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.”

MacMillan Coffee Morning

The yearly World’s Biggest Coffee Morning for MacMillan cancer support is on Friday 30th September.

Staff and students are invited to donate cakes, biscuits or home produce for sale on Friday morning from 10.45am in the JCB coffee area. Everyone is invited to bake, cook or donate either national delicacies or just something you want to share. In previous years we have also had home made jam and home grown fruit and vegetables for sale. For some recipe ideas see http://coffee.macmillan.org.uk/ideas/baking-recipes/

Donations for a raffle are also welcome (to Ishbel or the School Office).

The MacMillan coffee morning raises money for nurses and counsellors to support cancer patients and their families. At home or hospice terminal and support care nursing costs £28 per hour and a counsellor costs £15 per hour.

Event details

  • When: 30th September 2016 10:45 - 16:30
  • Where: Cole Coffee Area

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

School Seminar: “The path to Cellular IoT and the promise of 5G” by Frankie Garcia

The School of Computer Science welcomes Frankie Garcia from Keysight Technologies, Edinburgh. Frankie Garcia

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.

Event details

  • When: 27th September 2016 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Alex Voss: Great Scottish Swim for Macmillan

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.

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Visit his JustGiving page and reward his hard work and support a great charity.