School Seminar Series

Seminar: “Interaction, Embodiment and Technologies in Early Learning” by Dr Andrew Manches

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Abstract: 

 

Most of us might agree that ‘hands-on learning’ is good for children in the early years. But why? Is it simply more fun and sociable, or are there any more direct cognitive benefits? And what determines definitions of ‘hands-on’? Can we include iPads? This talk will draw upon an ESRC-funded project to examine the educational implications of recent theoretical arguments about the embodied nature of cognition. Video data from the project will be used to illustrate the methodological significance of the way children gesture when describing mathematical concepts and evaluate a hypothesis that numerical development is grounded upon two particular embodied metaphors. If correct, this presents a serious challenge to traditional approaches to the types of learning materials we offer children. The talk then demonstrates two embodied technologies to consider the potential of new forms of digital interaction to further our understanding of embodied cognition as well as support early learning.

 

 Bio:  

 

Dr Andrew Manches is a Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of Education and leads the Children and Technology group at the University of Edinburgh.  He has 20 years experience working with children, first as a teacher, then as an academic. His recent research, funded by an ESRC Future Research Leader grant, focuses on the role of interaction in thinking, and the implications this has for early learning and new forms of technology.  When not being an academic, Andrew is a parent of two young children and directs an early learning technology start-up that was awarded a SMART grant this year to build an early years maths tangible technology.

Event details

  • When: 24th November 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Seminar: ‘How to deliver Software Projects and be a Brilliant Software Developer’ by Howard Simms (Apadmi)

Abstract:

This talk will cover a wide range of issues in the practical aspects of delivering software projects, including cohesion and coupling, design patterns, software engineering models, and native vs. hybrid apps. The second part will give an overview of the desirable and undesirable attributes of software developers and how to make your career future proof.

Howard Simms

 

Bio:

 

With more than 15 years’ experience working in the mobile industry, creating technology solutions, building brilliant teams, and delivering continual growth, Howard’s journey at the forefront of one of the world’s most dynamic and exciting technology booms has been exhilarating.

 

 

About Apadmi:

Apadmi is now the UK’s leading mobile software development company, working with organisations such as the NHS and the BBC, as well as a range of business including Lexus and Skyscanner. The business has also spun out technology companies in several different areas, including Market Research, Retail, Loyalty schemes within football and the Internet of Things.
Apadmi has now launched Apadmi Ventures, a formalisation of their spinout business model that is bringing their technical excellence, experience and significant investment capacity to all business sectors.

Event details

  • When: 3rd November 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: ‘Trading Programs – How the Finance industry has become so complex that today’s products are similar to programs’ by Joel Bjornson

Abstract:

In this presentation, we’ll explore the ways in which Bloomberg uses functional programming to solve financial problems. In particular, we’ll focus on the challenges involved in the development of the Bloomberg Derivatives Library – an application for structuring and pricing financial contracts.

Bio:

Joel Bjornson is a developer at the Bloomberg Derivatives Library team, specializing in the usage of OCaml for modelling financial contracts. Joel has been interested in functional programming since discovering Haskell at an introductory programming course in university.

 

Event details

  • When: 20th October 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: ‘Formalizing Garbage: Mathematical Models of Memory Management’ by Jeremy Singer

Abstract:

Garbage collection is no longer an esoteric research interest. Mainstream programming languages like Java and C# rely on high-performance memory managed run time systems. In this talk, I will motivate the need for rigorous models of memory management to enable more powerful analysis and optimization techniques. I will draw on a diverse range of topics including thermodynamics, economics, machine learning and control theory.

Bio:

Jeremy Singer is a lecturer at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Scotland. He has research interests in programming languages,compilation, run time code optimization and memory management. Singer received his PhD from Cambridge in 2006. Website:http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jsinger

 

Event details

  • When: 6th October 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Seminar: ‘Disrupting trillion dollar industries using low power wireless sensor networks’ by Raphael Scheps and Gideon Farrell

Abstract:
Some of the world’s most important industries are intrinsically grounded in the physical world, yet their interaction with it is still almost completely manual. Converge is a young startup, forged in the fires of Entrepreneurs First, that is building wireless, distributed sensor networks to revolutionise how these industries operate. We (Raph and Gideon, founders) will talk about our tech (and what makes it a fun challenge to build), the difficulties of working in enormous and complex industries and our first 10 months as a company.

