School of Computer Science

PhD Studentship: Reasoning about Racy Programs under Relaxed Consistency

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.

School Seminar: Efficient Privacy Preserving Data Mining via Secure Computation by Dr Changyu Dong

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’. Chanyu Dong

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.

Event details

  • When: 1st July 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

June 2nd, Seminar by John Stasko: “New Approaches for Information Visualization: Rethinking Existing Notions”

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. John Stasko

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.

 

Event details

  • When: 2nd June 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Scottish Programing Languages Seminar

The School of Computer Science of the University of St Andrews is organizing the next Scottish Programing Languages Seminar which will be held on Monday 15th June 2015 in Lecture Room 2 of the Gateway. In the meantime you can keep up-to-date by following the SPLS website.

For further enquiries please contact Frantisek Farka.

Event details

  • When: 15th June 2015 11:30 - 18:00
  • Where: Gateway Bldg
  • Format: Seminar

PhD Scholarship in Data Science

Potential PhD students with a strong background in Computer Science are encouraged to apply for this three-year studentship funded by the Research Council of the European Commission (ERC). The student will work within an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Computer Science and Geography in the WORKANDHOME project (ERC Starting Grant 2014), which investigates how home-based businesses are shaping society and space.

The student will examine the Computer Science challenges within this research project. The exact scope of the PhD project is open to discussion but we anticipate that the successful candidate will be working broadly on Data Science topics, potentially covering one or more of the following areas: cloud computing, social network analysis and agent-based modelling. This is a unique opportunity to work at the cutting edge of systems research. Come join us in St Andrews.

Funding Notes: The studentship will cover UK/EU tuition fees and an annual tax-free stipend of approximately £13,000. Funding will be for three years of full-time study, starting asap.

Applications: It is expected that applicants should have or expect to obtain a UK first-class honours degree (or its equivalent from non-UK institutions) in Computer Science but the minimal standard that we will consider is a UK upper-second class Honours degree or its equivalent.

For further information on how to apply, see our postgraduate web pages. All interested candidates should contact Dr Adam Barker in the first instance to discuss your eligibility for the scholarship and a proposal for research.

June 26, Andruid Kerne, The Future of Human Expression: Ideation − Play − Body-based Interaction

Speaker: Andruid Kerne, Texas A&M, USA
Date/Time: 2-3pm June 26, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews

 

Andruid is research scientist-artist investigating how people experience personal expression, creative ideation, and social engagement. He develops and evaluates expressive interfaces, computational architectures, and distributed systems that support creative processes of knowledge production and interpersonal communication.

For more details see the SACHI page

Event details

  • When: 26th June 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Format: Seminar

May 19, Tom Rodden, On lions, impala, and bigraphs: modelling interactions in Ubiquitous Computing.

Speaker: Tom Rodden, University of Nottingham
Date/Time: 2-3pm May 19, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews

As ubiquitous systems have moved out of the lab and into the world the need to think more systematically about how there are realised has grown. This talk will present intradisciplinary work I have been engaged in with other computing colleagues on how we might develop more formal models and understanding of ubiquitous computing systems.

More details can be found on this SACHI page

 

Event details

  • When: 19th May 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

May 8th, Workshop, Sketching and Constructing Visualisations

A hands-on introduction to data literacy

This will be a hands-on workshop where we will conduct exercises on data characterisation, visualisation data sketching, and constructive visualisation. There will be several short talks on basic data visualisation concepts, discussions, sketching sessions and constructive visualisation sessions.

In this workshop you employ the basic visual variables to construct meaningful representations, the dynamic manipulation of spatial positioning to enable spatial reasoning, and through these practices you will become aware of the wide variety of ways that people can think about data.

More details can be found on this SACHI page.

 

Event details

  • When: 8th May 2015 11:00 - 16:30
  • Where: Cole 1.33

Graham Kirby: Excellence in Teaching Award

We congratulate our Director of Teaching Dr Graham Kirby on being rewarded for championing ‘learning by doing’ at The University Teaching Awards held in Parliament Hall.

The School is rated highly for student satisfaction, which echoes the great teaching and strong student staff community sustained here in Computer Science. Graham is pictured below participating in some recent School activities.

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Images courtesy of me (apologies in advance).