Aleksejs Sazonovs: Undergraduate Awards Success

Congratulations to our recent graduate Aleksejs Sazonovs who accomplished overall winner in the 2015 Undergraduate Awards for Computer Science yesterday. His Winning Paper: ‘A Metapopulation Model for Predicting the Success of Genetic Control Measures for Malaria’ supervised by Prof. Simon Dobson and Prof. Oscar Gaggiotti, was assessed by panels of international academics and will be published in The Undergraduate Awards Academic Journal. Overall winners are invited to the UA Global Summit, a four-day networking and brainstorming event which brings the world’s top students together for a series of inspirational lectures, workshops and discussions. We look forward to hearing more about the event from Aleksejs in November. Read more about the project in our highly commended post.

Aleksejs pictured at June Graduation

Aleksejs pictured at June Graduation

Computer Science 2015: Orientation and Welcome

After a busy week of induction and module talks, staff and students are pictured during orientation and welcome receptions. Undergraduate students were invited to a gaming session followed by pizza. It’s always rewarding to see so many students and staff welcoming our new 1st year students. Thanks to School president, Maria Kustikova for overseeing events.

Undergraduate gaming and pizza during orientation

Undergraduate gaming and pizza during orientation

Welcome receptions last Wednesday and Thursday evening for our MSc and Honours students, also proved popular and highlight the outstanding student community within the School.

MSc reception September 2015

MSc reception September 2015

Honours welcome reception 2015

Honours welcome reception 2015

Dr Roy Dyckhoff, Hon. Senior Lecturer: ‘Coherentisation of first-order logic’

The School of Computer Science is delighted to announce that honorable lecturer Dr Roy Dyckhoff is an invited speaker at the conference on Automated Reasoning with Analytic Tableaux and Related Methods, in Wrocław (Poland) from 20–24 September.

roy

Abstract: This talk explores the relationship between coherent (aka “geometric”) logic and first-order logic (FOL), with special reference to the coherence/geometricity required of accessibility conditions in Negri’s work on modal logic (and our joint work with her on intermediate logic). It has been known to some since the 1970s that every first-order theory has a coherent conservative extension, and weaker versions of this result have been used in association with the automation of coherent logic; but, it is hard to find the result in the literature. We discuss various proofs of the result, and present a coherentisation algorithm with the desirable property of being idempotent.

Please see: http://tableaux2015.ii.uni.wroc.pl/index.html for further details

Event details

  • When: 20th September 2015 10:00 - 24th September 2015 17:00
  • Format: Conference, Talk

Inaugural Lecture: ‘Constraint Satisfaction and the Crystal Maze’ by Professor Ian Miguel

The School of Computer Science is delighted to announce the Inaugural Lecture of Professor Ian Miguel.

maxresdefault

Title: ‘Constraint Satisfaction and the Crystal Maze’

Abstract: In numerous contexts today we are faced with making decisions of increasing size and complexity, where many different considerations interlock in complex ways. Consider, for example, a staff rostering problem to assign staff to shifts while respecting required shift patterns and staffing levels, physical and staff resources, and staff working preferences. The decision-making process is often further complicated by the need also to optimise an objective, such as to maximise profit or to minimise waste. In this talk I will introduce the field of Constraint Programming, which offers a means of solving such problems automatically. Using an illustrative example from the annals of the Crystal Maze, a popular TV game show from the 1990s, I will explore the process of modelling and solving problems with constraints and discuss some of the most significant challenges in the field.

The lecture will be held at School III, St Salvator’s Quadrangle

and there will be a reception afterwards, in Lower College Hall.

 

Event details

  • When: 23rd September 2015 17:15 - 18:30
  • Where: St Andrews
  • Format: Lecture

Lockheed Martin Award

Congratulations to our recent graduate Sam Elliott, who has won the Lockheed Martin Award SIS-0518for  Best Engineered Project at the Young Software Engineer awards.

The Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards are given for the best undergraduate software projects drawn from across all students studying computer science and software engineering in Scotland.

SIS-0502

Sam’s project, “A Concurrency System for Idris and Erlang”, takes an important step towards addressing the problem of writing large scale software, coordinated across several concurrently running machines, possibly distributed throughout the world. Writing such software is notoriously difficult because not only  do programmers need to think about the progress of a an individual task, they also need to think about how data is communicated between each task.

 

sam_award

 

The project combines Idris, a new programming language developed at the University of St Andrews, with Erlang, a programming language specifically designed for building robust distributed systems, and contributes a new system for running concurrent programs, with guaranteed behaviour, in a robust, industrial strength concurrent environment.

 

Seminar: ‘How to deliver Software Projects and be a Brilliant Software Developer’ by Howard Simms (Apadmi)

Abstract:

This talk will cover a wide range of issues in the practical aspects of delivering software projects, including cohesion and coupling, design patterns, software engineering models, and native vs. hybrid apps. The second part will give an overview of the desirable and undesirable attributes of software developers and how to make your career future proof.

Howard Simms

 

Bio:

 

With more than 15 years’ experience working in the mobile industry, creating technology solutions, building brilliant teams, and delivering continual growth, Howard’s journey at the forefront of one of the world’s most dynamic and exciting technology booms has been exhilarating.