Bio:
Gideon and Raphael co-founded Converge to deal with the huge amounts of data that will be produced by connected devices. Two Physicists from Cambridge, they are obsessed with instrumenting the world with connected sensors to drive a smarter physical environment. Gideon read Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, and obtained his M.Sci with a thesis on Solar Jets. He has been writing software for over 10 years, working for companies such as Primary Energy Research and Softeam Cadextan. He worked on the first generation of IoT connected sensors at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (The WISP project) in 2009. Raphael read Theoretical Physics, obtaining an M.Math with a thesis on String Theory and Quantum Gravity. He has worked on high speed interconnect within the hardware engineering team at Mellanox as well as the experimental astrophysics team at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He was Vice President at Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, the oldest student entrepreneurship society in Europe. They both met at Cambridge five years ago and started Converge in 2014.

This seminar is part of our ongoing school series. To see all our upcoming seminar follow this link: here.

Event details

  • When: 22nd September 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: ‘Measuring Personalization of Online Services’ by Alan Mislove

The School of Computer Science is delighted to welcome Alan Mislove from Northeastern University Boston to give his talk on ‘Measuring Personalization of Online Services

Abstract: Today, many web services personalize their content, including Netflix (movie recommendations), Amazon (product suggestions), and Yelp (business reviews). In many cases, personalization provides advantages for users: for example, when a user searches for an ambiguous query such as “router,” Amazon may be able to suggest the woodworking tool instead of the networking device. However, personalization is rarely transparent (or even labeled), and has the potential be used to the user’s disadvantage. For example, on e-commerce sites, personalization could be used to manipulate the set of products shown (price steering) or by customizing the prices of products (price discrimination). Unfortunately, today, we lack the tools and techniques necessary to be able to detect when personalization is occurring, as well as what inputs are used to perform personalization.

In this talk, I discuss my group’s recent work that aims to address this problem. First, we develop a methodology for accurately measuring when web services are personalizing their content. While conceptually simple, there are numerous details that our methodology must handle in order to accurately attribute differences in results to personalization (as opposed to other sources of noise). Second, we apply this methodology to two domains: Web search services (e.g., Google, Bing) and e-commerce sites (e.g., BestBuy.com, Expedia). We find evidence of personalization for real users on both Google search and nine of the popular e-commerce sites. Third, using fake accounts, we investigate the effect of user attributes and behaviors on personalization; we find that the choice of browser, logging in, and a user’s previously content can significantly affect the results presented.

Bio: Alan Mislove is an Associate Professor at the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. He received his Ph.D. from Rice University in 2009. Prof. Mislove’s research concerns distributed systems and networks, with a focus on using social networks to enhance the security, privacy, and efficiency of newly emerging systems. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award (2011), and his work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the CBS Evening News.

This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

Event details

  • When: 13th October 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: ‘Designing trusted and engaging forms of peer to peer healthcare’ by Pam Briggs

The School of Computer Science are delighted to welcome Pam Briggs from Northumbria University, Newcastle who will deliver her talk on Trust and Engagement.

Abstract: Patients now generate a significant amount of online material about health.  This raises questions about how we should design websites featuring patient knowledge and experience in order to ensure those sites provide a good match to patient needs.  In this presentation I describe a structured participatory methodology for the development and evaluation of a set of patient experience websites that took place over three phases, consistent with experience based co-design:

(1) a capture phase in which we wBriggs_Pamorked with patients to understand their reactions to existing websites; (2) an understand phase in which we translated this information into a patient-engagement framework and accompanying set of design guidelines and (3) an improve phase, where we used these guidelines to create three new health websites that were then assessed as patient experience interventions in a range of empirical studies.

Bio: Pam holds a Chair in Applied Psychology, delivering innovative research and consultancy around issues of identity, trust and security in new social media. Her research seeks answers to three main questions: Why and when do we feel secure in disclosing sensitive identity information about ourselves? What makes us trust an electronic message? How and when do we seek to protect our privacy?

In the last five years, Pam has published over forty articles on human perceptions of trust, privacy and security in computer-mediated communication and has recently developed, with colleagues, an innovative model of health advice-seeking online (ESRC funded). She has given a number of invited addresses on online trust and e-health, including an invited address on e-health to the World Health Summit 2009, the opening address at the Second International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (Canada) and the keynote to the 2010 IFIP Trust Management conference in Morioka, Japan. She has been a member of ESRC’s fellowship and CASE studentship committees and has recently made a contribution to the Govt. Office for Science’s Technology Foresight programme on the Future of Identity. She is currently a member of EPSRC’s new Identity Futures Network and also EPSRC’s Cybersecurity Network. She is one of the founder members of the UK’s new ‘Science of Cybersecurity’ Institute, funded by GCHQ in association with RCUK’s Global Uncertainty Programme.

