School Seminar – Professor Patrick Olivier – Digital Civics: Infrastructuring Participatory Citizenship

Title:  Digital Civics: Infrastructuring Participatory Citizenship

Abstract:  Firstly, this is not technical talk, its a talk about a research initiative in “Digital Civics” that Open Lab is undertaking primarily with partners in the North East of England, but also nationally and internationally. Digital Civics proposes the use of digital technologies in the provision of relational models of public services, that is, models that take as a starting point the potential of digital technologies to support citizen-focused sharing of knowledge, experience and resources. By framing government as more than simply the provider of uniform and mechanistic services, digital civics aims to leverage technology to foster environments in which local agents (e.g. charities, local businesses, citizens) are able to solve problems together. Digital Civics research is inherently cross-disciplinary, action-oriented and place-based, and this requires us (as academic researchers) to configure ourselves differently to the communities with whom we conduct our research. In this talk I will be describing examples of our digital civics research, from applications in community engagement and education to public health and social justice, as well as the trajectory and pragmatics of the overall endeavour.

Speaker biography:  Patrick Olivier is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computing, Newcastle University, UK. He founded and leads Open Lab, Newcastle University’s centre for cross-disciplinary research in digital technologies. His research interests span interaction design, social computing and ubiquitous computing, particularly in public service and civic application contexts (education, public health and social justice). He is director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital Civics (55 cross-disciplinary PhD students) and the EPSRC Digital Economy Research Centre (a multidisciplinary five-year project involving 25 postdocs).

Google scholar:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=CUu9heMAAAAJ

ORCID:

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2841-7580

Open Lab:

https://openlab.ncl.ac.uk/

Digital Civics:

https://digitalcivics.io/

Event details

  • When: 18th October 2018 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Young Software Engineer of the Year 2018 Awards

Congratulations to Keno Schwalb, a runner-up at last night’s Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards. His final year project IDS test comparison of intrusion detection systems using malware samples was shortlisted earlier in September.

The Young Software Engineer of the Year accolades are awarded to the best undergraduate software projects from students studying computer science and software engineering in Scotland.

The awards were announced at the closing event of ScotSoft, Scotland’s leading tech conference at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

Previous finalists and prize winners have included, Gala Malbasic, Simone Ivan Conte, Sam Elliott,Thomas Grimes, Alistair Scott, Craig Paul, Angus MacDonald, Ben Catherall, Graeme Bell and Ian Miguel. The number of finalists is further testament to the quality of talented students graduating from the School of Computer Science at St Andrews.

Dasip 2018 Keynote: Professor Simon Dobson

Head of School Simon Dobson will deliver a keynote at Dasip, the Conference on Design and Architectures for Signal and Image Processing in October in Porto. Dasip provides an international forum for innovation and developments in the field of embedded signal processing systems. Simon’s keynote will focus on making the transition from sensors to sensor systems software.

Abstract: Signal processing underpins everything we do with sensors. The physical limits of sensors, and the effects of their exposure to their environment, in turn constrain their accuracy, and therefore affect the trust we can place in sensor-driven systems. But this is a long pipeline, and it’s by no means clear how to trace from low-level errors and inaccuracies to their high-level consequences. In this talk I will try to tease-out some of the desiderata we might look for in such a pipeline, with a view to understanding how we can go about building sensor systems that deserve our trust.

MSc and Honours receptions 2018

After a busy week of orientation, advising and module talks, MSc and Honours students are pictured socialising during their welcome receptions on Tuesday and Thursday evening last week. The popular and lively events highlight the friendly student community within the School and provide a chance to chat to staff and students before a semester of hard work begins.

Images courtesy of Xu Zhu and Sylvia Laesecke

Computer Science orientation and welcome 2018

After advising and induction events, staff and students are pictured enjoying a welcome reception and orientation activities, coordinated by Alice Toniolo. The annual gaming session proved as popular as ever and offered retro classic digital games and traditional board games. The gaming session was closely followed by a well attended welcome reception for First Year students.

Images courtesy of Lisa Dow and Andrew Wong

Google@St Andrews

Next Wednesday, October 3rd between 2 and 4pm, Google will be hosting an event at St Andrews. Come along to the Purdie building (Lecture Theatre A) to learn the ins and outs of technical roles at Google. You’ll learn about software and site reliability engineering, product management, and engineering at Google in general. You’ll also get insights into the technical interviewing process, and learn about the internships and scholarships available to students.

When: Oct 3rd, 2018 2-4pm

Where: Purdie Lecture Theatre A

Register: https://goo.gl/qjaHgE

Register by Oct 1st for the chance to be invited to an technical interview workshop 6-8pm on Oct 3rd.

Event details

  • When: 3rd October 2018 14:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Purdie Bldg

An Academic’s Observations from a Sabbatical at Google

Professor Adam Barker is featured in this month’s Communications of the ACM Magazine (CACM) discussing his recent Visiting Faculty appointment at Google. The Viewpoints article summarises his experiences working in software engineering on the Borgmaster team, and some of the core lessons which can be brought back to academia.

Borg is Google’s cluster management framework, which runs hundreds of thousands of jobs, across a number of clusters each with up to tens of thousands of machines.

National University of Singapore

Professor Aaron Quigley has been appointed a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Smart Systems Institute in the National University of Singapore. As part of his next sabbatical Aaron will spend 6 months in the Creating Unique Technology for Everyone (CUTE) centre in Singapore [Video]. He will be collaborating with researchers there on next generation interfaces, discreet computing and new forms of interaction. The research and lessons learnt will help advance the field of HCI and will be incorporated in future teaching and research here in St Andrews.

Alexander Konovalov (St Andrews): How to teach basic research computing skills? (School Seminar)

Abstract:

The Carpentries (https://carpentries.org/) is a global community of
volunteers which teach foundational coding and data science skills to researchers
worldwide through Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry
workshops. Being involved in the Carpentries since 2015, I organised and taught
at several workshops, developed new lessons, and trained new Carpentry instructors.
In my talk I will discuss the Carpentries pedagogical approach, and also consider
its applicability to teaching Computer Science students.

Event details

  • When: 4th December 2018 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar