DLS: Distributed Systems and Sensing by Prof. Julie McCann

DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES

Semester 1

TITLE:

Distributed Systems and Sensing

by

Julie McCann

jm

7th November 2016

Lower and Upper College Halls

 

Introduction

By Professor Simon Dobson

School of Computer Science

University of St Andrews

The first of this academic year’s distinguished lectures will be given by Professor Julie McCann, Imperial College, London on Monday 7th November 2016 at Lower and Upper College Halls.

 

Overview

Chirping, self-organising, adaptive and intelligent tiny computers are beginning to enter both the market and people’s homes, performing various monitoring and control duties. From Google’s self-drive cars to the walls of modern office blocks, these simple devices are talking to each other in highly intelligent ways, mimicking the collective behaviour of insect colonies, for example, to overcome individual failures or changes in the local environment.

 

 

 Biography

Prof Julie A. McCann is a Professor of Computer Systems in Imperial College London (IC), where she leads the Adaptive Embedded Systems Engineering Research Group, she is Director for the Imperial wide Centre for Smart Connected Futures, Co-Director of the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Cities and she is CI for the NEC Smart Water Systems Lab and many other substantive projects with industry and academia with a focus on networking and sensing infrastructures to support environments such as smart cities, water and gas networks etc. She is CI on the EPSRC energy/water/food nexus WefWebs project where her focus is on precision farming and wine making.

Likewise, her NERC FUSE project designed and deployed a now patented sensing infrastructure for floodplain monitoring in Oxfordshire. Her research centres on highly decentralized and self-organizing scalable embedded frugal computing systems where one avoids a single point of failure to produce truly scalable solutions. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and is the Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Adaptive Autonomic Systems (TAAS), has been General and Technical chair for the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organising systems (SASO) and IEEE SECON 2016, SMARTCOMP 2017 and has been on the programme committee for IEEE INFOCOM, ACM UBICOMP and many more. Julie has presented her work in A* conferences and keynoted at the Indian Science Conclave Congregation of Nobel Prize Winners, for the encouragement of disadvantaged kids into science and computing in 2008.

 

 

 

Programme:   Monday 7th November 2016

 
     
 

09:15 – 09:30

 

Introduction:

 
  By Professor Simon Dobson  
 

09:30 – 10:30

 

Lecture 1:

 
  Professor Julie McCann will initially talk through how Wireless Sensor Networks are being used today and what other sciences will impact this subject leading to the ability to have Programmable Matter.  
 

10:30 – 11:00

 

Coffee Break

 
    Refreshments served
 

11:00 – 12:00

 

Lecture 2:

 
  In her second talk she will come very much down to earth and discuss how such systems are programmed today in terms of the hardware stack that composes them and the protocols that allow them to collaborate.  
 

12:00 – 14:00

 

Lunch Break

 
  Free time  
 

14:00 – 15:00

 

Lecture 3:

 
  Prof McCann will introduce some of the challenges that still remain, such as scaling this technology to larger dimensions but to also make them more resilient as well as secure etc. and the challenges that control adds to the system.  
 

15:00 – 15:30

 

 

Q & A Session:

 

 
  Open forum

 

 
   

 

 

Event details

  • When: 7th November 2016 09:15 - 16:00
  • Where: Lower College Hall
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Distinguished lecture

Multi-modal Indoor Positioning: Trends and Challenges by Prof. Niki Trigoni, Oxford University

Abstract:

GPS has enabled a number of location based services outdoors, but the problem of localisation remains open in GPS-denied environments, such as indoors and underground. In this talk, I will discuss the key challenges to accurate and robust position estimation, and will describe a variety of sensor modalities and algorithms developed at Oxford to address this problem.

The talk will cover inertial, radio-based and vision-based localisation approaches and their advantages and disadvantages in different settings.

 

Short Bio:

Niki Trigoni is a Professor at the Oxford University Department of Computer Science and a fellow of Kellogg College. She obtained her PhD at the University of Cambridge (2001), became a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University (2002-2004), and a Lecturer at Birkbeck College (2004-2007). Since she moved to Oxford in 2007, she established the Sensor Networks Group, and has conducted research in communication, localization and in-network processing algorithms for sensor networks. Her recent and ongoing projects span a wide variety of sensor networks applications, including indoor/underground localization, wildlife sensing, road traffic monitoring, autonomous (aerial and ground) vehicles, and sensor networks for industrial processes.

