Multi-modal Indoor Positioning: Trends and Challenges by Prof. Niki Trigoni, Oxford University

Abstract:

GPS has enabled a number of location based services outdoors, but the problem of localisation remains open in GPS-denied environments, such as indoors and underground. In this talk, I will discuss the key challenges to accurate and robust position estimation, and will describe a variety of sensor modalities and algorithms developed at Oxford to address this problem.

The talk will cover inertial, radio-based and vision-based localisation approaches and their advantages and disadvantages in different settings.

 

Short Bio:

Niki Trigoni is a Professor at the Oxford University Department of Computer Science and a fellow of Kellogg College. She obtained her PhD at the University of Cambridge (2001), became a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University (2002-2004), and a Lecturer at Birkbeck College (2004-2007). Since she moved to Oxford in 2007, she established the Sensor Networks Group, and has conducted research in communication, localization and in-network processing algorithms for sensor networks. Her recent and ongoing projects span a wide variety of sensor networks applications, including indoor/underground localization, wildlife sensing, road traffic monitoring, autonomous (aerial and ground) vehicles, and sensor networks for industrial processes.

Event details

  • When: 8th November 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Quicker Sort by Dietmar Kühl, Bloomberg L.P.

 

Abstract:

Quicksort is a well-known sorting algorithm used to implement sort functionality in many libraries. The presentation isn’t really about the algorithm itself but rather about how to actually create an efficient implementation of the algorithm: a text-book implementation of the algorithm actually is not that quick (even if the pivot is chosen cleverly). It takes paying some attention to detail to improve the implementation significantly. This presentation starts with a simple implementation and makes incremental improvements to eventually yield a proper generic and fast sorting function. All code will be in C++ but it should be possible to follow the majority of the reasoning with knowledge of another programming language.

 

Short Bio:

Dietmar Kühl is a senior software developer at Bloomberg L.P. working on the data distribution environment used both internally and by enterprise installations at clients. Before joining Bloomberg he has done mainly consulting for software projects in the finance area. He is a regular attendee of the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee, presents at conferences, and he used to be a moderator of the newsgroup comp.lang.c++.moderated. He frequently answers questions on Stackoverflow.

Event details

  • When: 25th October 2016 14:30 - 15:30
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Running Before We have Evolved Legs: The Gap Between Theory and Practice in Evolutionary Algorithms by Prof. John McCall

Abstract:

Evolutionary algorithms (EA) has developed as an academic discipline since the 1960s. The subject has spawned major subfields such as swarm intelligence and genetic programming and is applied to a wide variety of practical real world problems in science medicine and engineering. EAs are often the only practical method of solving large combinatorial optimisation problems and have achieved best-known results on a variety of benchmark problems. The global academic EA community is highly active, supporting several large international conferences and high-quality international journals. Despite this activity, sustained over decades, the community has struggled to make significant progress on developing a satisfactory theory of EAs. At the same time, substantial progress has been made on developing more sophisticated EAs that are ever more powerful but ever less amenable to theoretical study. In this talk I will outline some of the main approaches to a theory of EAs and illustrate the gap between those EAs that can be theoretically analysed by those approaches and EAs that are being used in practice. I will conclude with some interesting current developments and key open questions.

 

Short Bio:

John McCall is a Professor of Computing Science at Robert Gordon University.  He works in the Computational Intelligence research group, which he founded in 2003. He has over twenty years research experience in naturally-inspired computing.  His research focuses on the study and analysis of a range of naturally-inspired optimization algorithms (genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimisation, ant colony optimisation, estimation of distribution algorithms etc.) and their application to difficult learning and optimisation problems, particularly real-world problems arising in complex engineering and medical / biological systems. Application areas of this research include medical decision support, data modeling of drilling operations, analysis of biological sequences, staff rostering and scheduling, industrial process optimization and bio-control. He has over 90 publications in books, journals and conferences. He has successfully supervised 13 PhD students and has examined over 15 PhD theses.

Event details

  • When: 11th October 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Welcome to new PhD students

We are delighted to introduce three female PhD students funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council.

Xue Guo (JC1.06)
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“I am Xue Guo, a returning student from Beijing. My PhD research into Complex Networks is supervised by Prof. Simon Dobson. Last seven years, I hopped over five places: four undergraduate years in BUPT and UCSD, one master year in St Andrews, and two gap years – one in Phoenix TV as a technology journalist, and one in Skyscanner as a software engineer. A three-to-four-year research in one town seems quite a LONG journey for me, but I am sure it will NOT be a LONGLY one in this warm academic community of School of Computer Science. My current research interest is modelling real world phenomena using complex networks, esp. smart city design. Born in Beijing, a city with a population of over 20 million, I have experienced most urban problems that a metropolis can suffer from. I would like to design a research tool for the city designers to generate solutions to traffic congestion and give advice on city infrastructure distribution. I am looking forward to learning from you and exploring more applications of complex networks. In my free time, I enjoy fencing, snowboarding, calligraphy and music.”

Yanbei Chen (JC1.19)
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“From 2011 to 2014, I was studying in Zhejiang University in China, with a speciality in Automation. In 2014, I started my master program in KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, with a major in System, Control and Robotics. In the summer of 2015, I enrolled in Tohoku University Engineering Summer Program in Japan. In the first half of 2016, I conducted my master thesis in the field of machine learning, deep learning and multimodal learning under the supervision of Dr. Atsuto Maki in Computer Vision and Active Perception Lab in KTH.Currently, with the scholarship from China Scholarship Council and University of St Andrews, I will start my PhD study under the supervision of Dr. Juan Ye. My research interests lie in the fields of activity recognition, machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. From now on, my research will focus on activity recognition based on sensor data from smartphone. In my leisure time, I enjoy music, travel, reading, and jogging.”

Sidi Zhan (JC1.11)
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“Hi, I am Sidi Zhan! I completed my BEng in Computer Science at Beijing Foreign Studies University, focusing on recommending doctors to patients in online healthcare QA community. I am now working as a PhD student in Computer Science under the supervision of Dr. Tristan Henderson and Dr. Juan Ye. My proposed research is to enhance peers mutual help and promote their social support in online healthcare community by using recommender to match-make the patient users. My research project will include collecting and analyzing users’ profiles and records data, so policies on user privacy protection will also be examined. I enjoy studying and living in St Andrews, the beautiful coastal city, very much. I am so willing to combine my hobbies with the life here by experiencing local culture, like jogging along the East Sands, singing in a chorus and going Ceilidh dances.”

David Harris-Birtill: Converge Challenge Winner 2016

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.

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Google @ St Andrews – 28th September

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

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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.

SACHI Seminar: Professor Chris Reed – Argument Technology and Argument Mining

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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.

Event details

  • When: 6th October 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Purdie Theatre D
  • Format: Seminar

SACHI Seminar: Touching the future with Matt Jones

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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

Event details

  • When: 16th September 2016 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: A Changing Landscape: Securing The Internet Of Things (IoT)

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.

Event details

  • When: 8th September 2016 12:30 - 13:30
  • Where: Honey 103 - GFB
  • Format: Seminar