Congratulations to Ildiko Pete, who successfully defended her thesis today. She is pictured below with supervisor Dr Dharini Balasubramaniam, Internal examiner Dr Adam Barker and external examiner Professor Pete Sawyer, from Lancaster University.
Announcement of the 33rd British Colloquium for Theoretical Computer Science
The 33rd BCTCS will be hosted by the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, from the 26th to the 28th of April 2017. The purpose of BCTCS is to provide a forum in which researchers in theoretical computer science can meet, present research findings, and discuss developments in the field. It also aims to provide an environment in which PhD students can gain experience in presenting their work, and benefit from contact with established researchers.
The scope of the colloquium includes all aspects of theoretical computer science, including algorithms, complexity, cryptography, formal methods, game theory, machine learning, languages, logics and quantum computation. Both computer scientists and mathematicians are welcome to attend, as are participants from outside of the UK.
This year the colloquium will feature the following invited speakers
LMS Keynote Lecture in Discrete Mathematics
Professor László Babai, University of Chicago
Confirmed Speakers
Perdita Stevens, University of Edinburgh
Conor McBride, University of Strathclyde
Felix Fischer, University of Glasgow
Edwin Brady, University of St Andrews
Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary University of London
Registration is *now open*, and you can find more information at https://bctcs2017.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/
PhD students are especially encouraged to offer a talk.
As an additional event, there will be a Scottish Combinatorics Meeting at the School of Mathematics in St Andrews on the 24th and 25th of April. If you would like to take part in the meeting, please contact the organisers directly.
The organisers hope to welcome you to St Andrews in April.
Type-Driven Development of Communicating Systems using Idris
Speaker: Jan de Muijnck-Hughes
Abstract
Communicating protocols are a cornerstone of modern system design.
However, there is a disconnect between the different tooling used to design, implement and reason about these protocols and their implementations.
Session Types are a typing discipline that help resolve this difference by allowing protocol specifications to be used during type-checking to ensure that implementations adhere to a given specification.
Idris is a general purpose programming language that supports full-dependent types, providing programmers with the ability to reason more precisely about programs.
This talk introduces =Sessions=, our implementation of Session Types in Idris, and demonstrates =Sessions= ability to design and realise several common protocols.
=Sessions= improves upon existing Session Type implementations by introducing value dependencies between messages and fine-grained channel management during protocol design and implementation.
We also use Idris’ support for EDSL construction to allow for protocols to be designed and reasoned about in the same language as their implementation.
Thereby allowing for an intrinsic bond to be introduced between a protocol’s implementation and specification, and also with its verification.
Using =Sessions=, we can reduce the existing disconnect between the tooling used for protocol design, implementation, and verification.
Event details
- When: 23rd February 2017 13:00 - 15:00
- Where: Cole 1.33b
- Format: Colloquium, Seminar, Talk
EPSRC Grant Success: A Constraint Modelling Pipeline
Congratulations to colleagues Professor Ian Miguel, Dr Chris Jefferson, Dr Tom Kelsey, Professor Ian Gent and Dr Peter Nightingale, who have secured an impressive EPSRC grant A constraint Modelling Pipeline, with NHS and SME project partners. The three and a half year grant, officially announced yesterday, aims to advance the state of the art in solving complex combinatorial search problems ubiquitous in many settings, such as planning, scheduling or design. Specifically, the aim is to produce a powerful, general automated modelling and solving system unique in targeting a range of powerful solving formalisms from a single abstract problem specification. The research will impact across the public and private sectors, and academia.
Read more about the grant application through EPSRC reference:EP/P015638/1
SACHI Seminar – The Collaborative Design of Tangible Interactions in Museums
Title: The Collaborative Design of Tangible Interactions in Museums
Abstract: Interactive technology for cultural heritage has long been a subject of study for Human-Computer Interaction. Findings from a number of studies suggest that, however, technology can sometime distance visitors from heritage holdings rather than enabling people to establish deeper connections to what they see. Furthermore, the introduction of innovative interactive installations in museum is often seen as an interesting novelty but seldom leads to substantive change in how a museum approaches visitor engagement. This talk will discuss work on the EU project “meSch” (Material EncounterS with Digital Cultural Heritage) aimed at creating a do-it-yourself platform for cultural heritage professionals to design interactive tangible computing installations that bridge the gap between digital content and the materiality of museum objects and exhibits. The project has adopted a collaborative design approach throughout, involving cultural heritage professionals, designers, developers and social scientist. The talk will feature key examples of how collaboration unfolded and relevant lessons learned, particularly regarding the shared envisioning of tangible interaction concepts at a variety of heritage sites including archaeology and art museums, hands-on exploration centres and outdoor historical sites.
