Full Title

Visualization and the Universe: How and why astronomers, doctors, and you need to work together to understand the world around us.

Abstract:

Astronomy has long been a field reliant on visualization. First, it was literal visualization—looking at the Sky. Today, though, astronomers are faced with the daunting task of understanding gigantic digital images from across the electromagnetic spectrum and contextualizing them with hugely complex physics simulations, in order to make more sense of our Universe. In this talk, I will explain how new approaches to simultaneously exploring and explaining vast data sets allow astronomers—and other scientists—to make sense of what the data have to say, and to communicate what they learn to each other, and to the public. In particular, I will talk about the evolution of the multi-dimensional linked-view data visualization environment known as glue (glueviz.org) and the Universe Information System called WorldWide Telescope (worldwidetelescope.org). I will explain how glue is being used in medical and geographic information sciences, and I will discuss its future potential to expand into all fields where diverse, but related, multi-dimensional data sets can be profitably analyzed together. Toward the aim of bringing the insights to be discussed to a broader audience, I will also introduce the new “10 Questions to Ask When Creating a Visualization” website, 10QViz.org.

Speaker Bio:

Alyssa Goodman is the Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy at Harvard University, and a Research Associate of the Smithsonian Institution. Goodman’s research and teaching interests span astronomy, data visualization, and online systems for research and education. Goodman received her undergraduate degree in Physics from MIT in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard in 1989. Goodman was awarded the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1997, became full professor at Harvard in 1999, was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009, and chosen as Scientist of the Year by the Harvard Foundation in 2015. Goodman has served as Chair of the Astronomy Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and on the National Academy’s Board on Research Data and Information, and she currently serves on the both the IAU and AAS Working Groups on Astroinformatics and Astrostatistics. Goodman’s personal research presently focuses primarily on new ways to visualize and analyze the tremendous data volumes created by large and/or diverse astronomical surveys, and on improving our understanding of the structure of the Milky Way Galaxy. She is working closely with colleagues at the American Astronomical Society, helping to expand the use of the WorldWide Telescope program, in both research and in education.

Abstract:

The goals of building software in a professional environment are vastly different from those of a course assignment. In this talk, we’ll cover the differences between the environments, best practices during development and tips from years of experience with troubleshooting production issues.

Speaker Bio:

Becky Plummer is the software engineering team leader responsible for content collaboration applications for the Bloomberg Terminal and the Global Head of the Engineering Champions Program. Becky made a name for herself as a software engineer by creating the trade confirmation alerting system that was fully crash recoverable for the Bloomberg Fixed Income Electronic Trading platform. She created the Engineering Champions program in 2011 to empower developers to influence change and collaborate on improving the development environment tools. Finally, she has run both small scale implementation projects as well as cross engineering projects including hundreds of developers. She is a graduate of University of Maine and Columbia University with a Master’s degree in Computer Science. Joined Bloomberg LP in New York in 2006 and moved to London in 2014 to gain a global perspective.

More information at this link.

Abstract:

Moore’s Law has been the main driver behind the extraordinary success
of computer systems. However, with the technology roadmap showing a
decline in transistor scaling and hence the demise of Moore’s law,
computer systems will be increasingly specialised and diverse. The
consistent ISA contract is beginning to break down. As it stands,
software will simply not fit. Current compiler technology, whose role
is to map software to the underlying hardware is incapable of doing
this. This looming crisis requires a fundamental rethink of how we
design, program and use heterogeneous systems. This talk proposes a
new way of tackling heterogeneity so that, rather than deny and fear
the end of Moore’s law, we embrace and exploit it.

Speaker Bio:

Michael O’Boyle is a Professor of computer science at the University
of Edinburgh. He is best known for his work in incorporating machine
learning into compilation and parallelization, automating the design
and construction of optimizing technology. He has published over 100
papers and received three best paper awards. He was presented with
the ACM CGO Test of Time award in 2017. He is a founding member of
HiPEAC, the Director of the ARM Research Centre of Excellence at
Edinburgh and Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in
Pervasive Parallelism. He is a senior EPSRC Research Fellow and a
Fellow of the BCS.

Abstract:

Lurch is an open-source word processor that can check the steps in students’ mathematical proofs. Users write in a natural language, but mark portions of a document as meaningful, so the software can distinguish content for human readers from content it should analyze.

This talk begins with an overview of the most recent release of the system, the ways in which it impacts students’ learning of mathematical proofs, and how it needs to be improved in the future. I will then cover how we are making those improvements in the next version, which will lead naturally to an introduction of the Lurch Web Platform, a foundational set of tools that we will use to bring the project to the web.