Event details

  • When: 8th November 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Quicker Sort by Dietmar Kühl, Bloomberg L.P.

 

Abstract:

Quicksort is a well-known sorting algorithm used to implement sort functionality in many libraries. The presentation isn’t really about the algorithm itself but rather about how to actually create an efficient implementation of the algorithm: a text-book implementation of the algorithm actually is not that quick (even if the pivot is chosen cleverly). It takes paying some attention to detail to improve the implementation significantly. This presentation starts with a simple implementation and makes incremental improvements to eventually yield a proper generic and fast sorting function. All code will be in C++ but it should be possible to follow the majority of the reasoning with knowledge of another programming language.

 

Short Bio:

Dietmar Kühl is a senior software developer at Bloomberg L.P. working on the data distribution environment used both internally and by enterprise installations at clients. Before joining Bloomberg he has done mainly consulting for software projects in the finance area. He is a regular attendee of the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee, presents at conferences, and he used to be a moderator of the newsgroup comp.lang.c++.moderated. He frequently answers questions on Stackoverflow.

Event details

  • When: 25th October 2016 14:30 - 15:30
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Running Before We have Evolved Legs: The Gap Between Theory and Practice in Evolutionary Algorithms by Prof. John McCall

Abstract:

Evolutionary algorithms (EA) has developed as an academic discipline since the 1960s. The subject has spawned major subfields such as swarm intelligence and genetic programming and is applied to a wide variety of practical real world problems in science medicine and engineering. EAs are often the only practical method of solving large combinatorial optimisation problems and have achieved best-known results on a variety of benchmark problems. The global academic EA community is highly active, supporting several large international conferences and high-quality international journals. Despite this activity, sustained over decades, the community has struggled to make significant progress on developing a satisfactory theory of EAs. At the same time, substantial progress has been made on developing more sophisticated EAs that are ever more powerful but ever less amenable to theoretical study. In this talk I will outline some of the main approaches to a theory of EAs and illustrate the gap between those EAs that can be theoretically analysed by those approaches and EAs that are being used in practice. I will conclude with some interesting current developments and key open questions.

 

Short Bio:

John McCall is a Professor of Computing Science at Robert Gordon University.  He works in the Computational Intelligence research group, which he founded in 2003. He has over twenty years research experience in naturally-inspired computing.  His research focuses on the study and analysis of a range of naturally-inspired optimization algorithms (genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimisation, ant colony optimisation, estimation of distribution algorithms etc.) and their application to difficult learning and optimisation problems, particularly real-world problems arising in complex engineering and medical / biological systems. Application areas of this research include medical decision support, data modeling of drilling operations, analysis of biological sequences, staff rostering and scheduling, industrial process optimization and bio-control. He has over 90 publications in books, journals and conferences. He has successfully supervised 13 PhD students and has examined over 15 PhD theses.

Event details

  • When: 11th October 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

School Seminar: “The path to Cellular IoT and the promise of 5G” by Frankie Garcia

The School of Computer Science welcomes Frankie Garcia from Keysight Technologies, Edinburgh. Frankie Garcia

Abstract: Over the last two decades we have witnessed an unprecedented growth in the number of Internet-connected devices via the Cloud (storage, compute and intelligent analytics) generally referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT). This includes both machine-to-machine (M2M) and machine-to-person communications on a massive scale. While this growth has been fuelled through standardisation and engineering of short range wireless systems such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Zigbee, cellular technologies promise wide area coverage, ease of deployment and low-cost/low-energy devices capable of operating for many years on a small battery. However, IoT technologies based on existing cellular systems are not optimized to support the huge number of simultaneous connections needed for widespread adoption. To achieve this, radical changes are required in protocol layer design, radio access techniques, and future integrated platforms that can scale and handle millions of devices efficiently. These devices will themselves exhibit a diverse set of requirements with respect to reliability, latency and availability. For these reasons, Cellular IoT has become one of the most important use case drivers in the evolution of future 5G technologies and architectures.

