SICSA Seminar: “From rats to robot navigation and beyond” by Dr Michael Milford

The School of Computer Science welcomes Dr Michael Milford from Queensland University of Technology, Australia who is meantime visiting Scotland. MichaelMilford

Abstract: The brain circuitry involved in encoding space in rodents has been extensively tested over the past forty years, with an ever increasing body of knowledge about the components and wiring involved in navigation tasks. The learning and recall of spatial features is known to take place in and around the hippocampus of the rodent, where there is clear evidence of cells that encode the rodent’s position and heading. RatSLAM is a primarily vision-based robotic navigation system based on current models of the rodent hippocampus, which has achieved several significant outcomes in vision-based Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM), including mapping of an entire suburb using only a low cost webcam, and navigation continuously over a period of two weeks in a delivery robot experiment. This research led to recent experiments demonstrating that impressive feats of vision-based navigation can be achieved at any time of day or night, during any weather, and in any season using visual images as small as 2 pixels in size. In our current research we are investigating the problem of place recognition and visual navigation from two angles. The first is from a neuroscience-inspired perspective, modelling the multi-scale neuronal map of space found in the mammalian brain and the variably tolerant and selective visual recognition process in the primate and human brain. The second is from an algorithmic perspective, utilizing state of the art deep learning techniques. I will discuss the insights from this research, as well as current and future areas of study with the aim of stimulating discussion and collaboration.

Bio: I hold a PhD in Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor of Mechanical and Space Engineering from the University of Queensland (UQ), awarded in 2006 and 2002 respectively. After a brief postdoc in robotics at UQ, I worked for three years at the Queensland Brain Institute as a Research Fellow on the Thinking Systems Project. In 2010 I moved to the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to finish off my Thinking Systems postdoc, and then was appointed as a Lecturer in 2011. In 2012 I was awarded an inaugural Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, which provides me with a research-intensive fellowship salary and extra funding support for 3 years. In 2013 I became a Microsoft Faculty Fellow and lived in Boston on sabbatical working with Harvard and Boston University. I am currently a Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at QUT with a research focus, although I continue to teach Introduction to Robotics every year. From 2014 to 2020 I am a Chief Investigator on a $19,000,000 Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision.

My research interests include vision-based mapping and navigation, computational modelling of the rodent hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, especially with respect to mapping and navigation, computational modelling of human visual recognition, biologically inspired robot navigation and computer vision and Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping (SLAM).

Homepage:https://wiki.qut.edu.au/display/cyphy/Michael+Milford

Google Scholar:http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TDSmCKgAAAAJ

Event details

  • When: 14th April 2015 14:30 - 17:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Seminar

Type-driven Verification of Communicating Systems in Idris

Speaker: Edwin Brady

Abstract: Idris (http://idris-lang.org/) is a general-purpose programming language with an expressive type system which allows a programmer to state properties of a program precisely in its type. Type checking is equivalent to formally and mechanically checking a program’s correctness. Introductory examples of programs verified in this way typically involve length preserving operations on lists, or ordering invariants on sorting.

Realistically, though, programming is not so simple: programs interact with users, communicate over networks, manipulate state, deal with erroneous input, and so on. In this talk I will give an introduction to programming in Idris, with demonstrations, and show how its advanced type systems allows us to express such interactions precisely. I will show how it supports verification of stateful and communicating systems, in particular giving an example showing how to verify properties of concurrent communicating systems.

Bio: Edwin Brady is a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. His research interests include programming language design, in particular type systems and domain specific languages. He leads the design and implementation of the Idris programming language, a general purpose functional programming language with dependent types, which he uses to implement verified domain specific languages. When he’s not doing that, he’s likely to be playing a game of Go, wrestling with the crossword, or stuck on a train somewhere.