Biography: Dr. Luigina Ciolfi is Reader in Communication at Sheffield Hallam University. She holds a Laurea (Univ. of Siena, Italy) and a PhD (Univ. of Limerick, Ireland) in Human-Computer Interaction. Her research focuses on understanding and designing for human situated practices mediated by technology in both work and leisure settings, particularly focusing on participation and collaboration in design. She has worked on numerous international research projects on heritage technologies, nomadic work and interaction in public spaces. She is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed publications, has been an invited speaker in ten countries, and has advised on research policy around digital technologies and cultural heritage for several European countries. Dr. Ciolfi serves in a number of scientific committees for international conferences and journals, including ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, ACM GROUP, ECSCW, COOP and the CSCW Journal. She is a member of the EUSSET (The European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies) and of the ACM CSCW Steering Groups. Dr. Ciolfi is a senior member of the ACM. Full information on her work can be found at http://luiginaciolfi.com
Event details
- When: 31st January 2017 14:00 - 15:00
- Where: Cole 1.33a
- Format: Seminar
Infection Group Journal Club
Michael Pitcher will be presenting to the School of Medicine’s Infection Group next Thursday. The talk will be a Journal Club meeting, where he will be discussing the following article from the Lancet Infectious Diseases:
The Personal View piece discusses the need for a new interpretation of the life cycle of Tuberculosis with reference to both the timescales of infection and the localisation within the lung of varying stages of the infection.
The meeting is at 10:00am Thursday 26th January in Seminar Room 1, School of Medicine.
Graduation November 2016
Congratulations to the Masters Class of 2016, and PhD students Dr Vinodh Sampath and Dr Oche Ejembi, who graduated last month. Each year, students are invited to a reception in Computer Science to celebrate their achievement and reflect on their time in the School, with staff and guests.
Our graduates have moved on to a wide variety of interesting and challenging employment and further study opportunities, and we wish them all well with their future careers.
Seminar: Jacob Howe on Propagation and Reification
Jacob Howe, Senior Lecturer at City University London, and sabbatical visitor, will be giving a seminar to the AI Research Group at 2pm on Thursday 15th December in JC 1.33a.
The title and abstract are:
Propagation and Reification: SAT and SMT in Prolog
This talk will describe how a watched literal DPLL based Satisfiability (SAT)
solver can be succinctly coded in 20 lines of Prolog. The extension of
this solver to an Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver will be discussed with a particular focus on
the case where the theory is that of rational-tree constraints, and its
application in a reverse engineering problem.
Event details
- When: 15th December 2016 14:00 - 15:00
- Where: Cole 1.33a
- Format: Seminar
Talk: Using cost models of algorithmic skeletons
Abstract:
The increasing importance of parallelism has motivated the creation of better abstractions for writing parallel software, including structured parallelism using nested algorithmic skeletons. Such approaches provide high-level abstractions that avoid common problems, such as race conditions, and often allow strong cost models to be defined. However, choosing a combination of algorithmic skeletons that yields good parallel speedups for a program on some specific parallel architecture remains a difficult task. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to simultaneously reason both about the costs of different parallel structures and about the semantic equivalences between them. This paper presents a new type-based mechanism that enables strong static reasoning about these properties. We exploit well-known properties of a very general recursion pattern, hylomorphisms, and give a denotational semantics for structured parallel processes in terms of these hylomorphisms. Using our approach, it is possible to determine formally whether it is possible to introduce a desired parallel structure into a program without altering its functional behaviour, and also to choose a version of that parallel structure that minimises some given cost model.
Event details
- When: 13th December 2016 16:00 - 17:00
- Where: Honey 103 - GFB
- Format: Talk
Alexander Konovalov: Certified Software and Data Carpentry Instructor
Congratulations to Alexander Konovalov who has just completed the instructor training course and subsequent assignments and is now certified to teach Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry workshops.
Software Carpentry is a volunteer organisation whose goal is to make scientists more productive, and their work more reliable, by teaching them basic computing skills. Its sibling organisation is DataCarpentry, which focuses on data analysis skills rather than programming skills. Their volunteer instructors run hundreds of events for thousands of scientists. Alexander has been teaching at several workshops, and is very enthusiastic about organising more!
