There will be a series of talks at the Global Research Centre for Diverse Intelligences which might be interesting to staff in the School.
It will be a mix of discussions about how different fields (i.e., not just CS) think about intelligence and some talks about various sub-fields of AI presented by CS staff.
Talks by Ruth Hoffmann, Nguyen Dang, and Phong Le will be about foundational AI topics: https://diverseintelligences.st-andrews.ac.uk/events/
You are warmly invited to the second School Seminar:
Speaker: Peter Macgregor
Title: Fast Dynamic Algorithms for Modern Clustering
Abstract: Spectral clustering and DBSCAN both have long histories as theoretically grounded, general-purpose clustering algorithms. However, they face practical challenges when scaling to large datasets which have limited their adoption in practice.
In recent work, we have developed several improvements to these algorithms which improve their running time and space complexity while preserving their performance guarantees and generalising them to dynamically changing datasets. We make use of several algorithmic techniques including sparsification, dimensionality reduction, and random sampling. In this talk, I will present the recent progress and make the case that it’s time to challenge k-means’ dominance as the ‘default’ clustering algorithm.
Date & Time: Thursday 16/10/2025 11am-12pm
Location: JC 1.33A
Please do come along and join us! 🙂
You are warmly invited to the next School Seminar:
Speaker: Ian Gent
Title: How Not To Do It
Abstract: Empirical methods are a vital part of a researcher’s toolbox. Which means that the more senior a researcher is, the more tools they have dropped on their feet! I will share real mistakes which I or my colleagues made in analysing SAT and CP algorithms, and which we are prepared to own up to! Hopefully, you can learn from our mistakes instead of being doomed to repeat them. As an old academic I’ll also take the chance to offer some advice on being an academic. Like most advice given by old people this advice is valued principally by the person giving it and may be worthless to anyone else.
Date & Time: Tuesday 30/09/2025 11am-12pm
Location: JC 1.33A
Please do come along and join us 🙂
We are excited to invite you to a special SACHI seminar this week with Prof Sampsa Hyysalo, who will be visiting us from Aalto University in Finland. This is a great opportunity to hear from one of the leading voices in participatory design and user innovation.
📅 Friday 23rd May | 🕛 15:00 – 16:00 PM | 📍 JCB, Room 1.33A
Title:
Design Participation: Changing Roles of Users in Innovation and Research
Abstract:
In this talk, Sampsa will introduce ideas from his forthcoming book Design Participation (September 2025, cover attached), which presents doable and demonstrated ways by which design can become a major contributor to social and environmental change. This entails a shift from seeking to define solutions to opening spaces in which others—activists, entrepreneurs, civil servants, neighbourhood communities, politicians (and so on) —can effectively elaborate on and find (re)solutions to the matters they are facing. He will reflect on over two decades of research, offering insights into how participatory methods can help tackle complex social and environmental challenges. The talk will draw from work in health tech, energy transition, and civic design.
This session should be particularly relevant to colleagues working in Human-Computer Interaction, Science and Technology Studies, systems design, and research that intersects with communities, policy, and practice.
Bio:
Sampsa Hyysalo is a Professor of Co-Design at the Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, Finland. His research focuses on designer-user relations in sociotechnical change. This includes engagement in participatory design, co-design, open and user innovation, open design, peer knowledge creation, user communities, citizen science and user knowledge in organizations, design ethnography, longitudinal ethnography, social shaping of technology, process studies of innovation, practice theory, and sustainability transitions.
More about Sampsa: https://www.aalto.fi/en/collaborative-and-industrial-design/sampsa-hyysalo
He is the author of several books, including:
The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 2nd May at 2PM in JC 1.33a
Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Gen and Jess’ talks – Please do come along if you are able.
Gen Li
Title: Visualization of clinical pathways based on sepsis comorbidities
Abstract: Sepsis is a severe infectious syndrome that can lead to critical illness and death. At present, most retrospective studies on sepsis focus on diagnosis and mortality risk prediction, with relatively limited attention to patients’ medical backgrounds. Comorbidities, as an important factor affecting the severity of the disease and treatment outcomes, present complex and variable characteristics in the treatment process. However, current research in this field generally lacks in-depth analysis of clinical pathways such as patient transfers and treatment interventions during hospitalization, which limits the development of personalized treatment strategies. Based on this, our research plans to use machine learning methods to extract similar comorbidity sub-groups of sepsis patients from electronic health records (EHRs), and further combine them with advanced visualization technology to explore the clinical pathways of these sub-groups. The research aims to help clinicians gain insights into the potential relationship between sepsis and related comorbidities, improve the interpretability of patients’ clinical records, and thus develop more effective treatment and management strategies for patients.
Jess McGowan
Title: Roll For Initiative: From Play to Personas
Abstract: In user centred design, designing for a wide target audience can lead to systems attempting to please everyone and thus pleasing no-one. Using a persona, i.e. a single member of that target audience, and designing a system dedicated to their needs results in a more focused design, which leads to improved usability. However, the design of personas is largely unstructured, with no clearly agreed methodology behind their creation. The solution to this could be found in Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPGs), which tend to feature clearly structured character creation instructions. This project aims to investigate to what extent can TTRPG character creation instructions aid the design of personas.
This years Distinguished Lecture series was delivered yesterday ( Tuesday 1st April) by Professor Arthur Zimek, University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Denmark.
