School of Computer Science

Welcome to new Staff and Students

We are delighted to introduce the latest members of staff and research students to the school.

Dr Bo Chen:

Dr. Chen is an Associate Professor in the School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC, http://www.uestc.edu.cn). He is oriented by Dr. Adam Barker now as a BoVisiting Scholar till February, 2017. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2008 from UESTC. His major research areas include: 1) Rough Set and Soft Computing 2) Data-intensive Computing Software Infrastructure 3) Data Science and Inter-disciplinary Applications. Dr. Chen has substantial industrial backgrounds. Before join UESTC, he served as software engineer and senior consultant for middleware vendors Tongtech and BEA. He PI and Co-PI-ed some Chinese national granted projects for service oriented software platform in modern service fulfilling and international e-trading. He serves as an expert panel member of China Ministry of Science and Technology, for China State Sci- Tech Support Program and Torch Program. He is also a deputy sectary and expert panel member of Innovation Technology Alliance for Electronic Trade Industry (http://www.etrades.cn), led by China Ministry of Commerce. For more information, please check out his UESTC faculty webpage http://www.is.uestc.edu.cn/teachers.do?id=1061.

Dr Roushanak Rahmat:

roshiRoushanak is a Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews working on WORKANDHOME project with Dr Adam Barker.

Her research interests include mobile app design, cloud computing, image/signal processing and medical image analysis.

 

 

Dawand Sulaiman:

Dawand I earned my master’s degree in Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews (Academic Year: 2011/12) and received a medal for the best dissertation in the programme. Prior to that, I gained my BSc degree in Applied Computing in Ming Chuan University in Taiwan. For the last three years, I was in my hometown and worked as an instructor in the University of Kurdistan Hêwler and taught several modules including: Problem Solving Techniques, Data Structures and Algorithms, Object Oriented Programming, and Web Technologies. Meanwhile, I developed and distributed more than 30 mobile apps for both iOS and Android platforms.

I have started my PhD under the supervision of Adam Barker in January 2016. I will be working alongside an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Computer Science and Geography in the WORKANDHOME project, which investigates how home-based businesses are shaping society and space.

Guilherme Carneiro:

My name is Guilherme Carneiro, I am from Brazil. I hold a BSc in Computer Science with a specialization in SoGuilhermeftware Engineering. I have some experience in industry where I spent few years working at IBM with production databases of American customers. In 2013, I returned to academia to receive training in research with a Master in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Paris-Sud University in France. Before coming to St. Andrews, I worked for 6 months as a Research intern at INRIA (the French National Institute for computer science and applied mathematics).

I am starting my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Aaron Quigley and Dr. Miguel Nacenta in SACHI. My research topic is focused on collaborative information visualization to facilitate group decision making in real-time. My PhD is currently funded by CNPq and the Brazilian government through the Science Without Borders program.

I love traveling and visiting new places. I like any sports in general. I also have training in self-defense with a black belt in kung-fu.

Yasir Alguwaifli:

YasirUntil now I have been working as a lecturer in computer science, mainly teaching web-related modules. Before joining the academic field, I was a student mainly working in web-related as full-stack developer but sometimes dipping my toes in other areas such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and formal-verification.

I have now started my PhD with Professor Kevin Hammond’s team. When I’m not spending my nights looking at code, I usually enjoy playing mmorpgs or watching gaming streams!

 

Spot the difference?

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Do you have a discerning eye for video? If so, we need your help as a volunteer in our study!

Volunteers will be asked to watch 7 video clips of 10 seconds each. Each clip will be viewed 3 times, and then again at a different distance. After each video clip, you will choose which clip (if any) you perceived to have different quality and why. All video clips are suitable for viewing by people of 12 years and older. Volunteers have to be at least 18 years of age.

Please email Bence (bs44@st-andrews.ac.uk) if you wish to take part or have any further questions.

Contact details:
Researcher: Bence Szabo
E-mail: bs44@st-andrews.ac.uk

Supervisor: Professor Saleem Bhatti
E-mail: saleem@st-andrews.ac.uk

UTREC approval code: CS11878

School Seminar ‘Closure Experiences in Digital Product Design’ by Joe Macleod

“Closure Experiences in Digital Product Design. The loss of the resolution in the shop of abundance”

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Abstract
Most experiences in life are punctuated by a closure experience. In the past these were profound; however, over generations we have distanced ourselves from meaningful closure experiences thanks to our lifestyles increasing in comfort, the church weakening and medicine advancing. This has seemingly freed us from the shackles of the ultimate closure experience – death – and sanctioning our personal pursuit of heaven on earth in the form of consumption. We are now encouraged to drunkenly stumble from purchase to purchase, with any sense of longevity and responsibility removed. Long term side effects of this are exampled in the Product, Service and Digital landscapes that we frequent. The consequences of our behaviour results in a changing climate, industries fined billions for mis-selling and individuals casually eroding their personal online reputations. Many of us are active in the creation of services, products or digital products; making them attractive, engaging and usable for consumers, but we often overlook concluding these experiences for the user in a responsible way. Closure Experiences offers a model to frame this change.

Bio
Joe Macleod has been working in the mobile design space since 1998 and has been involved in a pretty diverse range of projects. At Nokia he helped develop some of the most streamlined packaging in the world, he created a hack team to disrupt the corporate drone of powerpoint, produced mobile services for pregnant women in Africa and pioneered lighting behavior for millions of phones. For the last four years he has been key to establishing ustwo as the UKs best digital product studio, with 180 people globally in London, New York, Sydney and Sweden, while also successfully building education initiatives, curriculums and courses on the back of the IncludeDesign campaign which launched in 2013. He now works independently on projects and has recently established established Closure Experiences, a new business looking at issues around consumption, consumerism and designing the end of things.

Event details

  • When: 29th March 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Launch of new St Andrews CS Alumni webpage

We now launched our new Alumni webpage for the School of Computer Science in the University of St Andrews.

This page is designed for our alumni to stay in touch with us and each other. We have a series of alumni profiles from across the last 40 years, recent news items from alumni events and links to our University alumni portal, alumni news, as well as School news and events.

Thanks to Louis Stewart for all his work on this site.

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
baselines.

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