Congratulations to Dr Luke Hutton, who successfully defended his PhD thesis earlier today. He is pictured below with Supervisor Dr Tristan Henderson, External Examiner Prof. Bernd Stahl from De Montfort University and Internal Examiner Prof. Ian Gent.
Congratulations to our Senior Honours Class of 2015, and a bumper crop of PhD students Dr Ruth Hoffmann, Dr Jonathan Ward, Dr Masih Hajiarabderkani, Dr John McCaffery, Dr Ross Nicol, Dr Lei Fang, Dr Yi Yu and Dr Graeme Stevenson who graduated last week. Students were invited to a reception in the school to celebrate their achievement with staff, friends and family. Our graduates 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.
Computer Science: Senior Honours 2015 (image courtesy of Callum Hyland)
In express agreement with Computer Science Law, a new supply of Toblerone arrives just in time for graduation, courtesy of Ruth Hoffmann.
A good vintage: A sea of blue gowns equals talented PhD students.
The University of St Andrews awarded Dr. Vint Cerf, a founding father of the Internet, an honorary doctorate alongside our graduating students last week. In advance of this, the School of Computer Science organised a one day symposium entitled “The Internet at 100” that encompassed a host of prominent speakers and closed with “Digital Dark Age? Digital Vellum”. The Keynote by Dr Cerf contemplated that the information we have now might be lost unless we plan carefully for the longevity of the applications and data that we use today.
The interesting and thought provoking talks challenged a diverse range of Internet related research absorbing video, the technology and politics of privacy and surveillance, things and sensors, research directions and a true history of the Internet were considered by Dr Colin Perkins, Prof Ian Brown, Prof Julie McCann, Dr Lars Eggert and Prof Jon Crowcroft respectively.
Read more about the schedule and the speakers on the event website. Images courtesy of Xu Zhu.
The School will be celebrating more student successes and accomplishments next week, when our Senior Honours and PhD students graduate. We look forward to toasting their success at our Graduation reception next Wednesday. The occasion is a great opportunity for staff to meet family and friends and, for us to keep some photographic memories. Over the years graduation has involved cakes, fizz, laughter, changeable weather and lots of reminiscing as pictured below.
Summer and Winter Graduations 2010 – 2014.
Celebrations, Kilts and the Dean of Science. Graduation 2010- 2014.
Congratulations to Computer Science Interns Gergely Flamich, Jack Cargill, Iveta Dulova, Tatiana Tay and Finlay Marno for designing a prize winning poster, and providing an excellent demonstration session at the recent EPSRC Impact Showcase held in the School of Medicine.
From left: Gergely, Jack, Iveta and Tatiana complete with winning poster.
The research presented, focuses on biomedical data science by identifying, integrating and simulating data from both previous studies and current collaborations.
The EPSRC awarded Impact acceleration award (IAA) funding to The University of St Andrews to promote a step change in the delivery of knowledge exchange. There were more than 30 projects funded by the EPSRC. The recent showcase offered an opportunity for university staff and students to find out more about the projects via posters, exhibits and demonstrations.
We have reached the end of semester 2 and so many events, activities and accomplishments have taken place, it’s worth reflecting on all the hard work and enthusiasm demonstrated by our talented students.
As stated previously the School is rated highly for student satisfaction, which echoes the continued strong student staff community cultivated by all.
The events and locations pictured below help to highlight why studying Computer Science at St Andrews is such an amazing experience.
Clockwise from top left: Senior Honours demonstrate their final year projects. Junior Honours attempt world domination. PhD students present their posters.
Computer Science students organise a hugely successful StacsHack.
A bumper crop of PhD students advance towards graduation.
The CompSci garden continues to flourish with a little help from the Transitions team.
Clockwise from top left: The May Dip, Torchlit procession, Christmas ceilidh and stunning St Andrews.
Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series: Prof. Mothy Roscoe pictured at the Byre Theatre and Prof. Luca Cardelli pictured in Lower College Hall.
Images courtesy of Lisa Dow, Xu Zhu, Fearn Bishop, Saleem Bhatti and Simone Conte,
A PhD studentship on “Reasoning about Racy Programs under Relaxed Consistency” is available in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, funded by Microsoft Research and EPSRC.
The project will involve developing reasoning principles and tools for relaxed memory consistency settings. This is a key problem in shared-memory concurrency at the low-level, whether in C or C++, or even higher-level languages such as Java.