This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

Event details

  • When: 29th September 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

School Seminar: Efficient Privacy Preserving Data Mining via Secure Computation by Dr Changyu Dong

The School of Computer Science welcomes the opportunity to hear from Dr Changyu Dong, from the Department of Computer and Information Sciences University of Strathclyde, who will be delivering his talk on ‘Efficient Privacy Preserving Data Mining via Secure Computation’. Chanyu Dong

Abstract: Loosely speaking, secure computation allows parties to compute a function jointly while keeping their inputs private. Participants of secure computation learns only the output of the function, but nothing about the others’ private inputs. An oblivious application of secure computation is privacy preserving data mining. Imagine a scenario in which Amazon and Facebook want to find correlations between their users’ activities. With current technology, this cannot happen because none of the companies is willing to disclose its own data to the other. Secure computation can remove this barrier because data remains private during  and after the computation. In the past, secure computation is considered to be only theoretical because of its inefficiency. Recently much effort has been made to make secure computation practical. In this talk, I will present some recent advancements in this area. I will first introduce Private Set Intersection (PSI), an important secure computation primitive, and how it can be realised efficiently. I will show how PSI can be applied to linking record in databases (private record linkage) and finding association rules. I will then show how fully homomorphic encryption, an emerging cryptographic technology, can be used in building efficient secure computation protocols, and in turn be used for privacy preserving data mining.

Bio: Changyu Dong is a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Computing at Imperial College London in 2009. His research is in cyber security, specifically in applied cryptography. Since 2006, He has published 27 research papers in major journals and international conferences, including the most prestigious venues in security such as ACM CCS, ESORICS and Journal of Computer Security. He has served on and chaired program committees for many conferences and workshops, and is a regular invited reviewer for top international journals including Journal of Computer Security, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing and IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. Shortly after moving to Strathclyde in 2011, he started his research on efficient secure computation. This research direction has led to some breakthroughs in secure computing for Private Set Intersection and Private Information Retrieval protocols, which he applied in domains such as data mining.

Event details

  • When: 1st July 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Type-driven Verification of Communicating Systems in Idris

Speaker: Edwin Brady

Abstract: Idris (http://idris-lang.org/) is a general-purpose programming language with an expressive type system which allows a programmer to state properties of a program precisely in its type. Type checking is equivalent to formally and mechanically checking a program’s correctness. Introductory examples of programs verified in this way typically involve length preserving operations on lists, or ordering invariants on sorting.

Realistically, though, programming is not so simple: programs interact with users, communicate over networks, manipulate state, deal with erroneous input, and so on. In this talk I will give an introduction to programming in Idris, with demonstrations, and show how its advanced type systems allows us to express such interactions precisely. I will show how it supports verification of stateful and communicating systems, in particular giving an example showing how to verify properties of concurrent communicating systems.

Bio: Edwin Brady is a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. His research interests include programming language design, in particular type systems and domain specific languages. He leads the design and implementation of the Idris programming language, a general purpose functional programming language with dependent types, which he uses to implement verified domain specific languages. When he’s not doing that, he’s likely to be playing a game of Go, wrestling with the crossword, or stuck on a train somewhere.

 

Event details

  • When: 7th April 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

School Seminars: Building the News Search Engine – Bloomberg

Building the news search engine, by Ramkumar Aiyengar, Bloomberg
Abstract:
This talk provides an insight into the challenges involved in providing near real-time news search to Bloomberg customers. Our News team is in the process of migrating to using Solr/Lucene as its search and alerting backend. This talk starts with a picture of what’s involved in building such a backend, then delves into what makes up a search engine, and then discusses the challenges of scaling up for low-latency and high-load.
Bio:
Ramkumar leads the News Search backend team at the Bloomberg R&D office in London. He joined Bloomberg from his university in India and has been with the News R&D team for 7 years now. For the last couple of years, his team has focussed on rewriting almost the entire search/alert backend, used by almost every Bloomberg user to get near-real time access to news with sub-second latencies. A geek at heart, he considers himself a Linux evangelist, an open source enthusiast, and one of those weird creatures who believes that Emacs is an operating system and had once got his music player and playlists to be controlled through a library written in Lisp.

Event details

  • When: 3rd March 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series, School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk