June 22nd: Internet at 100 Symposium with Dr Vint Cerf

On Monday June 22nd we are organising a one day symposium entitled “The Internet at 100”. This event features a host of distinguished speakers and culminates with a talk by Dr Cerf, one of the “fathers of the internet” and now vice-president and chief internet evangelist at Google.

Internet at 100

The Internet is, of course, not 100 years old. It’s not even quite 50 years old but the talks at this event will look at its history, its current state and forward to what it might look like at 100. We are looking forward to a day of inspiring talks, time to network and socialise but also time to look back while we consider what might be for the Internet.

The full website for this event can be found here: http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/i@100/

Event details

  • When: 22nd June 2015 09:45 - 20:45
  • Where: N Haugh, St Andrews
  • Format: Symposium

End of Semester Round up

We have reached the end of semester 2 and so many events, activities and accomplishments have taken place, it’s worth reflecting on all the hard work and enthusiasm demonstrated by our talented students.

As stated previously the School is rated highly for student satisfaction, which echoes the continued strong student staff community cultivated by all.

The events and locations pictured below help to highlight why studying Computer Science at St Andrews is such an amazing experience.

Clockwise from top left: Senior Honours demonstrate their final year projects. Junior Honours attempt world domination. PhD students present their posters.

Clockwise from top left: Senior Honours demonstrate their final year projects. Junior Honours attempt world domination. PhD students present their posters.

Computer Science students organise a hugely successful StacsHack.

Computer Science students organise a hugely successful StacsHack.

A bumper crop of PhD students advance towards graduation.

A bumper crop of PhD students advance towards graduation.

The CompSci garden continues to flourish with a little help from the Transitions team.

The CompSci garden continues to flourish with a little help from the Transitions team.

Clockwise from top left: The May Dip, Torchlit procession, Christmas ceilidh, stunning St Andrews.

Clockwise from top left: The May Dip, Torchlit procession, Christmas ceilidh and stunning St Andrews.

Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series. Prof. Mothy Roscoe pictured at the Byre Theatre and Prof. Luca Cardelli pictured in Lower College Hall.

Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series: Prof. Mothy Roscoe pictured at the Byre Theatre and Prof. Luca Cardelli pictured in Lower College Hall.

Images courtesy of Lisa Dow, Xu Zhu, Fearn Bishop, Saleem Bhatti and Simone Conte,

PhD Studentship: Reasoning about Racy Programs under Relaxed Consistency

A PhD studentship on “Reasoning about Racy Programs under Relaxed Consistency” is available in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, funded by Microsoft Research and EPSRC.

The project will involve developing reasoning principles and tools for relaxed memory consistency settings. This is a key problem in shared-memory concurrency at the low-level, whether in C or C++, or even higher-level languages such as Java.

The project will be supervised by Dr Susmit Sarkar at the University of St Andrews. Dr Jade Alglave of Microsoft Research Cambridge will be the Microsoft supervisor. During the course of their PhD, Scholars are invited to Microsoft Research in Cambridge for an annual Summer School, and there is also a possibility of paid internships during studies. The studentship is fully funded to pay fees and stipend for students with a relevant connection to the UK.

Applicants are expected to have or expect to obtain a UK first-class Honours or Masters degree (or its equivalent from non-UK institutions) in Computer Science, but the minimum standard we require is an upper second-class Honours degree or equivalent. Some experience in concurrent and/or functional programming and an aptitude for mathematical subjects are required. Knowledge and experience of one or more of formal verification, mechanised proofs, and programming languages is highly desirable.

For further information on how to apply, see our postgraduate web pages. Ideally the student will start in October 2015, or as soon as possible thereafter. Further details on the project and suggested reading is available from Dr Susmit Sarkar.