 

Event details

  • When: 7th April 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

April 13th, seminar by Nicolai Marquardt: Towards Ad-hoc Collaboration Spaces with Cross-Device Interaction Techniques

Speaker: Nicolai Marquardt, University College London
Date/Time: 1-2pm April 13, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews

Abstract:
Despite the ongoing proliferation of devices and form-factors such as tablets and electronic whiteboards, technology often hinders (rather than helps) informal small-group interactions. Whereas natural human conversation is fluid and dynamic, discussions that rely on digital content—slides, documents, clippings—often remain hindered due to the awkwardness of manipulating, sharing, and displaying information on and across multiple devices. Addressing these shortcomings, in this talk I present our research towards fluid, ad-hoc, minimally disruptive techniques for co-located collaboration by leveraging the proxemics of people as well as the proxemics of devices. In particular, I will demonstrate a number of cross-device interaction techniques—situated within the research theme of proxemic interactions—that support nuanced gradations of sharing. I will also introduce different novel hybrid sensing approaches enabling these interaction techniques and discuss future research directions.

Bio:
Nicolai Marquardt is Lecturer in Physical Computing at University College London. At the UCL Interaction Centre he is working in the research areas of ubiquitous computing, physical user interfaces, proxemic interactions, and interactive surfaces. He is co-author of the books Proxemic Interactions: From Theory to Practice (Morgan & Claypool 2015) and Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook (Elsevier, Morgan Kaufmann 2012).

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

Following on from Nicolai Marquardt’s successful talk his slides can now be viewed here: St Andrews guest lecture Nicolai Marquardt – Slide Presentation

Event details

  • When: 13th April 2015 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

New EPSRC project C3: Scalable & Verified Shared Memory

C3: Scalable & Verified Shared Memory via Consistency-directed Cache Coherence

Dr Susmit Sarkar

Dr Susmit Sarkar

Susmit Sarkar with colleagues in the University of Edinburgh and Intel as project partners, have been successful in their application to the EPSRC for their project C3: Scalable & Verified Shared Memory via Consistency-directed Cache Coherence. This 3 year project starts in July 2015 and aims to realise scalable and verified shared memory.

Shared-memory multi-core processors are ubiquitous, but programming them remains challenging. The programming model exposed by such multi-core processors depends crucially on a “memory consistency model” (MCM), a contract between the hardware and the programmer, which essentially specifies what value a read can return. On the hardware side, one key mechanism to implement the memory consistency model is the “cache-coherence protocol” (CCP), which essentially communicates memory operations between processors. However, the connection between the CCP and the MCM remains unclear. This is especially true for modern CCPs and MCMs, in which CCP design has been divorced from the requirements of the MCM. Susmit and his colleagues argue that this has negatively impacted the scalability and the verifiability of CCPs.

On the scalability front, there are serious question marks about sustaining cache coherence as the number of cores continue to scale. On the verification front, the application of existing verification techniques, which do not verify the CCP against the MCM, are arguably broken.

The C3 proposal, proposes a family of CCPs that are “aware” of, and verified against the MCM. Their approach is motivated by the fact that both hardware and programming languages are converging to various relaxed MCMs for performance oriented reasons. The team use such relaxed MCMs as inspiration to research CCPs that can take advantage of them.

Specifically, they will research “lazy” CCPs where memory operations are batched, and the cost of communicating a memory operation can be amortised. They will also, for the first time, formally verify the relationship between the hardware CCPs and the programmer-oriented MCM they provide. They will investigate rigorously the gains to be had from such lazy CCPs. The team will do this by creating a multi-core silicon prototype of our proposed CCP, leveraging our experience in the design of industrial-strength micro-architectures and their implementations.

Mario Kart Around the World

The School recently hosted “Mario Kart Around the World” for students from Newport Primary.

