Hot off the press: Type-Driven Development with Idris

A new book, Type-Driven Development with Idris has just been published by Manning Publications. Written by Dr Edwin Brady, the creator of Idris, Type-Driven Development with Idris teaches you how to improve the performance and accuracy of your programs by taking advantage of a state-of-the-art type system.

Type-driven development is an approach to programming that embraces types as the foundation of your code. It is based on the concept of “dependent types”, which allow you to express relationships and other assumptions directly in your code, and have these assumptions checked by the compiler. With this approach, you can define specifications early in development and write code that’s easy to maintain, test, and extend.

Dr Brady said:

“Idris arose as a result of my own research into program verification and language design with advanced type systems. After spending several years immersed in the concept of programming with dependent types, I felt there was a need for a language designed for developers and practitioners as well as researchers. By teaching the concept of type-driven development using Idris, the book aims to make state-of-the-art verification techniques accessible to software practitioners.”

The book is currently available via MANNING publications: https://www.manning.com/books/type-driven-development-with-idris. ePub and Kindle versions available from April 10th. The source code, chapter 1 and chapter 13 are available as free downloads.

Alex runs London Marathon 2017 for Guide Dogs

Alex Bain will be running the London Marathon again this year, raising funds for Guide Dogs. He is holding a fundraising bake sale in the department today. There are still plenty delicious cakes and home baking on offer. Support all his effort and training by buying a cake or two.

You can also donate through his justgiving page.

*Update: Total so far £320. Cakes and other sweet treats remain.

Distinguished Lecture Series 2017: Dr David Manlove

On March 31st, Dr David Manlove from the University of Glasgow, delivered the semester two distinguished lectures in Lower and Upper College Hall. The overall title was algorithms for healthcare-related matching problems.

David started with an overview of complexity theory and solving hard problems. He gave examples of this in practice, for example how researchers constructed a best-possible tour around the best 20,000 pubs in the UK. The second lecture focussed on how to assign junior doctors to hospitals in the best way, a very practical problem but with interesting complexity issues. The final lecture focussed on the life-changing topic of how to set up exchanges of kidneys between healthy donors and patients needing transplants. David talked about how his expertise in algorithms has been translated into regularly finding the best possible matches which then result in real transplants taking place.

David is pictured above at various stages of the distinguished lecture series and outside College Hall with Head of School, Prof Steve Linton, Prof Ian Gent and Dr Ishbel Duncan,

Videos from the DLS can be accessed on Vimeo –
Lecture 1: https://vimeo.com/211633740
Lecture 2: https://vimeo.com/211634119
Lecture 3: https://vimeo.com/211634923

Images courtesy of Ryo Yanagida.

SACHI Seminar: Andrés Lucero – Co-Designed, Collocated & Playful Mobile Interactions

Title: Co-Designed, Collocated & Playful Mobile Interactions

Abstract: Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets were originally conceived and have traditionally been utilized for individual use. Research on mobile collocated interactions has explored situations in which collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their mobile devices, thus going from personal/individual toward shared/multiuser experiences and interactions. The Social and Spatial Interactions (SSI) platform extends the current individual use of these devices to support shared collocated interactions with mobile phones. The platform supports shared collocated interactions, using the mobile phone as a physical interface and a sensor network built in the phone to track the position of the phones on a flat surface. The question the platform addresses is if people are willing to share their devices and engage in collaborative interactions. In this talk I will discuss the different methods used to create playful and engaging interactions in the context of the SSI project.

Bio: Andrés Lucero is Associate Professor of Interaction Design at Aalto University. His work focuses on the design and evaluation of novel interaction techniques for mobile devices and other interactive surfaces. He received his MA degree in Visual Communication Design from Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana (1999), PDEng in User-System Interaction from Eindhoven University of Technology (2004), and PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Eindhoven University of Technology (2009). His research interests include human-computer interaction, design, and play.

Event details

  • When: 11th April 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Seeing the Wood for the Trees – Essential Structure in Model-based Search by Prof. John McCall

Problem structure, or linkage, refers to the interaction between variables in a black-box fitness function. Discovering structure is a feature of a range of search algorithms that use structural models at each iteration to determine the trajectory of the search. Examples include Information Geometry Optimisation (IGO), Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES), Bayesian Evolutionary Learning (BEL) and Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDA).