That platform is available on GitHub for other mathematical software developers to use in their own projects. It includes a web editor with mathematical typesetting, an interface for marking up documents with mathematical (or other structured) meaning, OpenMath support, meaning visualization tools, and document dependence and sharing features, among others.

Speaker Bio:

Nathan Carter uses computer science to advance mathematics. He writes open source mathematics software for university mathematics education, in areas including mathematical logic and abstract algebra visualization. He is a past winner of the Mathematical Association of America’s Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Beginning College or University Mathematics Faculty Member and his first book, Visual Group Theory, won the 2012 Beckenbach Book Prize from that same society. His second book, Introduction to the Mathematics of Computer Graphics, was published in 2016. His current book project will be an edited volume entitled Data Science for Mathematicians, intended to help mathematics faculty make the transition into teaching and doing research in the fast-growing field of data science.

Abstract:

“Why is my kid getting HD on their phone, while I’m stuck with SD on my 50″ TV?” This type of complaint is among the most common directed to streaming services such as Netflix and BBC. Recent studies observe that adaptive video streams, when competing behind a bottleneck link, generate flows that lead to instability, under-utilization, and unfairness. Additional measurements suggest there may also be a negative impact on users’ perceived quality of experience as a consequence. The intuitive response may be, and has been, that application-generated issues should be resolved by the application. In this presentation I shall demonstrate that fairness, by any definition, can only be solved in the network. Moreover, that in an increasingly HTTP-S world, some form of client interaction is required. In support, a new network-layer ‘QoE-fairness’ metric will be be introduced that reflects user experience. Experiments using our open-source implementation in the home environment reinforce the network-layer as the right place to attack the general problem.

Refs-

[1] http://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/networking/networking2015/1570066341.pdf
[2] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2940144

Speaker Bio:
Marwan Fayed joined the University of St Andrews in 2018. He received his MA from Boston University and his PhD from the University of Ottawa, in 2003 and 2009 respectively, and in between worked at Microsoft as a member of the Core Reliability Group. In 2009 he joined the University of Stirling, UK as Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) Lecturer, alongside an appointment to ‘Theme Leader’ for networking research in Scotland, 2014-2016. His current research interests lie in wireless algorithms, as well as general network, transport, and measurement in next generation edge networks. He is a co-founder of HUBS C.i.C., an ISP focussed on rural communities, recipient of an IEEE best paper award, and a Senior Member of both the IEEE and ACM.

Title and Abstract TBD

Abstract:

Matthew Rice, Scotland Director for the Open Rights Group, the digital rights campaigning organisation, will lead a seminar discussing the role of civil society organisations in the discourse of technology, rights, regulation, and norms. Computer Scientists sit at an important point in this debate, as individuals affected by changes in norms, but more importantly as builders of the applications and the infrastructure that reflect these norms.

The seminar will discuss the impact civil society has on changing norms and laws around the world, and why these actors matter in the space between governments, companies, and wider society. It will introduce students to the Open Rights Group, the UK’s only technology and human rights grassroots campaigning organisation on t, and its current work in the area of technology and human rights.

Digital technology has transformed the way we live and opened up limitless new ways to communicate, connect, share and learn across the world. But for all the benefits, technological developments have created new threats to our human rights. The Open Rights Group raise awareness of these threats and challenge them through public campaigns, legal actions, policy interventions and tech projects.

Abstract:

It is widely recognised that the threat to enterprises from insider activities is increasing, and that significant costs are being incurred. Since insider threat and compromising actions can take a multitude of forms, there is a diverse experience and understanding of what insider threats are, and how to detect or prevent them. We investigate the potential for detection of insider threat activities within a large enterprise environment using monitoring tools centred around the information infrastructure. In this seminar we will review our experiences and lessons learnt from the implementation and trial of the Corporate Insider Threat Detection (CITD) tool in real organizations, not only from a technical perspective, but also from the legal and ethical aspects.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Arnau Erola is a cyber security expert with strong background in data analytics, machine learning, data mining and information privacy. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Cyber Analytics group of Oxford University, working on enterprise security, defence systems and better understanding the cyber-threat landscape. Dr Erola holds a Ph. D., M. Sc. and B.Sc. in Computer Science from the Rovira i Virgili University of Tarragona (URV). He is author of several international journal articles on online privacy, anonymity protocols and intrusion detection mechanisms.

Abstract TBD

Abstract:

The HUT Group have a variety of engineering, UX and data science teams solving real-world customer and logistics problems. This presentation looks at a variety of solutions applied across the business, from continuous release processes to warehouse layout approaches.

Speaker Bio:

Elliott graduated from CS at St Andrews in 2016, and now works within the research and development team at THG.