School Seminar: Efficient Privacy Preserving Data Mining via Secure Computation by Dr Changyu Dong

The School of Computer Science welcomes the opportunity to hear from Dr Changyu Dong, from the Department of Computer and Information Sciences University of Strathclyde, who will be delivering his talk on ‘Efficient Privacy Preserving Data Mining via Secure Computation’. Chanyu Dong

Abstract: Loosely speaking, secure computation allows parties to compute a function jointly while keeping their inputs private. Participants of secure computation learns only the output of the function, but nothing about the others’ private inputs. An oblivious application of secure computation is privacy preserving data mining. Imagine a scenario in which Amazon and Facebook want to find correlations between their users’ activities. With current technology, this cannot happen because none of the companies is willing to disclose its own data to the other. Secure computation can remove this barrier because data remains private during  and after the computation. In the past, secure computation is considered to be only theoretical because of its inefficiency. Recently much effort has been made to make secure computation practical. In this talk, I will present some recent advancements in this area. I will first introduce Private Set Intersection (PSI), an important secure computation primitive, and how it can be realised efficiently. I will show how PSI can be applied to linking record in databases (private record linkage) and finding association rules. I will then show how fully homomorphic encryption, an emerging cryptographic technology, can be used in building efficient secure computation protocols, and in turn be used for privacy preserving data mining.

Bio: Changyu Dong is a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Computing at Imperial College London in 2009. His research is in cyber security, specifically in applied cryptography. Since 2006, He has published 27 research papers in major journals and international conferences, including the most prestigious venues in security such as ACM CCS, ESORICS and Journal of Computer Security. He has served on and chaired program committees for many conferences and workshops, and is a regular invited reviewer for top international journals including Journal of Computer Security, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing and IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. Shortly after moving to Strathclyde in 2011, he started his research on efficient secure computation. This research direction has led to some breakthroughs in secure computing for Private Set Intersection and Private Information Retrieval protocols, which he applied in domains such as data mining.

Event details

  • When: 1st July 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Codebase Open day

CodeBase Open Day

Friday 5 June 2015 – Friday 5 June 2015
13:00 – 16:00
Edinburgh

The CodeBase Open Day gives a chance for students, professionals and would-be developers and designers to learn more about amazing companies housed within the UK’s largest technology incubator.

It’s a chance to roam our corridors and drop in on companies for an informal chat and find out more about what they do .

Come and learn more about the 60 startups based within the building and explore what the startup scene has to offer. There will also be series of drop-in talks so those who attend get the opportunity to hear, first hand, what it’s like to work for some of the most exciting and interesting tech companies in Edinburgh.

Further details and ticket information: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/codebase-open-day-tickets-16594864687

Event details

  • When: 5th June 2015 13:00 - 16:00

June 2nd, Seminar by John Stasko: “New Approaches for Information Visualization: Rethinking Existing Notions”

The School of Computer Science welcomes the opportunity to hear from Professor John Stasko of Georgia Tech,who will be delivering his talk on “New Approaches for Information Visualization: Rethinking Existing Notions” remotely. John Stasko

Abstract:
As the field of information visualization matures, researchers are able to reflect on, and perhaps even question,     some long-accepted notions from the area. In this talk, I focus on three such notions:
* Representing network data through force-directed node-link diagrams
* Focusing on visual representation first and foremost
* Evaluating visualizations through user studies and experiments
Although these ideas clearly have value as evidenced by their acceptance and longevity, I have begun to question      the wisdom of each. In this talk I’ll explain my concerns about these notions and I’ll suggest a new, alternative approach to each as well.       To support these arguments, I will describe a number of research projects from my lab that illustrate and exemplify the new approach.

Bio:
John received the B.S. degree in Mathematics at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (1983) and Sc.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (1985 and 1989). He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1989, and he is presently a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing. His primary research area is human-computer interaction, with a focus on information visualization and visual analytics. John is a senior member of the ACM and IEEE. He was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2011 and an IEEE Fellow in 2014. He also received the 2012 IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award. In 2013 John served as General Chair of the IEEE VIS conferences in Atlanta, and he was named an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

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

 

Event details

  • When: 2nd June 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Scottish Programing Languages Seminar

The School of Computer Science of the University of St Andrews is organizing the next Scottish Programing Languages Seminar which will be held on Monday 15th June 2015 in Lecture Room 2 of the Gateway. In the meantime you can keep up-to-date by following the SPLS website.

For further enquiries please contact Frantisek Farka.

Event details

  • When: 15th June 2015 11:30 - 18:00
  • Where: Gateway Bldg
  • Format: Seminar