Abstract:

Two important aspects in hardware design are the safe routing of signals between modules, and ensuring that ports are correctly connected. Well-known hardware description languages such as SystemVerilog, provide nominal checking over these aspects. Thus, leaving correctness checks over module orchestration to be performed post-design-time using static analyses, testing, and during synthesis.

Using a mixture of dependent and quantitative typing, we can lift external correctness checks over module connections directly into the type-system. With this approach we can detect more errors at design time, enhance the safety of our hardware designs, and thus increase design productivity.

In this talk I will introduce and discuss LightClick, an orchestration language for hardware design that exemplifies our approach. LightClick uses quantitative typing to ensure linear usage of ports, and dependent types to ensure that port compatibility is a decidable compile-time check. I will show how LightClick can be used to model simple hardware designs, how SystemVerilog stubs are generated from designs using staged interpretation.

Speaker Bio: Jan is a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow, who is interested in using state-of-the-art advances in programming language theory to build more trustworthy systems. Jan is currently involved in the Border Patrol project – a collaboration between the Universities of Heriot-Watt, Glasgow, and Imperial College London to explore how Dependent Typing and Session Typing can help make hardware design safer and secure.

Abstract:

This talk provides an insight into the challenges involved in providing near real-time news search to Bloomberg customers. It starts with a picture of what’s involved in building such a backend, then delves into what makes up a search engine. Finally we discuss the challenges of scaling up for low-latency and high-load, and how we tackle them.

Speaker Bio:

Ankush leads the News Search infrastructure team at the Bloomberg Engineering office in London. After completing his Masters in Computer Science, he joined Bloomberg at their New York office in 2009. Later working from Washington DC, he led a team to build a web application leveraging Lucene/Elasticsearch for businesses to discover government contracting opportunities. In London, his team focuses on search infrastructure and services allowing clients to search news events from all over the globe with near real-time access and sub-second latencies.

Abstract:

Writing optimising compilers is difficult. The range of programs that may be presented to the compiler is huge and the system on which they run are complex, heterogeneous, non-deterministic, and constantly changing. Machine learning has been shown to make writing compiler heuristics easier, but many issues remain.

In this talk I will discuss recent advances in using deep learning to solve compiler issues: learning heuristics and testing compiler correctness.

Speaker Bio:

Hugh is a reader (associate professor) at the University of Edinburgh. His research involves all elements of compilers and operating systems, usually targeting performance and energy optimisation, often with a focus on using machine learning for those tasks. After his PhD, also at Edinburgh, he was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Engineering. Before returning to academia, he was an engineer at Microsoft and architect and team leader at Trilogy, delivering multi-million dollar projects to Fortune 500 companies.

Abstract:

2018 was a crazy year for privacy. The General Data Protection Regulation came into force in May, and new revelations on the personal data ecosystem were making headlines on a weekly basis. I will give the behind the scenes for a lot of these events, question why they didn’t happen earlier, and offer some thoughts on the necessary future of online services. This will include a brief discussion of topics such as semantic alignment, interpretable machine learning, or new privacy-preserving data processing techniques.

Speaker Bio:

Paul-Olivier Dehaye is a mathematician by training. Affiliated to the University of Zurich as a SNSF Assistant Professor until 2016, his career then took a turn towards data protection activism and social entrepreneurship. He was the researcher on several news articles who have reached millions of readers (including many with Carole Cadwalladr), and testified in front of the UK and EU Parliaments on multiple occasions. He is on the board of MyData Global, has founded the NGO PersonalData.IO, and the project MyData Geneva.

