Room 222 – Physics and Astronomy
12:05 Michael Mazilu: Introduction
12:15 Malte Gather and Nils Kronenberg: Developing cell forces mapping for clinical diagnosis
12:45 Vivienne Wild and Milena Pawlik: Analysing images of galaxies
13:15 Coffee Break
13:25 David Harris-Birtill : Automated Remote Pulse Oximetry
Postgraduate student, Paul Dobra organised an end of semester celebratory dinner at the Fairmont Hotel in April. The social event marked the end of teaching and provided a chance to relax before the commencement of dissertation. Paul supplied comments and shared some photos from the occasion.
“There are rather few occasions not to be happy when you are surrounded by friends and family. Even better so when your friends are like your family, and in true computer science spirit the end of the second semester finished in a grand style: enjoying the scenic view of the North Sea from the balcony of the Fairmont Hotel and Restaurant, approximately 60 postgraduates celebrated their friendship and the successful completion of deadlines. Consisting of a lavish three-course meal and blessed with amazing weather, the event was a reminder of the true, everlasting bonds that can be forged outside university.”
Images and text courtesy of Paul Dobra
Dr Alan Miller joined other virtual reality educationalists to give an invited keynote talk at the 3rd Immersive Learning Network Conference on Tuesday 27th June.
The presentation drew upon two major complementary themes: virtual time travel and the use of immersive technologies for museums.
Please note that this seminar will now take place in Jack Cole 1.33A on Wednesday 5th July between 15:00 and 16:00
Title: Between Exploration and Explanation: Visualizations for Insights, Curiosity, and Storytelling.
Abstract: This talk presents a set of interactive visualizations for exploration and recent work in how to communicate insights through data-driven stories. In particular, I will present work on visualizing networks including an open-source online platform. Then, I will discuss comics as an approach to communicate not only changes in temporal data but to weave narration, textual explanations, and data visualizations. The questions raised by the talk are about effective ways to engage a larger audience in understanding, learning, and use of visualizations for exploration and communication. As visualizations are becoming more and more commonplace and familiar to people, we can see more and more aspects of our daily lives being potentially enriched with information presented visually. Eventually, I want to raise the question of which role novel technology such as Augmented and Virtual Reality can play in exploring, communicating, and interacting with visualizations.
Biography: Benjamin is a Lecturer in Design Informatics and Visualization at the University of Edinburgh. His research designs and investigates interactive information visualizations to help people explore, present, and understand information hidden in data. He focuses on the visualization of dynamic networks (e.g., social networks, brain connectivity networks), as well as temporal data (e.g., changes in videos and Wikipedia articles, events on timelines), comics for storytelling with visualizations, as well as visualization and interaction in Augmented and Virtual Reality. Before joining the University of Edinburgh in 2017, Benjamin worked as a postdoc at Harvard University, Monash University, as well as the Microsoft-Research Inria Joint Centre. Benjamin was visiting researcher at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research in 2015. He obtained his PhD in 2014 from the Université Paris Sud where he worked at the Aviz Group at Inria.
We would like to cordially invite all staff, students, and alumni to this historic CS event in the making. As you know, other schools in St Andrews have their own annual ball e.g. chem-ball, physics-ball, bull-and-bear (economics) ball etc. For a while, we have wanted our own CS ball – and thanks to a team of keen MSc students and sponsorship from the School of Computer Science – the ball is finally happening!
The tickets available from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/first-ever-cs-ball-smurfalicious-blue-ball-tickets-35035549271 are priced at £39.95, which includes:
The ball will strengthen our sense of fellowship, between all staff and students, and not least as a school. But as you all know very well, we are not just a school, we are a family – the St Andrews #csfamily. Hope to see many of you there!
FAQ:
Info and files provided by Shyam Reyal
Congratulations to our Senior Honours Class of 2017, MSci Honours students and our PhD students Dr Anne-Marie Mann, Dr Ildiko Pete, Dr Yuchen Zhao and Dr Michael Mauderer, who graduated on Wednesday. Students were invited to a reception in the School prior to the ceremony, to celebrate their achievement with staff, friends and family. We echo the sentiments expressed by our Head of School, Professor Steve Linton, during his Graduation address.