In particular, EDAs use probabilistic graphical models to represent structure learned from evaluated solutions. Various EDA approaches using trees, directed acyclic graphs and undirected graphs have been developed and evaluated on a range of benchmarks with a variety of representations.
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Event details

  • When: 4th April 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

SRG Seminar: nMANET, the Name-based Data Network (NDN) for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) by Percy Perez Aruni

The aim of this talk is to introduce the nMANET, the Name-based Data Network (NDN) for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) approach. nMANET is an alternative perspective on utilising the characteristics of NDN to solve the limitations of MANETs, such as mobility and energy consumption. NDN, which is an instance of Information Centric Networking (ICN), provides an alternative architecture for the future Internet. In contrast with traditional TCP/IP networks, NDN enables content addressing instead of host based communication. NDN secures the content instead of securing the communication channel between hosts, therefore the content can be obtained from the intermediate caches or final producers. Although NDN has proven to be an effective design in wired networks, it does not perfectly address challenges arising in MANETs. This shortcoming is due to the high mobilty of mobile devices and their inherent resource constraints, such as remaining energy in batteries.

The implementation of nMANET, the Java based NDN Forwarder Daemon (JNFD), aims to fill this gap and provide a Mobile Name-based Ad-hoc Network prototype compatible with NDN implementations. JNFD was designed for Android mobile devices and offers a set of energy efficient forwarding strategies to distribute content in a dynamic topology where consumers, producers and forwarders have high mobility and may join or leave the network at unpredictable times. nMANET evalues JNFD through benchmarking to estimate efficiency, which is defined as high rates of reliability, throughput and responsiveness with a low energy consumption.

Event details

  • When: 6th April 2017 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar

Team NOMAD win IDEA Explosion 2017

Congratulations to PhD students Shyam Reyal and Simone Conte , from Computer Science and Senior Scientific Officer Tomas Lebl, from Chemistry who presented NOMAD (NMR Online Management and Datastore) at IDEA Explosion 2017 and emerged victorious. Shyam delivered a five-minute elevator pitch, whilst Simone and Tomas responded to questions. Judges acknowledged that NOMAD has huge potential with researchers, and were impressed that it has been used in St Andrews for the past 5 years, with other universities now lined-up to make use of its services, fully supporting the use of the prize money to set-up a company.


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DLS: Algorithms for healthcare-related matching problems

Algorithms for healthcare-related matching problems

Distinguished Lecture Series, Semester 2, 2016-7

David Manlove

School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow

Lower College Hall (with overflow simulcast in Upper College Hall)

Abstract:

Algorithms arise in numerous everyday appPicture of David Manlovelications – in this series of lectures I will describe how algorithms can be used to solve matching problems having applications in healthcare settings.  I will begin by outlining how algorithms can be designed to cope with computationally hard problems.  I will then describe algorithms developed at the University of Glasgow that have been used by the NHS to solve two particular matching problems.  These problems correspond to the annual assignment of junior doctors to Scottish hospitals, and finding “kidney exchanges” between kidney patients and their incompatible donors in the UK.
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Event details

  • When: 31st March 2017 09:15 - 15:30
  • Where: Lower College Hall
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Distinguished lecture

SRG Seminar: Managing Shared Mutable Data in a Distributed Environment (Simone Conte)

Title: Managing Shared Mutable Data in a Distributed Environment

Abstract: Managing data is central to our digital lives. The average user owns multiple devices and uses a large variety of applications, services and tools. In an ideal world storage is infinite, data is easy to share and version, and available irrespective of where it is stored, and users can protect and exert control over the data arbitrarily.

In the real world, however, achieving such properties is very hard. File systems provide abstractions that do not satisfy all the needs of our daily lives anymore. Many applications now abstract data management to users but do so within their own silos. Cloud services provide each their own storage abstraction adding more fragmentation to the overall system.

The work presented in this talk is about engineering a system that usefully approximates to the ideal world. We present the Sea Of Stuff, a model where users can operate over distributed storage as if using their local storage, they can organise and version data in a distributed manner, and automatically exert policies about how to store content.

Event details

  • When: 23rd March 2017 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Series: Systems Seminars Series
  • Format: Seminar