Abstract:

Escape rooms are popular recreational activities whereby players are locked in a room and must solve a series of puzzles in order to ‘escape’. Recent years have seen a large expansion technology being used in these rooms in order to provide ever changing and increasingly immersive experiences. This technology could be used to minimise accessibility issues for users, e.g. with hearing or visual impairments, so that they can engage in the same way as their peers without disabilities. Escape room designers and players completed an online questionnaire exploring the use of technology and the accessibility of escape rooms. Results show that accessibility remains a key challenge in the design and implementation of escape rooms, despite the inclusion of technology that could be used to improve the experience of users with disabilities. This presentation will explore the lack of accessibility within Escape Rooms and the potential for technology to bridge this gap.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Rachel Menzies is the Head of Undergraduate Studies for Computing at the University of Dundee and is the current SICSA Director of Education (https://www.sicsa.ac.uk/education/). She co-directs the UX’d research group (https://www.ux-d.co.uk/) and her research interests include user centred design with marginalised user groups, such as users with disabilities, as well as exploring novel interfaces, data visualisation and CS education. Her most recent work focusses on accessibility is in escape rooms, in particular how users with varied disabilities can access and enjoy the experience alongside typical users.

Abstract:

From mapping the spread of disease to monitoring climate change, data holds the key to solving some of the world’s biggest challenges. Dependable decisions rely on understanding the provenance and reliability of data. Historically, only a small fraction of the generated data was shared and re-used, while the majority of data were used once and then erased or archived. At NPL Data Science we are defining best practice in measurement data reuse and traceability by developing metadata standards and data storage structures to locate and interpret datasets and make them available for sharing, publication and data mining.

The talk will shed light on the most burning issues in the scientific data management, and illustrate it with examples from industrial and academic practices. It will present several NPL Data Science projects that focus on delivering confidence in data obtained from life science imaging, medicine, geosciences and fundamental physics.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Marina Romanchikova joined the NPL Data Science team in 2017 to work on data quality and metadata standards. She obtained an MSc in Medical Informatics at University of Heidelberg, Germany, where she specialised in medical image processing and in management of hospital information systems. In 2010 she received a PhD on Monte Carlo dosimetry for targeted radionuclide therapy at the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, UK. Marina worked six years as a radiotherapy research physicist at Cambridge University Hospitals where she developed methods for curation and analysis of medical images.

Current interests

– Quantitative quality assessment of medical images and medical image segmentation
– Harmonisation of medical and healthcare data from heterogeneous sources
– Applications of machine learning in healthcare
– Automated data quality assurance

Abstract:

There has been a dramatic growth in the number and range of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors that generate healthcare data. These sensors stream high-dimensional time series data that must be analysed in order to provide the insights into medical conditions that can improve patient healthcare. This raises both statistical and computational challenges, including where to deploy the streaming data analytics, given that a typical healthcare IoT system will combine a highly diverse set of components with very varied computational characteristics, e.g. sensors, mobile phones and clouds. Different partitionings of the analytics across these components can dramatically affect key factors such as the battery life of the sensors, and the overall performance. In this work we describe a method for automatically partitioning stream processing across a set of components in order to optimise for a range of factors including sensor battery life and communications bandwidth. We illustrate this using our implementation of a statistical model predicting the glucose levels of type II diabetes patients in order to reduce the risk of hyperglycaemia.

Speaker Bios:

Lauren and Peter are final year PhD students at the CDT in Cloud Computing for Big Data at Newcastle University. Peter has a background in Computer Engineering from University of Žilina, Slovakia and a double-degree in Computer Software Engineering from JAMK University of Applied Sciences, Jyväskylä, Finland. His research interests are within distributed event processing, edge computing and Internet of Things with a special focus on energy and bandwidth constrains. Lauren has an MMath degree from Newcastle University and her research interests lie in statistical modelling of time series data.

Abstract:

Apprenticeship degrees have sprung up so fast that there has been little time for us all to reflect on how this apparently new form of education, to universities at least, could significantly affect our educational offerings. The University of Glasgow has been undertaking some preparatory work for Skills Development Scotland prior to running its apprenticeship degree in software engineering, and this has afforded us some time to see what others nationally and internationally have been doing, and to consider relevant aspects of the literature, as well as consult with industry. One view that we are developing of these degrees is as a true evolution of typical, largely campus-based, software engineering degrees, towards a full-blown professional degree such as in medicine, where university and hospitals are in real partnership over the training of doctors. In this talk, I will outline our thinking and raise a number of issues for discussion. In suggesting a closer relationship with industry in a talk in St Andrews, I do not of course miss the irony that industry accreditation was never (I believe) something that St Andrews was particularly bothered about – thinking that my BSc (Hons) 1988 is not accredited!