Congratulations to Dr David Harris-Birtill, who was announced the winner of the Converge Challenge KickStart award at a ceremony in Edinburgh yesterday. The converge challenge competition rewards an early-stage idea or a new product. David won a cash injection prize of £3,000 to kick-start Beyond Medics – Automated Remote Pulse Oximetry, a camera based system that remotely measures patients’ vital signs.
Come along and learn about Google and some of the engineering challenges they are tackling. The event will include talks from our very own CS alumni and mock interview opportunities, which are a great way to get feedback on your interview technique, from real Google Engineers. Pizza and drinks provided.
Date and Time: Wednesday 28th September
Venue: Jack Cole room 1.33ab
Event sign up link: goo.gl/1EtfGj
Schedule:
Engineering at Google – 4 – 5.30pm – Presentations from four St Andrews CS alumni working at Google. Q&A session – An opportunity to chat with alumni presenters, and Google interns who are current studying at St Andrews.
Mock interview sessions – 7 – 9pm – Interested people should sign up using the link above.
Title: Argument Technology and Argument Mining
Chris Reed, Centre for Argument Technology, University of Dundee – http://arg.tech
Abstract: Argument Technology is that part of the overlap between theories of argumentation and reasoning and those of AI where an engineering focus leads to applications and tools that are deployed. One significant step in the past decade has been the development of the Argument Web — the idea that many of these tools can interact using common infrastructure, with benefits to academic, commercial and public user groups. More recently, there has been a move towards linguistic aspects of argument, with NLP techniques facilitating the development of the field of Argument Mining. Drawing on the academic success and commercial uptake of techniques such as opinion mining and sentiment analysis, argument mining seeks to build on systems which use data mining to summarise *what* people think by explaining also *why* they hold the opinions they do.
Biography: Chris Reed is Professor of Computer Science and Philosophy at the University of Dundee in Scotland, where he heads the Centre for Argument Technology. Chris has been working at the overlap between argumentation theory and artificial intelligence for over twenty years, has won over £5.6m of funding from RCUK, government and commercial sources and has over 150 peer-reviewed papers in the area including five books. He has also been instrumental in the development of the Argument Interchange Format, an international standard for computational work in the area; he is spear-heading the major engineering effort behind the Argument Web; and he was a founding editor of the Journal of Argument & Computation.
Title: Touching the future with Matt Jones
Abstract: Discover the future of screen technology with computer scientist Matt Jones. Hear how his team are exploring displays that mutate to create textures and change shape to reveal controls like dials and switches depending on our needs. See some of the early prototypes that are connecting our digital interactions to the physical world.
Biography: Matt Jones is Head of Science at Swansea University. He is a multidisciplinary Computer Scientist who has worked on mobile interaction design for the past 20 years. He is a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder for his work on mobile systems for resource cobstrained communities around the world. More at www.undofuture.com
Details to follow.
Professor Sanjay Jha, Director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Laboratory (Cyspri) at UNSW.
The first part of this talk will discuss how the community is converging towards the IoT vision having worked in wireless sensor networking and Machine-2-Machine (M2M) communication. This will follow a general discussion of security challenges in IoT.
Finally I will discuss some results from an ongoing projects on security of bodywork devices and IoT. Wireless bodyworn sensing devices are becoming popular for fitness, sports training and personalized healthcare applications. Securing the data generated by these devices is essential if they are to be integrated into the current health infrastructure and employed in medical applications. In this talk, I will discuss a mechanism to secure data provenance and location proof for these devices by exploiting symmetric spatio-temporal characteristics of the wireless link between two communicating parties. Our solution enables both parties to generate closely matching `link’ fingerprints, which uniquely associate a data session with a wireless link such that a third party, at a later date, can verify the links the data was communicated on. These fingerprints are very hard for an eavesdropper to forge, lightweight compared to traditional provenance mechanisms, and allow for interesting security properties such as accountability and non-repudiation. I will present our solution with experiments using bodyworn devices in scenarios approximating actual device deployment. I will also touch upon other research on secure reprogramming of IoT devices over wireless networks.
The School of Computer Science welcomes Frankie Garcia from Keysight Technologies, Edinburgh. 
Abstract: Over the last two decades we have witnessed an unprecedented growth in the number of Internet-connected devices via the Cloud (storage, compute and intelligent analytics) generally referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT). This includes both machine-to-machine (M2M) and machine-to-person communications on a massive scale. While this growth has been fuelled through standardisation and engineering of short range wireless systems such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Zigbee, cellular technologies promise wide area coverage, ease of deployment and low-cost/low-energy devices capable of operating for many years on a small battery. However, IoT technologies based on existing cellular systems are not optimized to support the huge number of simultaneous connections needed for widespread adoption. To achieve this, radical changes are required in protocol layer design, radio access techniques, and future integrated platforms that can scale and handle millions of devices efficiently. These devices will themselves exhibit a diverse set of requirements with respect to reliability, latency and availability. For these reasons, Cellular IoT has become one of the most important use case drivers in the evolution of future 5G technologies and architectures.
In this talk we will briefly introduce the audience to existing cellular standards and systems to support IoT communications, including their strengths and limitations. We will then cover the path towards more efficient cellular technologies being developed today under 3GPP, focusing heavily on Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). This will be followed by a short introduction to 5G mobile network evolution needed to reduce signalling overheads and cater for a diversity of IoT use cases. This evolution is driven by tried and tested technologies used for virtualisation such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV). “Slicing”, is a much discussed design principle that that includes logical access, compute, storage and networking for on demand architectures tailored to individual service requirements. Finally, we will present the development of an agile SDR platform targeting experimentation and prototyping of NBIoT systems.
Bio: Educated at Lancaster University, Frankie Garcia is currently Master Scientist with Keysight Technologies in Edinburgh. In addition he is project scientist with Agilent Technologies and over the last two years he has been working on adaptive radio technologies focusing on test and measurements tools and validation tools for the complex interactions that take place between the PHY and MAC layer of such adaptive radios. In particular his focus has been on Mobile WiMAX and presently on LTE.
His experience, based on academic and industrial research labs settings is quite broad raging from distributed systems, protocol engineering, high speed communications, multimedia systems, wireless sensor networks, adaptive radio and QoS.
He is a Visiting Professor at Strathclyde University, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering.
On August 27th, Alex Voss will be participating in the Great Scottish Swim 2016. Alex is swimming in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support, a charity that supports people affected by cancer to ensure no one faces cancer alone.
Alex was part of the CS swim team who completed the challenge last year.
Visit his JustGiving page and reward his hard work and support a great charity.
Congratulations to Vinodh Rajan Sampath, who successfully defended his thesis today. He is pictured below with supervisor Dr Mark-Jan Nederhof, research student Juan Mendoza Santana and internal examiner Dr Tom Kelsey. Dr Peter Stokes from King’s College London, acted as external examiner.
Congratulations to Dr Miguel Nacenta and Michael Mauderer on the success of Deepview and its subsequent application Gazer, an open source tool that provides functionality for showcasing light field images using gaze-contingent focus. The software, developed by SACHI, works in conjunction with eye tracking devices to allow photographers using light field cameras to discern images by automatically concentrating on objects using just their eyes.
Results from the project have been widely disseminated in the media and featured on a BBC click episode (20.56)
For more information and downloads visit the Gazer project section or github repository.
The project was funded through the European Union’s Marie Curie Program (CIG – 303780).