The project will be supervised by Dr Susmit Sarkar at the University of St Andrews. Dr Jade Alglave of Microsoft Research Cambridge will be the Microsoft supervisor. During the course of their PhD, Scholars are invited to Microsoft Research in Cambridge for an annual Summer School, and there is also a possibility of paid internships during studies. The studentship is fully funded to pay fees and stipend for students with a relevant connection to the UK.
Applicants are expected to have or expect to obtain a UK first-class Honours or Masters degree (or its equivalent from non-UK institutions) in Computer Science, but the minimum standard we require is an upper second-class Honours degree or equivalent. Some experience in concurrent and/or functional programming and an aptitude for mathematical subjects are required. Knowledge and experience of one or more of formal verification, mechanised proofs, and programming languages is highly desirable.
For further information on how to apply, see our postgraduate web pages. Ideally the student will start in October 2015, or as soon as possible thereafter. Further details on the project and suggested reading is available from Dr Susmit Sarkar.
The School of Computer Science welcomes the opportunity to hear from Dr Changyu Dong, from the Department of Computer and Information Sciences University of Strathclyde, who will be delivering his talk on ‘Efficient Privacy Preserving Data Mining via Secure Computation’. 
Abstract: Loosely speaking, secure computation allows parties to compute a function jointly while keeping their inputs private. Participants of secure computation learns only the output of the function, but nothing about the others’ private inputs. An oblivious application of secure computation is privacy preserving data mining. Imagine a scenario in which Amazon and Facebook want to find correlations between their users’ activities. With current technology, this cannot happen because none of the companies is willing to disclose its own data to the other. Secure computation can remove this barrier because data remains private during and after the computation. In the past, secure computation is considered to be only theoretical because of its inefficiency. Recently much effort has been made to make secure computation practical. In this talk, I will present some recent advancements in this area. I will first introduce Private Set Intersection (PSI), an important secure computation primitive, and how it can be realised efficiently. I will show how PSI can be applied to linking record in databases (private record linkage) and finding association rules. I will then show how fully homomorphic encryption, an emerging cryptographic technology, can be used in building efficient secure computation protocols, and in turn be used for privacy preserving data mining.
Bio: Changyu Dong is a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Computing at Imperial College London in 2009. His research is in cyber security, specifically in applied cryptography. Since 2006, He has published 27 research papers in major journals and international conferences, including the most prestigious venues in security such as ACM CCS, ESORICS and Journal of Computer Security. He has served on and chaired program committees for many conferences and workshops, and is a regular invited reviewer for top international journals including Journal of Computer Security, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing and IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. Shortly after moving to Strathclyde in 2011, he started his research on efficient secure computation. This research direction has led to some breakthroughs in secure computing for Private Set Intersection and Private Information Retrieval protocols, which he applied in domains such as data mining.
The School of Computer Science welcomes the opportunity to hear from Professor John Stasko of Georgia Tech,who will be delivering his talk on “New Approaches for Information Visualization: Rethinking Existing Notions” remotely. 
Abstract:
As the field of information visualization matures, researchers are able to reflect on, and perhaps even question, some long-accepted notions from the area. In this talk, I focus on three such notions:
* Representing network data through force-directed node-link diagrams
* Focusing on visual representation first and foremost
* Evaluating visualizations through user studies and experiments
Although these ideas clearly have value as evidenced by their acceptance and longevity, I have begun to question the wisdom of each. In this talk I’ll explain my concerns about these notions and I’ll suggest a new, alternative approach to each as well. To support these arguments, I will describe a number of research projects from my lab that illustrate and exemplify the new approach.
Bio:
John received the B.S. degree in Mathematics at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (1983) and Sc.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (1985 and 1989). He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1989, and he is presently a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing. His primary research area is human-computer interaction, with a focus on information visualization and visual analytics. John is a senior member of the ACM and IEEE. He was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2011 and an IEEE Fellow in 2014. He also received the 2012 IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award. In 2013 John served as General Chair of the IEEE VIS conferences in Atlanta, and he was named an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.
Congratulations to To Chris Schneider, who has successfully defended his PhD thesis. Chris is pictured celebrating with supervisor Prof Simon Dobson, external examiner Dr Radu Calinescu from the University of York, and internal examiner Dr Graham Kirby.