In his talk on, ‘Data Mining and the “Curse of Dimensionality”’ he considered the challenges of the “curse” from the perspective of data mining. In Talk 1, he discussed the “curse” in more detail, identifying relevant aspects or problems. In Talk 2, he considered clustering facing these problems and discussed some strategies and example methods for subspace clustering. In Talk 3, he discussed outlier detection, considering strategies for improved efficiency, effectiveness, and subspace outlier detection.
We are pleased to share our upcoming SACHI seminar this week by Dr Stavroula Pipyrou, a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and Founding Director of the Centre for Minorities Research.
📅 Wednesday 2nd April | 🕛 13:00 – 14:00 PM | 📍 JCB, Room 1.33A
Title:
Radical Imagination: Knowledge Through Generations
Abstract:
“Today we will engage with insights from a young Greek interlocutor who did not live the Cold War period firsthand. She relates to the legacies of the Cold War through radical imagination, projecting that it is only logical that the affects of the era have left irreversible psychological marks on the people who experienced it. The talk proposes a theory of psychic time and generational battles for belonging. There is a critique of history as taught in school textbooks when compared to the lived experiences of history in the present.”
Bio:
Stavroula is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, Founding Director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Minorities Research and editor of the interdisciplinary book series Routledge Advances in Minority Studies. She works on minority politics, displacement, governance, and the Cold War. She is the author of “The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Minority Politics” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and “Lurking Cold War: Life Through Historical Communion” (Berghahn 2025). Lurking Cold War explores the entangled registers of the Cold War that continue to stalk the social landscape in Italy and Greece. Critiquing the connections between global categories and individual experiences, Lurking foregrounds Cold War resonances through materiality, imagination, speculation and affect, in literature, bureaucracy and in the family. A theory of methexi illustrates how people and history are brought into communion, blurring the boundaries between known and unknown, reality and imagination, and form and interpretation. The result is an articulation of history that matters in a way that matters.
We are pleased to share our upcoming SACHI seminar by Dr Mark Zarb, an Associate Professor based within the School of Computing, Engineering and Technology at RGU:
📅 26th March | 🕛 13:00 – 14:00 PM | 📍 JCB, Room 1.33A
Title:
Bridging Minds and Machines: Redefining Computing Education
Abstract:
Since 2009, Dr Zarb has been exploring the evolving landscape of pedagogical research, collecting ideas from across disciplines and trends. In this acronym-filled talk, he offers a guided tour through some of the latest research at RGU — from grappling with the ethical dilemmas posed by conversational AI in education, to exploring “shadow podcasts” as informal learning tools. We will look at practical challenges, unexpected questions and at how rapidly shifting technology continues to shape how (and why) we teach and learn.
Bio
Dr Mark Zarb is an Associate Professor based within the School of Computing, Engineering and Technology at RGU
His main research focus is within computing education, having led international working groups on transitions into higher education in 2018 and post-pandemic educational landscapes in 2021 and 2022.
He received his PhD (2014, University of Dundee) for work exploring the role of verbal communication styles in pair programming. His various roles and experiences allow him a wide and international perspective on computing education.
Tuesday 1st April
Booth Lecture Theatre, School of Medicine
Schedule:
We look forward to welcoming Professor Arthur Zimek, University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Denmark, who will talk about Data Mining and the “Curse of Dimensionality”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Zimek
Abstract:
While the “curse of dimensionality” is a famous (or rather infamous) phenomenon, it has many different aspects that are not always clearly distinguished, and the impact and relevance of these aspects for some specific task remains often unclear. In this lecture series we consider the challenges of the “curse” from the perspective of data mining. In the first part, we discuss the “curse” in more detail, identifying relevant aspects or problems. In the second part, we consider clustering facing these problems and discuss some strategies and example methods for subspace clustering. In the third and last part, we discuss outlier detection, considering strategies for improved efficiency, effectiveness, and subspace outlier detection.
We are pleased to share our upcoming SACHI research seminar by Dr Aluna Everitt, a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand:
📅 Today | 🕛 12:00 – 1:00 PM | 📍 JCB, Room 1.33B
Title:
Democratising the Design and Development of Emerging Technologies
Abstract:
My research focuses on democratising the development of emerging technologies. More specifically, by establishing accessible approaches for designing and building emerging technologies such as robotics, wearables, and shape-changing interfaces. To advance the field, my research focuses not only on understanding these technologies (e.g., their design), but also how to build them (e.g., engineer them), and how to innovate with them (e.g., application). In this talk, I will go into detail about some of the projects I have worked on around this topic across the fields of HCI, Design, and Engineering.
Bio:
Dr. Aluna Everitt is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Prior to moving to Christchurch (NZ), she was a Research Associate in the Cyber-Physical Systems group at the University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. She was also a Senior Visiting Researcher and postdoc at the University of Bristol (BIG Lab). Dr. Everitt was awarded her PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University, specializing in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). As a multi-disciplinary researcher, her areas of interest and expertise lie across the fields of HCI, Design, and Engineering. She has a particular interest in conducting both quantitative and qualitative research which combines a mix of engineering fabrication approaches for iterative prototyping, together with collaborative design (co-design) to encourage users and experts from different domains to develop content and applications for the next generation of interactive hardware systems and interfaces (e.g., shape-changing displays, wearables, and robotics).