In this talk we will briefly introduce the audience to existing cellular standards and systems to support IoT communications, including their strengths and limitations. We will then cover the path towards more efficient cellular technologies being developed today under 3GPP, focusing heavily on Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). This will be followed by a short introduction to 5G mobile network evolution needed to reduce signalling overheads and cater for a diversity of IoT use cases. This evolution is driven by tried and tested technologies used for virtualisation such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV). “Slicing”, is a much discussed design principle that that includes logical access, compute, storage and networking for on demand architectures tailored to individual service requirements. Finally, we will present the development of an agile SDR platform targeting experimentation and prototyping of NBIoT systems.

Bio: Educated at Lancaster University, Frankie Garcia is currently Master Scientist with Keysight Technologies in Edinburgh. In addition he is project scientist with Agilent Technologies and over the last two years he has been working on adaptive radio technologies focusing on test and measurements tools and validation tools for the complex interactions that take place between the PHY and MAC layer of such adaptive radios. In particular his focus has been on Mobile WiMAX and presently on LTE.

His experience, based on academic and industrial research labs settings is quite broad raging from distributed systems, protocol engineering, high speed communications, multimedia systems, wireless sensor networks, adaptive radio and QoS.

He is a Visiting Professor at Strathclyde University, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering.

Event details

  • When: 27th September 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Distinguished Lecture Series 2016: Dr Maria Klawe

Dr Maria Klawe, the first woman president of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California delivered the first set of Distinguished Lectures for 2016, in the Byre Theatre. Given the decline in female participation in the tech industry, the three highly relevant, moving, well attended and thought-provoking lectures centred around Computer Science for All. The three lectures focused on Computing Education for School Children, Diversity in Undergraduate Education and Computing Research and People with Disabilities. Maria also delivered a lecture for The Andrew Carnegie Lecture Series: Getting More Woman into Technology Careers to a wider audience prior to the DLS.

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Slides from the Distinguished Lecture Series
Lecture1: Computing Education for all in K-12 Education
Lecture2: Diversity in Undergraduate Education
Lecture3: Computing Research and People with Disabilities

Images courtesy of Saleem Bhatti

Elise van den Hoven : Materialising Memories: a design research programme to study everyday remembering

Abstract


Perhaps the term computer ‘memory’ has led people to believe that human memory has to be perfect and infallible. Many people worry when they realise they forget and some turn to recording and collecting as much as they can, e.g. photos or videos through life logging. Some people assume that by collecting they can avoid forgetting or at least have access to the information anytime later. And that is where they might be wrong. First of all, recordings are not equivalent to memories, and memories ‘can not be stored’. Secondly it has already been shown that people collect too much and organize too little for them to be able to find information later [1]. Thirdly, human memory works best when we forget… a lot.

What I want to talk about is my vision [2] that we can use design research to support human remembering by supporting our memory’s functions [3], which include a directive function (using the past to guide present and future thoughts and behaviours, e.g. solving problems), a self-representative function (creating a sense of self over time) and a social function (developing and nurturing relationships, through sharing of personal experiences). It is important to realise that in order to support these functions there is no need to improve our remembering capabilities, however it could benefit from the right type of support. Since remembering is a reconstructive process, individual memories are subject to change, continuously, and what someone experiences as a memory does not have to be the same as what happened or what other people remember from the experience.

Bits of information from the original experience can be used to stimulate and facilitate the reconstruction process. These so-called memory cues [4], which can be anything: from a photo, a song to a person or a location, are at the core of our research. We use a people-centred approach to study memory cues in everyday life, which informs the design of interactive systems that present these memory cues. Since these cues are often digital, while people prefer material objects [e.g. 5], we combine material and digital in our studies and designs.

  1. Whittaker, S., Bergman, O., and Clough, P. Easy on that trigger dad: a study of long term family photo retrieval. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 14,1 (2010), 31-43.
  2. Hoven, E. van den. A future-proof past: Designing for remembering experiences. Memory Studies 7, 3 (2014), 373-387.
  3. Bluck, S., Alea, N., Habermas, T., and Rubin, D. C. A tale of three functions: The self–reported uses of autobiographical memory. Social Cognition 23, 1 (2005), 91-117.
  4. Hoven, E. van den, and Eggen, B. The Cue is Key: Design for Real-Life Remembering. Zeitschrift für Psychologie 222, 2 (2014), 110-117.
  5. Golsteijn, C., Hoven, E. van den, Frohlich, D., and Sellen, A. Towards a More Cherishable Digital Object. In Proc. DIS 2012, ACM Press (2012), 655-664.