 

 

About Apadmi:

Apadmi is now the UK’s leading mobile software development company, working with organisations such as the NHS and the BBC, as well as a range of business including Lexus and Skyscanner. The business has also spun out technology companies in several different areas, including Market Research, Retail, Loyalty schemes within football and the Internet of Things.
Apadmi has now launched Apadmi Ventures, a formalisation of their spinout business model that is bringing their technical excellence, experience and significant investment capacity to all business sectors.

Event details

  • When: 3rd November 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: ‘Trading Programs – How the Finance industry has become so complex that today’s products are similar to programs’ by Joel Bjornson

Abstract:

In this presentation, we’ll explore the ways in which Bloomberg uses functional programming to solve financial problems. In particular, we’ll focus on the challenges involved in the development of the Bloomberg Derivatives Library – an application for structuring and pricing financial contracts.

Bio:

Joel Bjornson is a developer at the Bloomberg Derivatives Library team, specializing in the usage of OCaml for modelling financial contracts. Joel has been interested in functional programming since discovering Haskell at an introductory programming course in university.

 

Event details

  • When: 20th October 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: ‘Formalizing Garbage: Mathematical Models of Memory Management’ by Jeremy Singer

Abstract:

Garbage collection is no longer an esoteric research interest. Mainstream programming languages like Java and C# rely on high-performance memory managed run time systems. In this talk, I will motivate the need for rigorous models of memory management to enable more powerful analysis and optimization techniques. I will draw on a diverse range of topics including thermodynamics, economics, machine learning and control theory.

Bio:

Jeremy Singer is a lecturer at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Scotland. He has research interests in programming languages,compilation, run time code optimization and memory management. Singer received his PhD from Cambridge in 2006. Website:http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jsinger

 

Event details

  • When: 6th October 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk

Seminar: ‘Disrupting trillion dollar industries using low power wireless sensor networks’ by Raphael Scheps and Gideon Farrell

Abstract:
Some of the world’s most important industries are intrinsically grounded in the physical world, yet their interaction with it is still almost completely manual. Converge is a young startup, forged in the fires of Entrepreneurs First, that is building wireless, distributed sensor networks to revolutionise how these industries operate. We (Raph and Gideon, founders) will talk about our tech (and what makes it a fun challenge to build), the difficulties of working in enormous and complex industries and our first 10 months as a company.

Bio:
Gideon and Raphael co-founded Converge to deal with the huge amounts of data that will be produced by connected devices. Two Physicists from Cambridge, they are obsessed with instrumenting the world with connected sensors to drive a smarter physical environment. Gideon read Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, and obtained his M.Sci with a thesis on Solar Jets. He has been writing software for over 10 years, working for companies such as Primary Energy Research and Softeam Cadextan. He worked on the first generation of IoT connected sensors at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (The WISP project) in 2009. Raphael read Theoretical Physics, obtaining an M.Math with a thesis on String Theory and Quantum Gravity. He has worked on high speed interconnect within the hardware engineering team at Mellanox as well as the experimental astrophysics team at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He was Vice President at Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, the oldest student entrepreneurship society in Europe. They both met at Cambridge five years ago and started Converge in 2014.

This seminar is part of our ongoing school series. To see all our upcoming seminar follow this link: here.

Event details

  • When: 22nd September 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar: ‘Measuring Personalization of Online Services’ by Alan Mislove

The School of Computer Science is delighted to welcome Alan Mislove from Northeastern University Boston to give his talk on ‘Measuring Personalization of Online Services

Abstract: Today, many web services personalize their content, including Netflix (movie recommendations), Amazon (product suggestions), and Yelp (business reviews). In many cases, personalization provides advantages for users: for example, when a user searches for an ambiguous query such as “router,” Amazon may be able to suggest the woodworking tool instead of the networking device. However, personalization is rarely transparent (or even labeled), and has the potential be used to the user’s disadvantage. For example, on e-commerce sites, personalization could be used to manipulate the set of products shown (price steering) or by customizing the prices of products (price discrimination). Unfortunately, today, we lack the tools and techniques necessary to be able to detect when personalization is occurring, as well as what inputs are used to perform personalization.

In this talk, I discuss my group’s recent work that aims to address this problem. First, we develop a methodology for accurately measuring when web services are personalizing their content. While conceptually simple, there are numerous details that our methodology must handle in order to accurately attribute differences in results to personalization (as opposed to other sources of noise). Second, we apply this methodology to two domains: Web search services (e.g., Google, Bing) and e-commerce sites (e.g., BestBuy.com, Expedia). We find evidence of personalization for real users on both Google search and nine of the popular e-commerce sites. Third, using fake accounts, we investigate the effect of user attributes and behaviors on personalization; we find that the choice of browser, logging in, and a user’s previously content can significantly affect the results presented.

Bio: Alan Mislove is an Associate Professor at the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. He received his Ph.D. from Rice University in 2009. Prof. Mislove’s research concerns distributed systems and networks, with a focus on using social networks to enhance the security, privacy, and efficiency of newly emerging systems. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award (2011), and his work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the CBS Evening News.

This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

Event details

  • When: 13th October 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar