Narrative Generation: a case study in assistive technology

Speaker: Nava Tintarev, University of Aberdeen

Abstract:
Story-telling, (including personal narrative), is a big part of our personal and social communication. This talk will identify challenges and solutions that look at the generation of narrative for social communication. We describe a way to “automatically” generate personal stories. The stories which are mix of natural language and multimedia, are based on sensor, and other data, collected with a mobile phone. This study will place a particular focus on the natural language generation task of document structuring: segmenting this data into meaningful and distinct events.
About Nava:
Nava Tintarev has worked on applied HCI projects with themes such as explanations in recommender systems, recommendations in
a mobile travel scenario, and more recently, natural language generation for assistive technology.

Currently, she is working as a Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen where she is a member of the Natural Language Generation Group.
She has been working on the “How was School today…?” project, which helps children with complex communication needs create and tell a story
about their day at school (which will be the applied setting for the talk on the 19th of July). Before that, she was at Telefónica Research, Barcelona,
working on user-centred issues in recommender systems.
Her doctoral thesis focused on explanations for recommender systems, and one of her papers on the topic
won her the James Chen best student paper award at the International Conference on Hypermedia (2008). For the last
three years she has also been co-organizing a workshop on explanation-aware computing (ExaCt) (http://exact2011.workshop.hm/).

Event details

  • When: 19th July 2011 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Greg Bigwood receives the Brendan Murphy Memorial Young Researcher Prize

Greg Bigwood at MSN 2011St Andrews Computer Science PhD student Greg Bigwood has won the Brendan Murphy Memorial Young Researcher Prize at the 2011 Multi-Service Networks meeting in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. Multi-Service Networks (MSN) is an annual meeting of network researchers that mainly revolves around talks from PhD students. The Brendan Murphy Prize is given for the best presentation and is in memory of Brendan Murphy, an outstanding researcher and mountaineer known to many in the communications and distributed systems research community, and a regular participant at MSN since its inception. Greg received the prize for his talk Incentives for Opportunistic Networks.

The use of regret and forgiveness

Dr Steve Marsh.

Regret, the emotion arising from counterfactual reasoning about action
and inaction, is a powerful tool in the arsenal of trust-reasoning and
enabling technologies. One aspect of the tool, Regret Management, is the
enforcement of a view of System Trust in technological approaches in
order to preserve and encourage respect for concerns such as data
protection, privacy, and cyber-social interaction. Forgiveness, as a
tool in the broad spectrum of computational trust, helps agents reason
about and rebuild relationships that may have been damaged by some
action, and is particularly useful in areas where, as online, cheap
pseudonyms can exist. This talk will examine regret and forgiveness from
the point of view of agents or devices in connected environments, where
humans are present actors, and show how enforcement of regret management
and forgiveness measures may be efficacious.

Steve Marsh is a Research Scientist in the Network Security Group at in
the Communications Research Centre in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

His PhD (University of Stirling, 1994) was a seminal work that
introduced the first formalisation of the phenomenon of trust (the
concept of ‘Computational Trust’), and applied it to Multi Agent
Systems. As a milestone in trust research, it brought together disparate
disciplines and attempted to make sense of a vital phenomenon in human
and artificial societies, and is still widely referenced today. Steve’s
current work builds extensively on this model, applying it to network
security, MANETs, and mobile device security.

His research interests include computational trust, trust management,
regret and regret management, and socially adept technologies. He is the
Canadian delegate to IFIP Technical Committee 11: Security and Privacy
Protection in Information Processing Systems. He is an adjunct professor
at UNB (Computer Science), UOIT (Business and IT) and Carleton
University (Systems and Computer Engineering and Cognitive Science).

