Computer Science: June Graduation 2017

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.

Containers for HPC environments

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.“

Please take part in our 10 minute survey about the use of Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCID):

Are you a researcher or research student? Please take part in our 10 minute survey about the use of Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCID):

This survey aims to establish the extent to which researchers at the University of St Andrews are using ORCID identifiers during their work. The survey will collect anonymous data about the awareness and use of ORCID iDs amongst researchers and will only take 5 – 10 minutes to complete.

You will be able to indicate your interest in taking part in a follow-up interview. This is entirely voluntary and does not affect participation in the online survey or its results.

You will also have a chance to win a £100 Amazon voucher by providing your email address at the end of the survey. Again, this is entirely voluntary and will be independent from participation in the voluntary follow-up interviews.

This research is carried out in the context of an MSc project by Eva Borger at the School of Computer Science in collaboration with the University Library. For more information, contact Eva at eb427@st-andrews.ac.uk .

To access the survey, follow this link:

https://standrews.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_7NIVceZa6cFomTb

Responses will be collected until 14th July 2017.

Ethics approval: CS12882

If you would like help setting up an ORCID ID or linking it to your Pure Profile, you can contact Jennifer Pritchard or Norman Stewart at purelive@st-andrews.ac.uk .

The Library’s Digital Research division also holds Open Office Hours every Wednesday 2pm-4pm, in the Old Union Diner, Butts Wynd (off North Street) where the team are available for advice regarding Open Access, Research Data Management, Pure, ORCID, Research Computing and Digital Humanities
https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/library/services/researchsupport/

Thank you!

 

Eva Borger

PhD (Neuroscience)

MSc Student Management and IT

University of St Andrews

School of Computer Science

ORICD: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4965-2969

 

SACHI Seminar: Dr. Christopher Collins – Finding What to Read: Visual Text Analytics Tools and Techniques to Guide Investigation

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.

Event details

  • When: 27th June 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Seminar

Graduation Celebrations

Wednesday 21st June

As usual the school will host a small reception in the Jack Cole coffee area between 10.30 and 12.30, come along and enjoy a glass of bubbly and a cream cake or two in true Computer Science fashion!

All graduating students, their guests and staff members are invited.

 

DHSI Seminar Series (Digital Health Science Initiative)

“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 details

  • When: 14th June 2017 12:00 - 14:00
  • Where: N Haugh, St Andrews
  • Format: Seminar

Dr. Ornela Dardha’ talk: Session Types Revisited

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.

 

Event details

  • When: 4th July 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: N Haugh, St Andrews
  • Format: Seminar

SACHI Seminar: Oliver Schneider and Karon MacLean

We have a SACHI seminar on Monday 12th June 2017 which will be given by two speakers, presenting two connected talks within the normal hour slot.

The speakers are Dr Oliver Schneider from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany and Professor Karon MacLean who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Details for the two talks are as follows.

Title:  Haptic Experience Design: How to Create for Touch

Abstract:  Touch is everywhere in our daily lives, but interactive technology has traditionally prioritized visual and audio feedback. Recently, a variety of haptic feedback methods promise the benefits of touch for application areas like eyes-free feedback, emotional robots, and physically embodied education. However, haptic experiences are challenging to create – designers must draw from expertise in psychology, mechanical engineering, software engineering, and design theory, and work simultaneously with touch, vision, and audio.

To understand and support haptic experience design, we interviewed professional hapticians (makers of haptics) to provide a first definition and description of their process and its constituent challenges. We developed a series of design tools to support rapid, iterative creation of experiences for the most common haptic interface: expressive vibrotactile feedback. By characterizing haptic experience design and informing supportive tools, we make a first step towards establishing haptic design as its own field, akin to graphic and sound design.

Bio:  Oliver Schneider is a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. His Ph.D. topic at the University of British Columbia (UBC) was Haptic Experience Design: describing the process designers follow when creating haptic experiences and developing software tools to support them. Oliver received his M.Sc. in Computer Science from UBC and a B.Sc. Honours from the University of Saskatchewan, and has worked with Disney Research on novel haptic interactions. Through his research, Oliver seeks to empower people to work creatively with novel haptic, multimodal, and multisensory interactive technology.

Title:  Making and Experimenting with Furry Robots with Feelings

Abstract:  Touch has a major role to play in human-robot interaction. Here, advances in tactile sensing, wearable and context-aware computing as well as robotics more broadly are spurring new ideas about  how to configure the human-robot relationship in terms of roles and utility, which in turn expose new technical and social design questions.

This talk will focus on my group’s recent work on haptic or physical human-robot interaction, where we aim to bring effective haptic interaction into people’s lives by examining how touch (in either direction) can help address human needs with the benefit of both low- and high-tech innovation. I will give a sense of these efforts from three perspectives, each involving significant technical and evaluative design challenges: sensing emotive touch, designing expressive robot bodies and behaviours, and creating evaluative scenarios where participants experience genuine – and changing – emotions as they interact with our robots.

Bio:  Karon MacLean is Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Canada, with a B.Sc. in Biology and Mech. Eng. (Stanford) and a M.Sc. and Ph.D. (Mech. Eng., MIT)  and time spent as professional robotics engineer (Center for Engineering Design, University of Utah) and interaction researcher (Interval Research, Palo Alto). At UBC since 2000, her research specializes in haptic interaction: cognitive, sensory and affective design for people interacting with the computation we touch, emote and move with, whether robots, touchscreens or mobile activity sensors. Special Advisor on Knowledge Mobilization to UBC Faculty of Science; Charles A. McDowell Award, 2008; Assoc Editor of  IEEE Transactions on Haptics; co-chair of the 2010 and 2012 IEEE Haptics Symposium; Director of UBC’s pan-university Designing for People Research Cluster.

SACHI Seminar: Daniel Vogel, University of Waterloo

Title:  New Approaches to Mode-Switching

Abstract:  The fundamental unit of all interaction is issuing commands, and the trickiest types of commands are those that control “modes” — different ways to map the same input to different application actions. For example, the current mode in a tablet drawing app could determine if the exact same sequence of touch movements draws a line, pans the canvas, makes a marquee selection, or issues a gestural command. Switching between modes like these are frequent, so finding optimum mode-switching methods is important.  In this talk, I survey my group’s work to understand and improve mode-switching and command selection for different input types and device form factors. These include: Pin-and-Cross, a touch overloading technique combining static touches with nearby crossing selection; Conté, a pen-like input device that leverages small changes in contact geometry; Doppio, a reconfigurable two-faced smartwatch for tangible input; and Gunslinger, a mid-air interaction technique using bare hand postures and gestures performed in a relaxed arms-down position.

Bio:  Daniel Vogel is an Assistant Professor and co-director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. His research interests are fundamental characteristics of input and novel forms of interaction for current and future computing form factors like touch, tangibles, large displays, mid-air gestures, and whole-body input. In addition to earning PhD and MSc degrees from the University of Toronto, Dan holds a BFA from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and he leverages his combined art and science background in his research. For example, he was recently awarded a major grant to build a $1.8 million lab to explore the intersection of HCI and Fine Art in spatial augmented reality. Dan’s 2004 paper on interactive ambient displays is one of the ten most cited papers in the nineteen-year history of ACM UIST, and he has received honours including: multiple best paper awards at ACM CHI; the Bill Buxton Dissertation Award (2010); a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship (2011 – 2013), and an Ontario Early Researcher Award (2017).

Event details

  • When: 15th June 2017 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Maths Theatre B
  • Format: Seminar