Abstract: Modern biological research hinges on technologies that are able to generate very large and complex datasets. For example, recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies have led to global collections in the multi-petabyte range that are doubling every five months. These data require organising in a form that allows interpretation by a very large and diverse user community that are interested in everything from human health and disease, through crop and animal breeding to the understanding of ecosystems. In this talk I will first give an overview of core molecular biology concepts and some of the different types of data that are currently collected, I will then focus on work from my group in visualisation and analysis of sequence alignment data before turning to examples of prediction of properties and features from biological data.

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Systems software, such as an operating system or a network stack, underlies everything we do on a computer, whether that computer is a desktop machine, a server, a mobile phone, or any embedded device. It is therefore vital that such software operates correctly in all situations. In recent years, dependent types have emerged as a promising approach to ensuring program correctness using languages and verification tools such as Agda and Coq. However, these tools operate at a high level of abstraction and so it can be difficult to map these verified programs to efficient low level code, working with bit-level operations and interacting directly with system services.

In this talk I will describe Idris, a dependently typed programming language implemented with systems programming in mind. I will show how it may be used to implement programs which interact safely with the operating system, in particular how to give precise APIs for verifiable systems programming with external C libraries.

Bio: Edwin Brady is a SICSA Advanced Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews
(http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~eb)

Many ‘failures’ in software-intensive organisational systems result from human actions or inaction so, to reduce the possibility of such ‘failures’ and so improve system dependability, it is important to adopt a holistic view where system designers consider the environment in which a system will be used as well as the technical characteristics of the system itself.

In this talk, I will introduce the notion of responsibility modelling, which aims to represent the responsibilities of human and automated agents in a complex system, where the system may be created by integrating different systems from different agencies. The motivation for the work is that many ‘system failures’ are actually failures of agents in the system to fulfil their expected responsibilities and so responsibility modelling offers the opportunity to analyse how responsibilities are distributed and to identify responsibility vulnerabilities, before these lead to system failure.

Bio

 Ian Sommerville has been Professor of Computer Science at St Andrews University since 2006. For more details see http://www.software-engin.com.

In this talk we will introduce how new mobile base station architectures are evolving not only to meet demand but also to become “greener” since at current rates of deployment, mobile networks are becoming very large CO2 contributors. These new base station architectures are also becoming enablers for new Radio Access Networks (RANs) where the same infrastructure can support multiple radio technologies simultaneously by backhauling their baseband leading towards distributed antenna systems and distributed base station architectures. Some would argue that this represents a paradigm shift towards “cloud” enabled mobile networks. In the talk we will cover the reasons why things are progressing this way, how this is being enabled through technology innovation, and what Agilent has done to meet some of the test and measurement challenges in this evolved 4G wireless communications space.

Abstract:

In Capability and Wellbeing, Sen (1993) says that acting freely and being able to choose may be directly conducive to wellbeing, not just because more freedom may make better alternatives available, but because the action of choice is itself a freedom. This talk reflects on three projects with older people and considers their sense of agency in thinking about interactive systems and future technologies, looking particularly at how agency might contribute to a sense of wellbeing. Although a theme running through the talk is the design of digital tools, the discussion takes a broad view of the factors to be considered in human-computer interaction.

Sen, Amartya. (1993). Capability and Well-Being. In M. Nussbaum and A. Sen, eds. The Quality of Life, pp. 30–53. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Abstract

The human visual system is extraordinary powerful, but it is not a perfect seeing device. In this talk I will use the example of binocular vision to explore visual processing. I will describe some of the biology of the binocular visual system, some of the limitations that the biology presents, and I will describe methods used to probe the relative importance of binocular vision, versus other sources of 3-D visual information. These methods allow us to predict where and when binocular vision provides a powerful source of 3-D information, and is therefore useful to inform the design and production of devices across a range of HCI applications.

Bio


Julie Harris is interested in visual perception, with particular interests in how binocular vision and eye movements are used for the perception of shape and depth and the control of action in 3-D space. Current projects include how binocular information is used for distance perception, how gaze patterns can be described in simple mathematical terms, and how we perceive motion in three dimensions.