 

Bio

Professor Dr Elise van den Hoven MTD is full Professor in the School of Software, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and part-time Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). She has two honorary appointments: Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee and Associate Investigator with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders.

Her research interests span different disciplines, including human-computer interaction, design and psychology, including people-centred design, designing interactive systems, physical interaction and supporting human remembering.

Professor Van den Hoven leads the international research programme Materialising Memories, a collaboration between UTS, TU/e and the University of Dundee, which uses a design research approach to study people in their everyday remembering activities in order to come up with ways to support them.

www.elisevandenhoven.com
www.materialisingmemories.com

Event details

  • When: 20th April 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Daniel Archambault : Effective Visualisation of Static and Dynamic Graphs

Abstract

Visualising dynamic graphs is important for many application areas.  For social media networks, they can help us understand the interaction and interests of users online.  In biology, they can illustrate the interactions between genes and biological processes.  Understanding and designing effective visualisation methods for dynamic network data is fundamental to these areas as well as many others.  In this talk, we focus on the effective presentation of dynamic networks.  In particular, we summarise recent results on dynamic graph visualisation with respect to animation (presentation of interactive movies of the data), small multiples (presenting the data through several linked windows like a comic book), and drawing stability (the visual stability of the data presentation).  We conclude with some recent work on scalable graph visualisation and in the visualisation of sets and their intersections.

Biography

Daniel Archambault has been working in the field of information visualization for ten years. His work in this area has focused on the development and evaluation of techniques for visualizing dynamic networks and scalable graph visualizations.  His research has been been applied to many areas outside of computer science, including the digital humanities, biology, networking, sociology, and social media analysis.

Event details

  • When: 12th April 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Keith Cheverst: Investigating the Shared Curation of Locative Media relating to the Local History of a Rural Community

Abstract

In this talk I will present experiences and insights from our studies involving locative media, local history and community. Our work in the village of Wray has involved the longitudinal and ‘in the wild’ deployment of ‘digital noticeboard’ displays (conceived as technology probes) that support the sharing of photos/images. A significant portion of the submitted photo content relates to Wray’s local history and features of Wray’s landscape. Residents of the village have helped shape the system through involvement in co-design workshops. A key motivation of our current studies (as part of the SHARC project) is to explore issues around the co-curation of locative media experiences. A field trial (involving both residents and visitors) and a design workshop revealed both opportunities and challenges for the co-curation approach.

Bio

Dr Keith Cheverst is a Reader in HCI at Lancaster University where he obtained his PhD in 1999. Keith has also held the position of visiting scientist at Newcastle University’s Culture Lab, at Microsoft Research, Cambridge (working with the Socio-Digital systems group), and at the University of Melbourne (Department of Computing and Information Systems).

Keith’s primary research focus is in exploring the obdurate problems associated with the user-centered design of interactive systems in complex or semi-wild settings and the deployment and longitudinal study of these systems in order to gain insights into issues of user adoption and appropriation. He is particularly interested in the design interactive systems that feature locative media and associated mobile/pervasive technologies

Event details

  • When: 5th April 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Distinguished Lecture Series: Reminder of next event – ‘CS for All’ by President Maria Klawe

Reminder that President Maria Klawe will be speaking at our Distinguished Lecture Series on March 31st 2016 in St Andrews.KlaweMaria

During this event Maria  will discuss the challenges in CS for all, including CS education in K-12, computing for all in undergraduate education, and CS research aimed at people with accessibility challenges and creating educational and research opportunities around the applications of computational technologies in almost every discipline and economic sector.

Programme of events:

  • 09:00 – 09:30
    • Introduction: By Professor Aaron Quigley
  • 09:30 – 10:30
    • Lecture 1: Computing for all in K-12 education
  • 10:30 – 11:00
    • Coffee Break: Refreshments served in foyer
  • 11:00 – 12:00
    • Lecture 2: Computing for all in undergraduate education
  • 12:00 – 14:00
    • Lunch Break: Free time
  • 14:00 – 15:00
    • Lecture 3: Computing for all in research
  • 15:00 – 15:30
    • Q & A: Open forum in the auditorium
  • 15:30 – 16:00
    • Informal time with Speaker: In the foyer

Event details

  • When: 31st March 2016 09:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Byre Theatre
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Distinguished lecture