“For what you have achieved here, we are so proud of you. For what you will achieve, we wait eagerly and will always be proud. And wherever you are, we hope you will always regard St Andrews as a place you can call home.”
Our graduates will indeed move on to a wide variety of interesting and challenging employment and further study opportunities, and we wish them all well with their future careers.
Images courtesy of Annemarie Paton and Ryo Yanagida.
Rethinking High performance computing Platforms: Challenges, Opportunities and Recommendations, co-authored by Adam Barker and a team (Ole Weidner, Malcolm Atkinson, Rosa Filgueira Vicente) in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh was recently featured in the Communications of the ACM and HPC Wire.
The paper focuses on container technology and argues that a number of “second generation” high-performance computing applications with heterogeneous, dynamic and data-intensive properties have an extended set of requirements, which are not met by the current production HPC platform models and policies. These applications (and users) require a new approach to supporting infrastructure, which draws on container-like technology and services. The paper then goes on to describe cHPC: an early prototype of an implementation based on Linux Containers (LXC).
Ali Khajeh-Hosseini, Co-founder of AbarCloud and former co-founder of ShopForCloud (acquired by RightScale as PlanForCloud) said of this research, “Containers have helped speed-up the development and deployment of applications in heterogeneous environments found in larger enterprises. It’s interesting to investigate their applications in similar types of environments in newer HPC applications.“
Title: Finding What to Read: Visual Text Analytics Tools and Techniques to Guide Investigation
Abstract: Text is one of the most prominent forms of open data available, from social media to legal cases. Text visualizations are often critiqued for not being useful, for being unstructured and presenting data out of context (think: word clouds). I argue that we should not expect them to be a replacement for reading. In this talk I will briefly discuss the close/distant reading debate then focus on where I think text visualization can be useful: hypothesis generation and guiding investigation. Text visualization can help someone form questions about a large text collection, then drill down to investigate through targeted reading of the underlying source texts. Over the past 10 years my research focus has been primarily on creating techniques and systems for text analytics using visualization, across domains as diverse as legal studies, poetics, social media, and automotive safety. I will review several of my past projects with particular attention to the capabilities and limitations of the technologies and tools we used, how we use semantics to structure visualizations, and the importance of providing interactive links to the source materials. In addition, I will discuss the design challenges which, while common across visualization, are particularly important with text (legibility, label fitting, finding appropriate levels of ‘zoom’).
Biography: Dr. Christopher Collins is the Canada Research Chair in Linguistic Information Visualization and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). His research focus is interdisciplinary, combining information visualization and human-computer interaction with natural language processing to address the challenges of information management and the problems of information overload. His work has been published in many venues including IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, and has been featured in popular media such as the Toronto Star and the New York Times Magazine. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. Dr. Collins is a past member of the executive of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee and sits on the IEEE VIS Conference Organizing Committee.
“Addiction”
Seminar Room 1 School of Medicine
12:00: Alex Baldacchino- Introduction
12:15: Ognjen Arandjelović & Aniqa Aslam- Understanding Fatal and Non-Fatal Drug Overdose Risk Factors in Fife: Overdose Risk (OdRi) tool
12:45: Damien Williams & Fergus Neville- Transdermal alcohol monitoring
13:15: David Harris-Birtill & David Morrison- Narco Cat – waste water analysis in substance misuse – a novel epidemiological tool
13:15 – 14.00: All Questions & Opportunities
Event Location: School of Medicine, Seminar room 1
Abstract:
Session types are a formalism to model structured communication-based programming. A session type describes communication by specifying the type and direction of data exchanged between two parties. We show that session types are encodable in more primitive and foundational pi-calculus types. Besides providing an expressivity result, the encoding: (i) removes redundancies in the syntax of session types, and (ii) yields standard properties of session types as straightforward corollaries, exploiting the corresponding properties of standard typed pi-calculus. The robustness of the encoding is tested on a few extensions of session types, including subtyping, polymorphism, and higher-order communications. In this talk we present the encoding, some of its applications and recent developments.
