St 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 for the workshop and summer school
Continue reading
Event details
- When: 26th June 2011
- Where: Cole Bldg
- Format: Workshop
Summer School on Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism
The focus of this summer school is to introduce a new generation of researchers to the latest research advances in multimodal systems, in the context of applications, services and technologies for tourists (Digital Tourism). Where mobile and desktop applications can rely on eyes down interaction, the tourist aims to keep their eyes up and focussed on the painting, statue, mountain, ski run, castle, loch or other sight before them. In this school we focus on multimodal input and output interfaces, data fusion techniques and hybrid architectures, vision, speech and conversational interfaces, haptic interaction, mobile, tangible and virtual/augmented multimodal UIs, tools and system infrastructure issues for designing interfaces and their evaluation.
We have structured this summer school as a blend of theory and practice.
Further information on the summer school on the SACHI site.
Event details
- When: 27th June 2011 - 1st July 2011
- Where: Honey Bldg
- Format: Summer School
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.
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- Stuart and Jim with the prototype server now running BSD
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- The server’s internal components
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- Raid array initialising for the first time
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/
Miller Prize for Joe Schaul
Computer Science student wins University prize for Science
One of our graduating students, Joe Schaul, has been awarded the University’s “Miller Prize”. The Prize is awarded to the best final-year undergraduate in the Science Faculty. As well has having an excellent academic record throughout his 4 years in the School, Joe also produced an exceptional undergraduate project. He developed a computer simulation framework for complex networks and applied it to two very different, real-world case studies: 1) the study of epidemics using a probabilistic model for various complex network topologies; and 2) the study of the effects of super-node crashes in Skype-like computer networks. The project was extremely challenging: it involved not only aspects related to the design, implementation and performance analysis of a scalable simulation tool for thousands of nodes, but it also required a very deep understanding of the problems related to the simulation of complex systems.
Well done, Joe!