All versions of Mario Kart with the exception of arcade versions were available for the youngsters to play. Our visitors had access to a range of consoles and games ranging from Vectrex to Leap Motion and a great opportunity to see modern equipment and how it looked in the “olden days“.

out3

out2

Staff were pictured testing out the equipment ( by way of playing Mario Kart) post event. Peter Nightingale (top left) is pictured playing the Vectrex Home Arcade System. Jon Lewis (bottom left) was seen tackling Elite on the Sinclair Spectrum.

out1

The successful event was organised by Ruth Letham with help from Ian Gent, Jon Lewis, Peter Nightingale, Chris Jefferson, Ian Miguel, Gonzalo Mendez and Shyam Reyal.

Images Courtesy of Ian Miguel and Ian Gent.

Torchlit Procession

The Torchlit Procession and Rectorial Drag are historic university traditions, in February the soon-to-be-installed Rector Catherine Stihler addressed all students in St Mary’s Quad. The Torchlit Procession later in the evening left from Sallies Lawn where students collected and lit their torches. The walk continued down to the pier offering some fabulous photographic opportunities.

torch

Stunning images from the procession were captured by MSc students Xu Zhu and Fearn Bishop.

School Hosts StacsHack 2015

The School hosted a hugely successful StacsHack last month. We congratulate Stacs St Andrews Computing Society for organising and running a fantastic event. Hackathons allow students with a range of talents and aptitudes to form groups and create innovative projects in 24hrs. It’s clear from the many photos that great fun was had by all. View some of the winning projects at the challenge post submission gallery.

Thanks to Gala Malbasic, Nick Tikhonov, Ieva Vasiļjeva and Vika Anisimova for representing the School of Computer Science in such a positive way and for all their hard work and enthusiasm.

stacshack

stacshack2

Sponsors: Palantir, J.P. Morgan, Braintree_Dev, Bloomberg and Thalmiclabs.

MLH Hardware Lab partners: Oculus VR, Pebble, Thalmic Labs, Sparkfun, Estimote, Leap Motion and Spark.

Images courtesy of Gala Malbasic and Major League Hacking.
More images from the event can be viewed on the StacsHack Facebook Page.

March 10th, seminar by Nick Taylor: Sustaining Civic Engagement in Communities

Speaker: Nick Taylor, University of Dundee
Date/Time: 2-3pm March 10, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews

Abstract:
Engagement with local issues is typically very low, despite digital technologies opening up more channels for citizens to access information and get involved than ever before. This talk will present research around the use of simple physical interfaces in public spaces to lower barriers to participation and engage a wider audience in local issues. It will also explore the potential for moving beyond top-down interventions to support sustainable grassroots innovation, in which citizens can develop their own solutions to local issues.

Bio:
Nick Taylor is a Lecturer and Dundee Fellow in the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee. His research interests involve the use of novel technologies in social contexts, particularly in communities and public spaces. This has involved the exploration of technologies to support civic engagement in local democracy, public displays supporting community awareness and heritage, as well as methods of engaging communities in design.

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

Event details

  • When: 10th March 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

School Seminars: Building the News Search Engine – Bloomberg

Building the news search engine, by Ramkumar Aiyengar, Bloomberg
Abstract:
This talk provides an insight into the challenges involved in providing near real-time news search to Bloomberg customers. Our News team is in the process of migrating to using Solr/Lucene as its search and alerting backend. This talk starts with a picture of what’s involved in building such a backend, then delves into what makes up a search engine, and then discusses the challenges of scaling up for low-latency and high-load.
Bio:
Ramkumar leads the News Search backend team at the Bloomberg R&D office in London. He joined Bloomberg from his university in India and has been with the News R&D team for 7 years now. For the last couple of years, his team has focussed on rewriting almost the entire search/alert backend, used by almost every Bloomberg user to get near-real time access to news with sub-second latencies. A geek at heart, he considers himself a Linux evangelist, an open source enthusiast, and one of those weird creatures who believes that Emacs is an operating system and had once got his music player and playlists to be controlled through a library written in Lisp.

Event details

  • When: 3rd March 2015 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series, School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar, Talk