School of Computer Science

School of Computer Science: Distinguished Lecture Series

The School of Computer Science in the University of St Andrews is pleased to announce the next set of Distinguished Lectures (DLS) leading up to the 50th anniversary of the series in 2019.

The next DLS will be delivered by Maria Klawe the president of Harvey Mudd College and former president of the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) on Thursday March 31st, location to be confirmed.

The well attended Distinguished Lecture Series were initiated by Professor Jack Cole in 1969 with a view to exposing students and other interested parties to leading edge topics in Computer Science.

Professor Jack Cole

Professor Jack Cole

All alumni of the school are invited to return and join us in St Andrews for the DLS, and In time we will extend further invitations to the larger 50th Anniversary events in 2019.

Previous Distinguished Lectures held in Lower College Hall and The Byre Theatre

Previous Distinguished Lectures held in Lower College Hall and The Byre Theatre

Computer Science fundraisers: Dryathlons and Marathons

Alex Voss has completed a January Dryathlon for Cancer Research UK. Read about his recent exploration of mocktails and smoothies, and help him reach his target through justgiving.

https://www.justgiving.com/Alexander-Voss-dryathlete2016

Alex Bain will be running the London Marathon this year, for wordwide cancer research and has been busy fundraising with a car wash, calendars and a Burns Night. He will be holding a bake sale on Friday 19th February in the school. Help support all his hard work in training for the event.

https://www.justgiving.com/Alex-Bain

School Seminar ‘Paraphrase Generation from Latent-Variable PCFGs for Semantic Parsing’ by Shashi Narayan

Abstract:

One of the limitations of semantic parsing approaches to open-domain question answering is the lexicosyntactic gap between natural language questions and knowledge base entries — there are many ways to ask a question, all with the same answer. In this paper we propose to bridge this gap by generating paraphrases to the input question with the goal that at least one of them will be correctly mapped to a correct knowledge-base query. We introduce a novel grammar model for paraphrase generation that does not require any sentence-aligned paraphrase corpus. Our key idea is to leverage the flexibility and scalability of latent-variable probabilistic context-free grammars to sample paraphrases. We do an extrinsic evaluation of our paraphrases by plugging them into a semantic parser for Freebase. Our evaluation experiments on WebQuestions benchmark dataset show that the performance of the semantic parser significantly improves over strong
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Bio:

Shashi Narayan is a research associate at School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently working with Shay Cohen onthe problems of spectral methods for parsing and generation. Before,he earned his doctoral degree in 2014 from Université de Lorraine,under the supervision of Claire Gardent. He received Erasmus MundusMasters scholarship (2009-2011) in Language and CommunicationTechnology (EM-LCT). He did his major in Computer Science and Engineeringfrom Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur India. He is interested in the application of syntax and semantics to solvevarious NLP problems, in particular, natural language generation,parsing, sentence simplification, paraphrase generation and questionanswering.

Event details

  • When: 26th January 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

PhD Reading Party 2015

The 2015 PhD Reading Party was held at the Burn, a Georgian Mansion at the foot of Glenesk in the North East of Scotland in December last year. It was an opportunity for research students to network, brainstorm and talk about their research and interests with colleagues in a relaxed atmosphere.

There were twenty-two (22) student talks, each of which lasted for up to 10 minutes including time for questions and discussions. Two members of staff – Ruth Letham and Ozgur Akgun – also gave talks, the former on teaching opportunities and career paths and the latter on reproducible research and research streams in academia. At the end of the talks, the staff members provided feedback and facilitated small group brainstorming sessions based on the interests and research themes that emerged.

It wasn’t all work and no play, as the gang explored the scenic landscape, wandered through the nearby woods and streams, and contemplated the complexities of the universe while star-gazing at night. Indoors, the gang played pool, table tennis, darts and cards, and participated in organised activities including a pub quiz (because there’s no such thing as too much trivia knowledge), presentation karaoke (because extemporising is fun and useful) and a host of board games (because why not?).

PhD Reading Party 2015

PhD Reading Party 2015

Images and text courtesy of Adeola Fabola, Haifa Al Nasseri and Shyam Reyal

School Seminar: ‘Probabilistic Formal Analysis of App Usage to Inform Redesign’ by Oana Andrei

The School of Computer Science are delighted to welcome Dr Oana Andrei, from the University of Glasgow, to give her talk on Probabilistic Formal Analysis of App Usage to Inform Redesign.

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Abstract: Good design of mobile apps is challenging because users are seldom homogeneous or predictable in the ways they navigate around and use the functionality presented to them. Recently we set out a process of app analysis intended to support understanding of use but also redesign using probabilistic model checking. In this talk I will show how to infer admixture models of activity patterns from various time cuts of app usage logs, characterise the activity patterns by probabilistic temporal logic properties using model checking, and compare the admixture models longitudinally and structurally. I will illustrate this work via a case study of a mobile app presenting analytic findings and discussing how they are feeding into redesign. We had posited that two activity patterns indicated two separable sets of users, each of which might benefit from a differently tailored app version, but our subsequent analysis detailed users’ interleaving of activity patterns over time – evidence speaking more in favour of redesign that supports each pattern in an integrated way. We uncover patterns consisting of brief glances at particular data and recommend them as possible candidates for new design work on widget extensions: small displays available while users use other apps.

Bio: Oana Andrei is a Research Fellow at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. Her research interests involve fundamental aspects of theoretical computer science, mainly formal modelling and analysis of concurrent and stochastic systems. The applications I study concern mobile app analytics, vehicular networks, sensor systems, biochemical networks, and autonomic computing.

 

Event details

  • When: 9th February 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: “Data Exploration on Smart watches” by Dr Rachel Menzies

rachel menzies

Abstract:

For many of us, interacting with data on mobile devices such as phones and tablets is commonplace in our lives, e.g. phone call data, TV guide, maps, fitness and wearable data. With the introduction of smart watches, the screen size of mobile devices has dramatically decreased. This reduction in screen real estate provides challenges for the design of interfaces, including the presentation and exploration of data visualisations. Using bar charts as an example, this presentation will explore the shortcomings of current zooming techniques on very small screens and consider proposed guidelines for the development of simple data exploration applications. Key design features such as the need for overview and context will be considered in respect to a simple and effective data exploration task.

 

Biography:

Rachel Menzies is a lecturer and Head of Undergraduate Studies (Computing) at the School of Science and Engineering at the University of Dundee. Her research interests include user centred design with marginalised user groups, such as users with disabilities, as well as exploring novel interfaces, data visualisation and CS education. Rachel is an Accessibility and Usability Consultant with the Human Centred Computing Consultancy, run by the University of Dundee, and has worked for many large international clients as well as providing bespoke training sessions to small companies.

Event details

  • When: 23rd February 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Graduation November 2015

Congratulations to the Masters Class of 2015, and PhD students Dr Luke Hutton and Dr Chris Schneider who graduated on Monday. Dr Chonlatee Khorakhun graduated in absentia.

Students were invited to a reception in the school to celebrate their achievement with staff, friends and family.

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Our graduates have moved on to a wide variety of interesting and challenging employment and further study opportunities, and we wish them all well with their future careers.