Wednesday 21st June
As usual the school will host a small reception in the Jack Cole coffee area between 10.30 and 12.30, come along and enjoy a glass of bubbly and a cream cake or two in true Computer Science fashion!
All graduating students, their guests and staff members are invited.
We have a SACHI seminar on Monday 12th June 2017 which will be given by two speakers, presenting two connected talks within the normal hour slot.
The speakers are Dr Oliver Schneider from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany and Professor Karon MacLean who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
Details for the two talks are as follows.
Title: Haptic Experience Design: How to Create for Touch
Abstract: Touch is everywhere in our daily lives, but interactive technology has traditionally prioritized visual and audio feedback. Recently, a variety of haptic feedback methods promise the benefits of touch for application areas like eyes-free feedback, emotional robots, and physically embodied education. However, haptic experiences are challenging to create – designers must draw from expertise in psychology, mechanical engineering, software engineering, and design theory, and work simultaneously with touch, vision, and audio.
To understand and support haptic experience design, we interviewed professional hapticians (makers of haptics) to provide a first definition and description of their process and its constituent challenges. We developed a series of design tools to support rapid, iterative creation of experiences for the most common haptic interface: expressive vibrotactile feedback. By characterizing haptic experience design and informing supportive tools, we make a first step towards establishing haptic design as its own field, akin to graphic and sound design.
Bio: Oliver Schneider is a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. His Ph.D. topic at the University of British Columbia (UBC) was Haptic Experience Design: describing the process designers follow when creating haptic experiences and developing software tools to support them. Oliver received his M.Sc. in Computer Science from UBC and a B.Sc. Honours from the University of Saskatchewan, and has worked with Disney Research on novel haptic interactions. Through his research, Oliver seeks to empower people to work creatively with novel haptic, multimodal, and multisensory interactive technology.
Title: Making and Experimenting with Furry Robots with Feelings
Abstract: Touch has a major role to play in human-robot interaction. Here, advances in tactile sensing, wearable and context-aware computing as well as robotics more broadly are spurring new ideas about how to configure the human-robot relationship in terms of roles and utility, which in turn expose new technical and social design questions.
This talk will focus on my group’s recent work on haptic or physical human-robot interaction, where we aim to bring effective haptic interaction into people’s lives by examining how touch (in either direction) can help address human needs with the benefit of both low- and high-tech innovation. I will give a sense of these efforts from three perspectives, each involving significant technical and evaluative design challenges: sensing emotive touch, designing expressive robot bodies and behaviours, and creating evaluative scenarios where participants experience genuine – and changing – emotions as they interact with our robots.
Bio: Karon MacLean is Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Canada, with a B.Sc. in Biology and Mech. Eng. (Stanford) and a M.Sc. and Ph.D. (Mech. Eng., MIT) and time spent as professional robotics engineer (Center for Engineering Design, University of Utah) and interaction researcher (Interval Research, Palo Alto). At UBC since 2000, her research specializes in haptic interaction: cognitive, sensory and affective design for people interacting with the computation we touch, emote and move with, whether robots, touchscreens or mobile activity sensors. Special Advisor on Knowledge Mobilization to UBC Faculty of Science; Charles A. McDowell Award, 2008; Assoc Editor of IEEE Transactions on Haptics; co-chair of the 2010 and 2012 IEEE Haptics Symposium; Director of UBC’s pan-university Designing for People Research Cluster.
*PLEASE NOTE THIS TALK WILL TAKE PLACE IN BMS BUILDING – SEMINAR ROOM 113*
BIO: Nikhil Barthwal is a polyglot programmer currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at Jet.com, an e-commerce startup recently acquired by Walmart. He works in the Tools & Productivity team with the aim of making developers more productive, as well as improving the quality of the code. Outside of work, he is involved with local meetups in New York city where he gives talks on various topics related to technology. He holds a Master’s in Computer Science with special focus on Distributed Systems and a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering.
ABSTRACT: Web services are typically stateless entities, that need to operate at scale at large. Functional paradigm can be used to model these web services work and offer several benefits like scalability, productivity, and correctness.
This talk describes how Jet.com implemented their Event-Driven Microservices using F#. It covers topics like their Microservices, Event-Sourcing, Kafka, Build & Deployment pipeline. The objective of the talk is show how to create a scalable & highly distributed web service in F#, and demonstrate how various characteristics of functional paradigm capture the behavior of such services architecture very naturally.
Associated with the recently-funded EPSRC grant A Constraint Modelling Pipeline, a 3.5-year postdoctoral research fellow position is available in the School.
Full details can be found at the University vacancies page.
“The technology driving the evolution of internet advertising, targeted advertising or intrusive surveillance?”
Tim Palmer, Senior Partner, Digiterre (http://www.digiterre.com)
The yearly World’s Biggest Coffee Morning for MacMillan cancer support is on Friday 30th September.
Staff and students are invited to donate cakes, biscuits or home produce for sale on Friday morning from 10.45am in the JCB coffee area. Everyone is invited to bake, cook or donate either national delicacies or just something you want to share. In previous years we have also had home made jam and home grown fruit and vegetables for sale. For some recipe ideas see http://coffee.macmillan.org.uk/ideas/baking-recipes/
Donations for a raffle are also welcome (to Ishbel or the School Office).
The MacMillan coffee morning raises money for nurses and counsellors to support cancer patients and their families. At home or hospice terminal and support care nursing costs £28 per hour and a counsellor costs £15 per hour.
Applications are invited for 2 Teaching Fellowships in the School of Computer Science. In the first instance, at least, these are fixed-term positions of ten to twelve months with a start date of August 2016. We require Teaching Fellows to assist with the development and delivery of high quality, innovative teaching. Applicants should have at least a BSc in Computer Science, preferably a PhD, and previous lecturing and tutorial experience at undergraduate level. Preferably they should also be able to demonstrate ability to deliver a range of core Computer Science courses, in classroom, laboratory and small-group tutorial environments. Experience in project supervision at undergraduate and masters level would also be beneficial.
Candidates are welcome to make informal enquiries to the School’s Director of Teaching, Dr Graham Kirby, dot-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk.
For further information about the School of Computer Science, please see the further particulars.
The University of St Andrews is committed to promoting equality of opportunity for all, which is further demonstrated through its working on the Gender and Race Equality Charters and being awarded the Athena SWAN award for women in science, HR Excellence in Research Award and the LGBT Charter; http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/hr/edi/diversityawards/.
Information on how to apply.
Closing Date: 29 June 2016
Two new internships for summer 2016 are available in the Artificial Intelligence Research Group.
Internship 1: “What did I just do and how can I do it again?”
Supervisors: Ian Gent & Chris Jefferson
Internship 2: “Mixed Integer Programming Backend for Savile Row”
Supervisors: Chris Jefferson & Peter Nightingale
The deadline for applying is Wednesday 4th May 2016.
More details in this pdf: Computer Science Internship Summer 2016
Following the successful School Seminar on Tuesday 9th February, ‘Probabilistic Formal Analysis of App Usage to Inform Redesign’ by Oana Andrei’, please find attached the speaker’s slides.