Event details

  • When: 26th July 2011 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Talk

Evaluation of network resilience and survivability: analysis, simulation, tools, and experimentation

Abstract

As the Internet becomes increasingly important to all aspects of society, the consequences of disruption are increasingly severe. Thus it is critical to increase the resilience and survivability of the future networks in general, and the Internet in particular. We define resilience as the ability of the network to provide desired service even when the network is challenged by attacks, large-scale disasters, and other failures. Resilience subsumes the disciplines of survivability, fault-tolerance, disruption-tolerance, traffic-tolerance, dependability, performability, and security. After an introduction to the disciplines and challenges to network resilience, this presentation will discuss analytical, simulation, and experimental emulation techniques for understanding, evaluating, and improving the resilience of the Future Internet. This includes a multilevel state-space based approach that plots network service delivery against operational state that is the basis for both mathematical- and simulation-based analysis, and approaches that embed fundamental properties such as redundancy and diversity into all aspects of network structure, mechanism, and protocols. A set of tools to help in this analysis has been developed: KU-LoCGen (Location and Cost-Constrained Topology Generation), KU-TopViwe (Topology Viewer), and KU-CSM (Challenge Simulation Module). Plans to experimentally evaluate resilience include using the international programmable testbed GpENI: Great Plains Environment for Network Innovation.

Bio:

James P.G. Sterbenz is Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and a member of technical staff at the Information & Telecommunication Technology Center at the University of Kansas, and is a Visiting Professor of Computing in InfoLab 21 at Lancaster University in the UK. He has previously held senior staff and research management positions at BBN Technologies, GTE Laboratories, and IBM Research. His research interests include resilient, survivable, and disruption tolerant networking, future Internet architectures, active and programmable networks, and high-speed networking and components. He is director of the ResiliNets Research Group, currently PI in the NSF-funded FIND and GENI programs, the EU-funded FIRE ResumeNet project, leads the GpENI international programmable network testbed project, and leads a US DoD project in highly-mobile ad hoc disruption-tolerant networking. He received a doctorate in computer science from Washington University in 1991. He has been program chair for IEEE GI, GBN, and HotI; IFIP IWSOS, PfHSN, and IWAN; and is on the editorial board of IEEE Network. He is principal author of the book High-Speed Networking: A Systematic Approach to High-Bandwidth Low-Latency Communication.

Event details

  • When: 12th July 2011 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

News & events

The system for posting news and events has been replaced with a combination of the School blog and an RSS feed to the School web site. For more information, follow the links at the foot of the School home page.

Professor Ian Sommerville receives teaching awards

Professor Ian Sommerville has been honoured for his work in software engineering education.

The distinguished researcher has received the 2011 SIGSOFT Influential Educator award from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the 2011 Outstanding Educator award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).

The awards recognise Professor Sommerville’s work in developing software engineering education and in helping establish The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance Graduate Academy in Scotland.

Prof Ian Sommerville

See the official University of St Andrews press release for more information

Arduino workshop

The School will hold an all day Arduino workshop on Sunday the 26th of June hosted by Dr David McKeown from UCD in Ireland. Thanks also to Ben Arent, an interaction designer based in Dublin for his help in supporting this.
The Arduino workshop preceeds the Summer School on Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism that will be held in the School from 27th June to 1st July.

Arduino and Kinect equipment

Arduino and Kinect equipment for the workshop and summer school


Continue reading

Event details

  • When: 26th June 2011
  • Where: Cole Bldg
  • Format: Workshop

Storage Server Protype

Our storage server prototype build is now complete and we have moved on to configuration, tuning and testing. After some delays in sourcing components the build is now complete and everything appears to be working. The server will run BSD with ZFS. The chassis holds 24 3.5″ HDDs in hot-swap bays. These are connected to an Adaptec raid controller via a 4U SAS II expander back-plane. The RAID configuration consists of 4 RAID6 volumes over which a set of ZFS filesystems will be striped. This will give us a raw storage capacity of 16TB. A SSD is used for ZFS optimisation.

Our tuning techniques and performance results will appear here soon. If everything goes to plan we will be using 4 servers configured in this way to host user home directories and research data for the School.

St Andrews Computer Science is first in Scotland in Good University Guide

St Andrews Computer Science rated 6th in the UK and 1st in Scotland in the 2012 Good University Guide.

The School of Computer Science is placed sixth in the UK and first in Scotland in the latest Times Good University Guide. The University as a whole also came sixth in the UK and first in Scotland.

URL for further information: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/gug/