Senior Honours Poster and Demo Sessions

Our talented Senior Honours students are pictured presenting posters and software artefacts to second markers, interested staff and students last week. The impressive range of year-long projects included, plagiarism detection tools, augmented books with AR Visualsiation, Network science in GPUs, evaluating Full coverage display, a Blockchain construction toolkit, Intrusion detection systems evaluation and many more demonstrating cutting edge research areas. The successful session was organised by Kasim Terzic, projects coordinator in the School. We wish our students well with their forthcoming exams and look forward to seeing them at June graduation.

Images courtesy of Lisa Dow and Saleem Bhatti

Junior Honours: Software Team Project 2017

Earlier today our hard working Junior Honours students presented their Team Projects. The projects involve substantial team based software engineering and rely heavily on collective development. There are many aspects of software and professional development along with considerable inter-team and intra-team collaborations. This year the students were asked to develop a software product intended for use by the School of Medicine. The teams demonstrated lots of creativity in developing back end, HCI and Machine learning aspects for their artefact. Thanks to all the students, supervisors and coordinators for their hard work this year. We wish all our junior honours students success with their forthcoming exams and we look forward to seeing them again for senior honours in September.

SACHI research group in Canada for the annual CHI conference

  

This week members of the SACHI research group are in Canada for the annual CHI conference where they are presenting 8 papers and other research work.

Their research papers have been attracting media interest this week. The Times has covered their paper on Change blindness in proximity-aware mobile interfaces quoting Professor Quigley. 

         

 

App developers urged to cure phone ‘blindness’

While the verge and Engadget has covered the best paper Project Zanzibar: A Portable and Flexible Tangible Interaction Platform.

Hui-Shyong Yeo contributed to this research while he was a research intern at Microsoft Research last summer in Cambridge.

 

The research group has put together a page which describes all the efforts at CHI 2018 here

Next year CHI 2019 will be in Scotland while CHI 2020 will be in Hawaii on its way to Asia in 2021.

Members of SACHI are already involved in the planning for 2019 as associate chairs for the program and are looking forward to CHI here in Scotland next year

Students perform in G&S’s Princess Ida

Peter Cushley (MSci) brilliantly sang the part of Hilarion in the Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s Princess Ida performance at the Byre on the 20th and 21st April.

Two other Computer Scientists were in the cast; Joanna Moreland and Simon Cadge, both in 2nd year.

The performances were well received with great applause. Some of the cast will be singing in HMS Pinafore at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August.

SACHI at CHI 2018 in Montreal next week

 

 

 

The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) series of academic conferences is generally considered the most prestigious in the field of human-computer interaction. It is hosted by ACM SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. CHI has been held annually since 1982 and attracts thousands of international attendees. Next week members of SACHI will be at the CHI 2018 conference in Montreal where they will be presenting 6 full papers (1 best paper), 1 demonstration, 1 late-breaking work and other activities.

This work includes pointing all around you, the design of visualization tools,  physicalization, change blindness, multi-user interfaces, tangible interaction and augmented reality.

You can find the research papers, videos and more details on SACHI @ CHI2018 here.

Montreal, Canada

War Stories: Building new tech products in an uncertain world

Steven Drost (CodeBase Chief Strategy Officer) and Jamie Coleman (CodeBase CoFounder and Chair) will talk about the topics that are rarely discussed in an academic environment around startups, product management, jobs to be done and disruption. Discussing aspects of UX, HCI, AI and systems development this is the stuff that they wish every computer scientist and startup founder knew before trying to create an innovative new business.

What is CodeBase?

CodeBase is the UK’s largest startup incubator, home to around 100 technology companies in Edinburgh and Stirling. It brings together ambitious entrepreneurs, world-class technological talent and top investors, in a creative, collaborative environment designed for the new digital economy. We host a vibrant, open community of experts in a diverse range of fields, with hands-on mentorship, networking and world-class business support. http://www.thisiscodebase.com

Jamie and Steven are quite inspiring speakers and if you are looking for project partners, collaborators or just to learn how to develop your ideas commercially, this could be a good talk for you.

 

Event details

  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

SRG Seminar: “Application of Bayesian Nonparametric in household human activity recognition” by Lei Fang

Abstract

In this talk, I will talk about the possibility of using Bayesian nonparametric clustering, or Dirichlet Process Mixture model to solve human activity recognition problem. In particular, I will discuss how the technique can be useful when the activity labels are not annotated and/or the activity evolves over the time. This initial study is built on an existing work on using directional statistical models (von Mises-Fisher) distribution, called Hierarchical Mixture of Conditional Independent von Mises Fisher distribution (HMCIvMFs), for unknown events detection and learning. Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling based learning algorithm will be presented together with some initial experiment results.

Event details

  • When: 12th April 2018 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

SRG Seminar: “Introduction to Apache Mesos and the DataCenter Operating System” by Matt Jarvis

Abstract
Data processing paradigms are undergoing a paradigm shift as we move more and more towards real time processing. Emerging software models such as the SMACK stack are at the forefront of this change, focused on a pipeline processing model, but are also introducing new levels of operational complexity in running multiple complex distributed systems such as Spark, Kafka and Cassandra. In this talk, I’ll introduce both Apache Mesos and DC/OS as a solution to this growing problem, and describe the benefits are of running these new kinds of systems for emerging cloud native workloads.
 
Bio
Matt Jarvis is Senior Director of Community and Evangelism at Mesosphere, engaging with the communities around DC/OS and Mesos. Matt has spent more than 15 years building products and services around open source software, on everything from embedded devices to large scale distributed systems. Most recently he has been focused on the open cloud infrastructure space, and in emerging patterns for cloud native applications. 

Event details

  • When: 24th April 2018 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar