Congratulations to School Manager Alex Bain, who completed the London Marathon for the third time earlier this month. Alex, runner no 32993, is pictured below with his finisher’s medal. Alex also completed the London Marathon in 2017 and 2016 raising funds for Guide dogs and worldwide cancer research.
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
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.
Congratulations to Percy Perez, who successfully defended his thesis yesterday. He is pictured with supervisor Dr Alex Voss, Internal examiner, Dr Marwan Fayed and external examiner Dr Gareth Tyson, from Queen Mary University of London.
Image courtesy of Ryo Yanagida
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.
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.
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.
Title:
A Type-System for describing System-on-a-Chip Architectures
Abstract:
The protocols that describe the interactions between IP Cores on System-on-a-Chip (SoC) architectures are well-documented. These protocols described not only the structural properties of the physical interfaces but also the behaviour of the emanating signals. However, there is a disconnect between the design of SoC architectures, their formal description, and the verification of their implementation in known hardware description languages.
Within the Border Patrol project we are investigating how to capture and reason about the structural and behavioural properties of SoC architectures using state-of-the-art advances in programming language research. Namely, we are investigating using dependent types and session types to capture and reason about hardware communication.
In this talk I will discuss my work in designing a dependent type- system and corresponding language that captures and reasons about the topological structure of a System-on-a-Chip. This language provides correct-by-construction guarantees over:
We provide these guarantees through the (ab)use of dependent types as presented in Idris; and abuse of indexed monads to reason about resource usage.
Given time I will give an account of how this language enables reasoning about SoC behaviour when considered in conjunction with Session Types.ssion Types.
A project funded by the Undergraduate Research Assistant Scheme has successfully completed the first stage of interdisciplinary work, between the Institute of Mediaeval Studies and the School of Computer Science. The long-term aim is to digitise and analyse early French bibles.
In this pilot project, undergraduate student Gregor Haywood, under the supervision of Prof. Clive Sneddon and Dr. Mark-Jan Nederhof, explored the feasibility of large-scale OCR technology for early printed text. Scans from a French bible from 1543 were provided by the Special Collections of the University Library. Much of the project consisted of iterations of automatic transcription, manual correction, retraining, and evaluation of accuracy. In addition, problems were investigated that specifically arise from taking OCR technology designed for modern printed documents and applying it on early documents. Such problems include non-standard character sets, non-standard page layout, faded or smudged ink, and torn pages.
Despite of these problems, it was demonstrated that error rates below 3% are achievable, which paves the way for a continuation of these efforts.
