The annual welcome reception for the new evening degree students took place last night in the Gateway brasserie. The familiar but extremely useful Meet Your Tutor session followed shortly afterwards. Tuesday evening sessions for IT begin next week.
Graduate Claire Gorgan was singled out for her achievements. Congratulations Claire.
Evening Degree Programme website
Speaker: Mark Shovman, University of Abertay, Dundee
Abstract:
In natural and social sciences, novel insights are often derived from visual analysis of data. But what principles underpin the extraction of meaningful content from these visualisations? Abstract data visualisation can be traced at least as far back as 1801; but with the increase in the quantity and complexity of data that require analysis, standard tools and techniques are no longer adequate for the task. The ubiquity of computing power enables novel visualisations that are rich, multimodal and interactive; but what is the most effective way to exploit this power to support analysis of large, complex data sets? Often, the lack of fundamental theory is pointed out as a central ‘missing link’ in the development and assessment of efficient novel visualisation tools and techniques.
In this talk, I will present some first steps towards the theory of visualisation comprehension, drawing heavily on existing research in natural scene perception and reading comprehension. The central inspiration is the Reverse Hierarchy Theory of perceptual organisation, which is a recent (2002) development of the near-centennial Laws of Gestalt. The proposed theory comes complete with a testing methodology (the ‘pop-out’ effect testing) that is based on our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in visualisation comprehension.
About Mark:
Mark Shovman is a SICSA Lecturer in Information Visualisation in the Institute of Arts, Media and Computer Games Technology in the University of Abertay Dundee. He is an interdisciplinary researcher, studying the perception and cognition aspects of information visualisations, computer games, and immersive virtual reality. His recent research projects include the application of dynamic 3D link-charts in Systems Biology; alleviating cyber-sickness in VR helmets; and immersive VR as an art medium. Mark was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, and lived in Jerusalem, Israel since 1990. He can be found on http://www.linkedin.com/pub/mark-shovman/3/a4b/849
After much anticipation and excitement, the School welcomes 12 new African Cichlids for the start of a new semester.
Students undertaking the pre-sessional language course before entering our taught Masters programme, had the opportunity to try out their programming skills this afternoon, in a fun and enjoyable context using Java to write programmes that control robots.
Jan de Muijnck-Hughes and Lars Kotthoff led the session in the John Honey Building.
The Basilica reconstruction was a collaborative project between the School of Classics and the School Computer Science. Research Blog
A reconstruction of St Andrews Cathedral has also taken place.
The reconstruction was a research topic for successful computer science and information technology MSc. dissertations in the summer of 2010 and 2011.
Technical support was available in regular laboratory sessions; in addition students had input from experts in the history and architecture of the cathedral and direct access to the physical site.
A key innovative aspect of this project was to situate the reconstruction within the immersive 3D virtual world OpenSim. This allows visitors to explore the reconstruction through the proxy of an avatar.
A small celebratory cake for Angus.
The MSc poster presentations and project demonstrations took place this afternoon. We wish all of our MSc students good luck as they finish their dissertations and move closer to graduation!
Mirco Musolesi leaves the School today to start his new post in Birmingham. Thank you for the cakes from a local Royal supplier. Good luck and we will hopefully see you in St Andrews in the future.
The summer school “Advanced techniques in computer algebra systems development” is organised by the Centre of Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra and supported by the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) and the EU FP6 project “SCIEnce – Symbolic Computation Infrastructure for Europe” Further details>>>
Mobile computing and sensing technologies present exciting opportunities for healthcare. Wireless sensors worn by patients can automatically deliver medical
sensor data to care providers, family members, or other caregivers, providing new opportunities to diagnose, monitor, and manage a wide range of medical
conditions. Using the mobile phones that patients already carry to provide connectivity between sensors and providers can help to keep costs low and
deployments simple. However, there are many security and privacy challenges involved in developing a system that will protect the patient’s privacy and the
integrity of the data collected. In this talk I describe the advent of these “mHealth” systems, survey the security and privacy issues, and describe research
underway at Dartmouth to address these challenges.
David Kotz is the Champion International Professor, in the Department of Computer Science, and Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Sciences, at Dartmouth
College in Hanover NH. During the 2008-09 academic year he was a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, in Bangalore India, and a Fulbright
Research Scholar to India. At Dartmouth, he was the Executive Director of the Institute for Security Technology Studies from 2004-07. His research interests
include security and privacy, pervasive computing for healthcare, and wireless networks. He has published over 100 refereed journal and conference papers. He
is an IEEE Fellow, a Senior Member of the ACM, a member of the USENIX Association, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
After receiving his A.B. in Computer Science and Physics from Dartmouth in 1986, he completed his Ph.D in Computer Science from Duke University in 1991 and
returned to Dartmouth to join the faculty. For more information see http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~dfk/.
