally Mapstone

On Tuesday the 5th of October we were pleased to host our new Principal and Vice-Chancellor ‌Professor Sally Mapstone to visit the School of Computer Science. During this visit she was able to meet with staff and students, visit our teaching spaces and visit some of our research labs. We discussed our new Engineering Doctorate (EngD) in Computer Science, our PhD programme, our new and existing MSc programmes, our growth in undergraduate single, joint and MSci degree programmes along with changes to our teaching and research space over the past few years.

From left to right, Simon Dobson, Ruth Letham, Steve Linton, Sally Mapstone, Aaron Quigley, Robin Nabel and Dharini Balasubramaniam

From left to right, Simon Dobson, Ruth Letham, Steve Linton, Sally Mapstone, Aaron Quigley, Robin Nabel and Dharini Balasubramaniam

We were also able to showcase some of our ongoing research which included a short talk from Adam Barker, on Distributed Systems and his recent time with Google, and demonstrations from Chris Jefferson, on visualisation of constraints, Vinodh Rajan Sampath, on Scribal Behaviour and Digital Palaeography, Gonzalo Mendez, on iVolver, Gergely Flamich and Patrick Schrempf, on RadarCat,  Hui-Shyong Yeo on WatchMi and David Morrison, on Beyond Medics.

We thank all the staff and students who made our new Principal feel welcome here in Computer Science.

 

 

Google@Computer Science in St Andrews

The School hosted another successful Google event on Wednesday. Students heard first hand, from four of our talented alumni, and had an opportunity to chat with current students who have completed internships. The well-received and very well attended session also covered mock interviews and rewarded students with the customary pizza.

google

st-andrews-google-careers-poster-21

PhD Viva Success: Michael Mauderer

Belated congratulations to Michael Mauderer, who successfully defended his thesis earlier this month. Micheal’s thesis, augmenting visual perception with gaze-contigent displays, was supervised by Dr Miguel Nacenta. Professor Aaron Quigley acted as internal examiner and Professor Hans Gellersen, from Lancaster University acted as external examiner.

mm

Multi-modal Indoor Positioning: Trends and Challenges by Prof. Niki Trigoni, Oxford University

Abstract:

GPS has enabled a number of location based services outdoors, but the problem of localisation remains open in GPS-denied environments, such as indoors and underground. In this talk, I will discuss the key challenges to accurate and robust position estimation, and will describe a variety of sensor modalities and algorithms developed at Oxford to address this problem.

The talk will cover inertial, radio-based and vision-based localisation approaches and their advantages and disadvantages in different settings.

 

Short Bio:

Niki Trigoni is a Professor at the Oxford University Department of Computer Science and a fellow of Kellogg College. She obtained her PhD at the University of Cambridge (2001), became a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University (2002-2004), and a Lecturer at Birkbeck College (2004-2007). Since she moved to Oxford in 2007, she established the Sensor Networks Group, and has conducted research in communication, localization and in-network processing algorithms for sensor networks. Her recent and ongoing projects span a wide variety of sensor networks applications, including indoor/underground localization, wildlife sensing, road traffic monitoring, autonomous (aerial and ground) vehicles, and sensor networks for industrial processes.

Event details

  • When: 8th November 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Quicker Sort by Dietmar Kühl, Bloomberg L.P.

 

Abstract:

Quicksort is a well-known sorting algorithm used to implement sort functionality in many libraries. The presentation isn’t really about the algorithm itself but rather about how to actually create an efficient implementation of the algorithm: a text-book implementation of the algorithm actually is not that quick (even if the pivot is chosen cleverly). It takes paying some attention to detail to improve the implementation significantly. This presentation starts with a simple implementation and makes incremental improvements to eventually yield a proper generic and fast sorting function. All code will be in C++ but it should be possible to follow the majority of the reasoning with knowledge of another programming language.

 

Short Bio:

Dietmar Kühl is a senior software developer at Bloomberg L.P. working on the data distribution environment used both internally and by enterprise installations at clients. Before joining Bloomberg he has done mainly consulting for software projects in the finance area. He is a regular attendee of the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee, presents at conferences, and he used to be a moderator of the newsgroup comp.lang.c++.moderated. He frequently answers questions on Stackoverflow.

Event details

  • When: 25th October 2016 14:30 - 15:30
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk