Congratulations David Letham!

Congratulations to David Letham who has been invited to the Gives Back Awards 2022, on behalf of University of St Andrews Charities Campaign.

David is one of the first winners of the making a difference Award. This new Award comes from students and staff who would like to nominate members of staff who have gone the extra mile within St Andrew’s community and beyond. Whether that be stepping up to help others during exceptional times, showing initiative or making a positive impact on the individuals/communities they have worked with

Enjoy the Ceremony!

 

Research participants from further education wanted

We are looking to speak to further education students of all disciplines.

Photo by David Kennedy on Unsplash

We want to understand what students want to know about personal cyber security and how they want to learn it.   To participate, you must be 16 or over and based at college, not at school, and willing to take part in an interview about this.  Sessions will last a maximum of 30-40 minutes, held on Microsoft Teams. Participants will be offered a £8 voucher for their time and contributions.

If you are interested, please get in contact using the details below. You will then be given a Participant Information Sheet with further details of our research and have the opportunity to ask questions, before being asked whether you consent to participate.

Contact Details

Amy Hunt  – student-cyber-awareness@st-andrews.ac.uk

This study is being conducted as part of a research study in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.  The researchers are Dr Jean Carletta, Kevin Doherty, Amy Hunt, and Molly Wilson.

 

Only One day to go until SISCO!

SISCO Conference, 5 & 6 February

Ian Gent, Chris Jefferson and Simon Dobson are all presenting at the SISCO conference this weekend. There will be social and networking events which include free food in the medicine cafeteria. We think that these will be nice opportunities for all students, speakers and staff to get to know one other.

You are all invited to these events, both on Saturday and Sunday.

You can get your free tickets to attend and further information on their Facebook page

Congratulations to our Emeritus Professor Ian Sommerville

Very many congratulations to our Emeritus Professor Ian Sommerville who has recently been awarded the 2022 Nancy Mead award for excellence in software engineering education.

https://mycseet.wordpress.com/nancy-mead-award-terms-of-reference/

The award will be presented at the (virtual) Conference for Software Engineering and Training next month.

This Award goes to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding contributions to software engineering education and training, as well as to the related area of software engineering professionalism. Contributions may include, but are not limited to: service to the community, papers, reports, books, tools, techniques and media for software engineering education, and outstanding practice of teaching that has been witnessed by the community at large. Contributions should have had an influence over an extended period of time at the international level. Contributions to software engineering itself (peer-reviewed research or practice) should be mentioned in a separate section of any nomination, but having made such contributions is not necessary in order to receive this award.

Well Done Ian!

Welcoming Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo for our DLS on Tuesday 9 November

As part of the schools Distinguished Lecture Series we look forward to welcoming Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo on Tuesday 9 November.

Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo  received her Ph.D. in Software Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 1999. After spending two years at CERN (the European Center for Nuclear Research) and 5 years in the UK as Lecturer, she became full professor at the University of Geneva in 2010. Since 2016, she is the Director of the Computer Science Center of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She has been nominated in 2018 among the 100 digital shapers in Switzerland. Her research interests relate to the engineering of decentralised software with self-organising and emergent behaviour. This involves studying natural systems, designing and developing artificial collective systems, and verifying reliability and trustworthiness of those systems. Giovanna co-founded the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organising Systems (SASO) and the ACM Transactions on Autonomous Adaptive Systems (TAAS), for which she served as EiC from 2005 to 2011.

This event will be held on Teams with further details to follow.

$2.2 million funding for former CS students

Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini, along with former CS students Ali Khajeh-Hosseini and Alistair Scott saw an untapped market to help engineers lower their cloud computing costs, creating Infracost as a result. Infracost provides developers with cloud cost estimates based on changes they make to their code infrastructure.

Hassan, the CEO, who attended The Robert Gordon University and The University of Edinburgh, and is a serial entrepreneur, with two of his companies he cofounded with his brother Ali (ShopForCloud and AbarCloud) being acquired. Ali, also attended The Robert Gordon University and The University of Edinburgh like his brother, and went on to obtain his Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews, with his doctoral thesis focusing on cloud computing (Thesis: Supporting System Deployment Decisions in Public Clouds). His decade of expertise in the field played a critical role in the success and acquisitions of ShopForCloud and AbarCloud. Rounding out the team is Alistair, who attended the University of St. Andrews for his computer science degree. He was also a cofounder at AbarCloud and a senior software engineer at RightScale. These three together have impressive domain expertise and a successful entrepreneurial track record in cloud computing makes it likely that will make a massive impact with Infracost in the tech industry at-large.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickdaso/2021/09/23/infracost-raises-22m-from-sequoia-to-help-engineers-lower-their-cloud-computing-costs/

 

ACL 2021 Test of Time Award

Dr. Jean Carletta has been awarded the 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics 25-year Test-of-Time paper award for Assessing Agreement on Classification Tasks: The Kappa Statistic, Computational Linguistics 22 (1), 1996. In this paper she intervened to correct a common but misleading statistical practice. As a result, her field began to require assessments of how variability in subjective analyses could bias the claims made for their results. Although her work was based on existing content analysis best practice in the humanities, the clarity of her expression led to the paper being used widely in teaching research methods to medical students as far afield as Beijing.
Jean is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science. She is engaged in a wide portfolio of work that takes a systems level approach to improving the impact Scotland’s academic community has on national cyber security and resilience.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/announcement-2021-acl-test-time-paper-award-0

Seminar – Phong Le, Amazon – 3rd March 2021

Can Language Models be Weak Annotators

We are happy to have Phong Le, from Amazon, talk on Teams on Wed 3 March at 12 noon on Teams.

Abstract

Deep language models e.g. BERT and GPT3 are the breakthrough in Natural Language Processing in the last 3 years. Being trained on massive raw text data, they capture useful priors for several tasks such as syntactic parsing, information extraction, and question answering. Moreover, they are capable of answering factual and commonsense cloze questions such as “Dante was born in _____”. In this talk, I will firstly give an overview about what language models “know”. I will then present our work on exploiting their knowledge as weak supervision for a specific task called relation classification.

Relation classification, the identification of a particular relation type between two entities in text, requires annotated data. Data annotation is either a manual process for supervised learning, or automated, using knowledge bases for distant learning. However, both methodologies are costly and time-consuming since they depend on intensive human labour for annotation or for knowledge base creation. Using language models as annotators, on the contrary, is very cheap but the annotation quality is low. We hence propose NoelA, an auto-encoder using a noisy channel, to improve the accuracy by learning from the low quality annotated data. NoelA outperforms BERT and a bootstrapping baseline on TACRED and reWIKI datasets.

Bio: I’m an applied scientist at Amazon Alexa. Before that, I was a tenure-track research fellow at the University of Manchester. I did a postdoc with Ivan Titov at the University of Edinburgh, and got a PhD from the University of Amsterdam under the supervision of (Jelle) Willem Zuidema. I’m interested in neural networks and deep learning. My current work is to employ them to solve natural language processing tasks such as entity linking, coreference resolution, and dependency parsing. I’m also interested in formal semantics, especially learning semantic parsing.

For more details, please visit my homepage https://sites.google.com/site/lephongxyz/

 

Please note the session will not be recorded, to preserve the like-for-like nature of physical seminars and also avoid any privacy/rights issues.

Event details

  • When: 3rd March 2021 12:00 - 3rd February 2021 13:00
  • Format: Seminar